How do I help my students find a healthy balance between effort, stress, and success? I read this article on facebook today and it got me thinking about what I can do to help my students take a step back when they’re being hard on themselves. I started wondering if a constant emphasis on effort stemming from growth mindset and grit might have something to do with the worrisome pride I notice in my students when they talk about late nights, being over-worked, and getting upset over A’s and A-‘s because they weren’t A+’s.
Student Mindset
This seems sort of counter-intuitive. The message from Dweck is something like: you perform much better when you don’t label yourself as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at something. It doesn’t mean that everyone who has a growth mindset* will do well, it means that having a growth mindset will help you do better than if you had a fixed mindset. It doesn’t deny there are different starting points and that there are students who are definitely gifted or who struggle very seriously, it just says ‘keep an open mind about what you can do, and you’ll do better than if you box yourself into a fixed mindset’. And grit says, “when you fail, it’s not ‘game over’. Pick yourself up and give it another go, bringing your new experience to the table”
My students have definitely gotten two messages from this, even thought it’s not the whole message: “effort is good. put in lots of effort” and “failure is good because you can learn from it”. The problem is that I have students who put in, dare I say it?, too much effort.
I have students who look at an A- and think, “If I’d only put in more effort, that would be an A, or an A+. Why am I not learning from all of my little mistakes?”. Here the fixed mindset is, “If I get an A-, I’m not being the best student I could be. Mistakes are bad because if I’d put in more effort and learned from them, I wouldn’t be making them.” The grade is still seen as something that defines who they are rather than a pointer indicating their current location on the road to mastery of a given topic. Mistakes are seen as bad on an assessment because they demonstrate less than perfect learning.
I also have students who put in huge amounts of effort, but still don’t find huge success. They feel frustrated and overwhelmed, and bless them, they still keep pushing themselves. They are determined to figure out that sentence, even if it does take them all night. And because they’ve put in the effort there, they don’t have the time to put in effort elsewhere. A vicious circle beings. Clearly this shows a need for more differentiation on my part, but they’re also working in a fixed mindset: “I need to earn an A and I will work ceaselessly until I do”. These students also occasionally start thinking, “if effort will make me successful, and I’m not successful yet despite this effort, then I must be bad at this”.
A Solution?
The fault, of course, lies with me. How can I expect them to understand the ‘process over product’ aspect of Dweck’s research when I keep emphasizing that X topic needs to be learned by Y time? I want to say, “Don’t worry about it! It’s okay that you don’t get it yet!” But I sound like a huge hypocrite because I then get up in front of the room and tell them that there’s a test on Friday. A test has one product: a grade. So by making my class about my students’ performance on tests, I’m emphasizing the importance of what grade is earned, not the process of getting there. This message is far stronger than any words I say to try to counter it.
How do I get my students to appreciate what they are getting, and how do I get them to work for the interesting things they’ll learn instead of working for a check mark next to “Latin I”?
Daniel Pink and Daniel Willingham talk about what motivates students to learn. Their answer is, very generally speaking: interesting puzzles, juicy challenges. Learning via juicy challenges can translate to project based learning. I wonder if this is this a way to start defeating the stress and effort monster I sometimes see emanating like a greasy aura from my students a few classes before a test?
Projects would allow a lot more room for differentiation in instruction and final product, and that might reduce some stress for my students who need more support and scaffolding. My students who need more challenge can create more nuanced and intricate products. Would the juiciness of a challenging project be enough to shift my students’ focus from the successful completion of different topics to the process of learning and applying learning?
Reducing the Pressure
I’m not entirely convinced. I think projects, for all of their good intentions and all their focus on enjoying the process don’t really relieve the grade pressure students feel. It’s cultural: school is about grades. Whether condoned by their teachers or not, students are constantly being equated with their grades. If you get high grades, you’re a good student; if you get low grades, you’re a poor student.
I find myself really tempted to bring in some fixed mindset terminology here, just to relieve the pressure. “It’s okay to be a student who struggles with Latin. Not getting an A or a B doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not putting in enough effort. This is just a topic that’s challenging for you.”
When I was in high school, that element of fixed mindset certainly helped me through pre-calculus. Numbers gave me instant headaches and it was comforting to think, “This really isn’t my thing, and that’s okay.” I let myself push aside homework I didn’t get. I had other things I was more interested in learning, and it was okay as long as it stayed occasional. I knew I still needed to do well, but taking some of the responsibility off of my shoulders, acknowledging that math just didn’t come easily to me, let me relax a bit during that very stressful senior year.
And ironically, this might help my students with their growth mindset. “In this class, I want you to be happy with B’s.” If I can get my students to stop focusing on that A, then maybe they’ll really start to enjoy what they’re learning. And maybe, just maybe, they might start surprising themselves with some A’s.
*growth mindset: “In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.” from here
**fixed mindset: “In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb.” from here
Teaching Latin 