Dear
all,
Thought
that I would start this week’s Food for Thought with something to think about
when we are giving instructions. This idea arose from a moment I observed at
the 3 v 3 Basketball on Saturday when the organizer lined up 9 players for a
sudden death shoot out for 8 prizes…he said the first to miss is out. The first
boy in the queue shot and missed the other 8 got the prizes, was this fair and
what did it teach the others?
Now that
I have you thinking we can move on to this week’s Food for Thought, which has
been approximately a month in the writing. It is an aspect of student
development that has recently received a
large amount of attention and research and is one that I believe we need to be
cognizant of and think about in our relationships with students. To some extent
it is reflected in the basketball prize example I referred to at the start of
this post. The question is why were 8 runners up being rewarded anyway, and
what does this do for those individuals who are always being told or rewarded for
being smart or good? Does this help them achieve more or better next time? This
concept is very important for our Culture of Achievement that we are working towards.
Developing the right “Mindset” the phrase used by Carol Dweck to encourage
resilience and the ability to learn from our mistakes.
In a recent blog post be Selena Gallagher entitled Learning to
Fail, I that, “The self-esteem movement, which began in the 1980s, was based on
the premise that raising children’s self-esteem would benefit society, and a
culture of praise and reward was established that continues today. In the
United States and Canada, the trophy industry is now worth an estimated $3
billion a year. Much of that comes from junior sports leagues where it is now
common practice for all participants to receive a trophy. In fact, the American
Youth Soccer Organization spends 12% of its yearly budget on trophies.” http://inside.isb.ac.th/challengematters/
In this post she also included these two illustrations which sum
up this situation beautifully. The first by Michael Jordon one of the greatest
basketball players ever.
What the research is saying and what we have to be
careful about is how we use positive praise to enhance achievement, “grit” and
resilience. Hence I would like to share the following links/ articles with you
that talk about this work and will help us adopt the right balanced approach in
our classrooms. So here are 4 readings that you can take a look at that discuss
this topic
·
Wisdom from a MacArthur Genius: Psychologist Angela
Duckworth on Why Grit, Not IQ, Predicts Success
"Character
is at least as important as intellect."
Creative history brims with embodied examples of why the
secret of genius is doggedness rather than "god"-given talent, from
the case of young Mozart's upbringing to E. B. White's wisdom on writing to Chuck Close's assertion about art to Tchaikovsky's conviction about composition to Neil Gaiman's advice to aspiring writers. But
it takes a brilliant scholar of the psychology of achievement to empirically
prove these creative intuitions: Math-teacher-turned-psychologist Angela Duckworth,
who began her graduate studies under positive psychology godfather Martin Seligman
at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has done more than anyone for
advancing our understanding of how self-control and grit – the relentless work
ethic of sustaining your commitments toward a long-term goal – impact success.
So how heartening to hear that Duckworth is the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur "genius" grant for
her extraordinary endeavors, the implications of which span from education to
employment to human happiness.
In this short video from the MacArthur Foundation,
Duckworth traces her journey and explores the essence of her work: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/26/angela-duckworth-grit/
"We need more than the intuitions of educators to work on
this problem. For sure
we need the educators, but in partnership I think we need scientists to study
this from different vantage points, and that actually inspired me to move out
of the classroom as a teacher and into the lab as a research psychologist."
·
Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results
”I had a teacher once who called his students "idiots" when they screwed up. He was our orchestra conductor, a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky, and when someone played out of tune, he would stop the entire group to yell, "Who eez deaf in first violins!?" He made us rehearse until our fingers almost bled. He corrected our wayward hands and arms by poking at us with a pencil.
Today, he'd be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated: Forty years' worth of former students and colleagues flew back to my New Jersey hometown from every corner of the country, old instruments in tow, to play a concert in his memory. I was among them, toting my long-neglected viola. When the curtain rose on our concert that day, we had formed a symphony orchestra the size of the New York Philharmonic.”
·
Presence not Praise: How to Cultivate a Healthy
Relationship with Achievement
“In The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
(public library), psychoanalyst and University College
London professor Stephen Grosz builds on more than 50,000 hours of
conversation from his quarter-century experience as a practicing psychoanalyst
to explore the machinery of our inner life, with insights that are invariably
profound and often provocative — for instance, a section titled “How praise can
cause a loss of confidence,” in which Grosz writes:
Nowadays, we lavish praise on our
children. Praise, self-confidence and academic performance, it is commonly
believed, rise and fall together. But current research suggests otherwise — over
the past decade, a number of studies on self-esteem have come to the conclusion
that praising a child as ‘clever’ may not help her at school. In fact, it might
cause her to under-perform. Often a child will react to praise by quitting —
why make a new drawing if you have already made ‘the best’? Or a child may
simply repeat the same work — why draw something new, or in a new way, if the
old way always gets applause?”
·
Carol Dweck
Last, but certainly not
least, one of the leaders in this movement for adjusting the way and manner in
which we praise students and hence encourage them to be successful and achieve,
Carol Dweck the author of Mindset. This is a short video of Carol Dweck
explaining Mindset. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jDVd-nCEYc
Carol Dweck has a website that focuses on the growth mindset, Brainology® http://www.mindsetworks.com/webnav/whatismindset.aspx
I hope you enjoy the reading and thinking,
Have a good Sunday,
Yours
Adrian
I've had students ask "What do I get?" when they complete a task that's set up as a game. Their faces invariably fall when I reply "The satisfaction of a job well done!" & they reply, "Well that sucks!". Recently, when I told a group of primary students their first "finished" product needed to be refined, they were disappointed that their job wasn't finished. I went through their paragraph & pointed out areas that needed refining, even though they told me they'd already reviewed it. Everyone in the class had a further goal to reach, and nobody benefited from another's mistakes. Instead, they learned technical writing tips from each other's comments & their subsequent efforts to improve. They could apply them to their own writing, either then or in a future project.
ReplyDeleteIn IB language, grit is perseverance. My observations lead me to believe that our profession needs to focus on it far more. The basketball example wasn't fair to the first player because the others benefited from his unsuccessful attempt; they learned what NOT to do to get the prize. I don't know how to make it more equitable, though, so I can't make any suggestions on how to improve it!
I loved reading the tips from Neil Gaiman! They resonated lots of important points for me, especially expectations for reading library books. One of a library's functions is to provide a sanctuary where students have the freedom to explore their interests & push themselves - read outside their comfort zone, either in subject matter or reading level. They also need the freedom to say, "I didn't understand this so I'm returning it". There's no shame in choosing a book that's wrong for us - I do it all the time! This is why I disagree with labeling books by Lexile level or any other reading scheme. Yes, the information is there for people who want to choose books that way, but I don't want it to be the primary focus of searching for library materials because I believe it creates a "tunnel vision" mentality where students will limit themselves & make their level the only selection criteria. Also, lexile levels create a more classroom-like atmosphere to choosing reading material, and that diminishes the library's function in a school, or any community. So I advocate giving students the freedom to choose, but I'm here to guide them towards stretching their reading choices & venturing out of their comfort zones.