Monday, September 30, 2013

Is It Worth the Effort

I have an old Jeep in my garage that I tinker with from time to time.  I have a goal to completely restore the Jeep.  While I am making slow progress towards that goal, my confidence in my ability to complete this project stems from a conversation I had when I was 22 years old.  At that point in my life, I had just started my teaching career and like most young teachers I had a summer job.  That summer, I was a lifeguard at Nauset Beach in Orleans, MA.  As a part of that job one lifeguard each day had to patrol the outer beaches as a ride along with an enforcement officer.  During 8 hours together in the truck, several conversations take place.  During one of those conversations, the enforcement officer  and I were discussing the fact that he and his sons were rebuilding the transmission on their Ford pickup truck.  I remember saying, "I wish I knew how to do that stuff, I have never been good with mechanical stuff."

At that point he said something to me that continues to influence my thinking today.  He said, "Do you think that we are any smarter than you are?  Do you think the mechanics that work down at _____ are any smarter than you are?  We just try different things out and try to figure it out.  If we can't figure it out, we ask someone or look it up.  We just keep trying until we figure it out."  I will remember that moment for the rest of my life, because since that moment I have thought differently about innate ability and the role effort plays in success.  I realized that I wasn't born "bad" at mechanics, or that I was "dumb" about engines; rather, I had not put in the effort to learn about them.  I had not tried, failed and tried again....but I could.

Grit

In the years since that moment, I have learned that many people have made the same realizations that I had made.  I learned that others have dedicated years of research to determining what factors separate the successful from the unsuccessful, and what factors most influence learning.  Researchers like Carol Dweck and Angela Lee Duckworth (video below) have done extensive research and determined that effort and perseverance (or grit as Duckworth describes it) are the best indicators of success.  Duckworth's research indicates that grit is the number one determiner for success in school and recognizes that we as a group do not know how best to develop grit in students.  She does say that grit is not a product of talent and that talent is often inversely related to grit.  Both Dweck and Duckworth make compelling arguments that perseverance through effective effort should be skills deliberately taught in today's schools.  

So What Do We Do?

The first step requires a self-exploration.  You must start by asking yourself what do you believe.  Is intelligence fixed?  Do you have students that will come to you that can not learn?  Students that at 5,7,12 are destined for a low wage menial job and have a fixed ceiling for their "smartness"?  Do you believe that an IQ score is a reliable predictor of someone's intelligence?  You may be surprised to find that Alfred Binet himself did not believe his assessment provided information about a permanent innate intelligence level. He stressed that intelligence was too complex and involved too many factors to be measured this way.  So, if the creator of the IQ test did not believe intelligence was fixed, why should we?  Perhaps it is more realistic, based upon our experiences, our research and the wise beach enforcement officer I rode with that summer that we all have the opportunity to learn if we are willing to put in the effort. 

The next challenge comes when we try and think about how we create this ability and belief in our students. As with most things in education, the answer is not clean.  At some point, perhaps there will be enough research conducted to say, "if I do this...., then the students will develop grit and persevere in their learning," but unfortunately that day is not yet here.  Not all is lost however, research conducted by Carol Dweck has shown that the way people think about intelligence can be altered.  Her research has shown that students who are given specific praise for effort and perseverance rather than for being smart are more likely to stick with learning experiences when presented with challenge.  It is important that we create environments in our classrooms where students can see that there is a direct correlation between the effective effort we put into something and the results we see on the other end.  As educators, we all recognize that some students have a natural facility with academics, which effects their rate of learning, in the same way that some people are genetically more athletic than others.  However, all students will face a moment in time when they will struggle and fail.  It is important that we have instilled in them a belief that with the proper time, support and effort they can succeed where they once failed.  Failure is not a sign of "dumbness", rather it is a situation we have not figured out YET.  

In the Classroom

In my reading, watching and conversing on this subject I have come across some useful tips for creating a culture of grit in our classrooms.  This list is by no means all inclusive.  As Dr. Duckworth mentions in her TED talk, this is a complex issue and we need to "be gritty about getting our kids grittier."
  • Avoid starting a lesson with, "We are going to start with some easy ones."  If a child struggles with the easy ones, he/she is likely to believe that he/she is not smart enough to do the rest.  Instead perhaps you could start your lesson with something like, "We are about to learn some very difficult stuff.  I know that you all can do it, and I am here to help you.  It is going to take some hard work on your part, and there is a chance some of you will not get it right away, but if you stick with it, keep trying, and use the strategies I give you ,you can do it."
  • Be careful with the word smart.  If we are always telling students that they are successful because they are "so smart", what happens when they meet failure?  Is it because they are not smart about that thing?  If that is what they believe, then there is no point in trying anymore, because they were not born to do it.  This is where the thinking of "I am not good at math" gets started.
  • Be specific in your praise.  "Good job," "Nice Work," and "Excellent" all have their place in the classroom, but they do not provide the student with a lot of information and can be missed opportunities to build a culture of grit.  You will get more with specific targeted feedback.  Try statements like, "I love the way you stuck with that problem when you didn't get the answer the first time.";  "Johnny, I was so happy to see that you used your math notebook and experimented with some of the strategies we discusses in order to help you solve that problem."; "I am noticing that Sally has slowed down and is really concentrating to make sure she is forming her letters correctly."
  • Provide opportunities to learn and grow from failure.  It is one thing to have high standards for academic learning, it is another to have expectations that all can achieve those standards.  When examining your grading practices, be sure to ask yourself about the purpose of the grade and how that compares to the purpose of education.  If a student fails a test, is that the end or just the beginning? Do you have opportunities for that child to try again?  If you do not think they should have that opportunity then let me ask why not?  Is it important that the students learn the material, or is it important that the students learn the material according to your schedule?  I am not suggesting that you hold all other students back, or that the student does not have responsibility in their own learning, but have you created opportunities for students to put forth that extra effort and try again?
  • Share information with students that correlates effort with success.  A great example I read related to this connects homework with exam grades.  After giving an exam, this middle school teacher shares the class profile with all the students, but she doesn't just give the standard, "x students got an A and y students got a B..."  Instead she organizes the data by how many completing their homework.  She reports, "of the students that did 100% of their homework, the average score was a ____, and of the students that did between 75% and 99% of their homework the average score was a ___...."  She then leads a short discussion with students around the correlation between completing homework and the grade on the exam.  This connects to her on-going conversation about effort and success.  
Regardless of our approach, technique or language choices, educators have a responsibility to ensure each student believes in his/her own success.  We must be deliberate in our planning and create a culture where learning is the ultimate goal.  If we simply teach it, test it and move on we are continuing the belief that some people are cut out for this school stuff and some people are not.  To do so would marginalize the impact of quality education.

"I have not failed.  I have just found 10,000 ways that won't work." ~ Thomas Edison