We're Teaching Grit the Wrong Way

This week’s article summary is We're Teaching Grit the Wrong Way.

I have never been a fan of Star Trek but I know that Mr. Spock was all about reason, not emotion.

The article below posits that teachers and parents in trying to help their students and children develop qualities like grit, deferred gratification, and perseverance overemphasize reason and logic and should instead utilize more emotional motivators, including how one’s actions can help others.

I have spoken to kids countless times about effort, short-term sacrifice for long-term gain, and the benefits of persistence and willpower. Yet according to the article, my words of advice perhaps have not had a positive effect on students and might have exacerbated feelings of failure and even isolation.

Self-sacrifice always came easy to me. I was the type of kid (and to this day as an adult) who challenged myself to see how long I could go before breaking a $10 bill in my wallet. At college, I, unlike many of my friends, could easily bypass a spontaneous dorm party if I had to write a paper, study for a test, or complete a reading assignment. As Freud believed, my super ego was well developed and ruled over my id. For me, reason and logic were all I needed as motivators to develop grit, willpower, and persistence. Mr. Spock would concur.

Yet as the article below explains what works for Spock and me is not the case for all of us. Some need other reasons and motivations for denying immediate happiness for future benefits. Last week’s article summary spoke about how social humans are, and for many, this is the motivator for making personal sacrifices: how one’s behavior impacts others may be the carrot some need to develop personal habits like grit. For me it was personal, for others it’s social.

The next time I speak to students about the virtue of deferred gratification, I am definitely going to move beyond  how it will help the student as an individual and include how it can positively affect others. Motivation like inspiration needs to come from many directions to reach everyone.

Joe

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Let’s face it, for most students academic work isn’t intrinsically enjoyable. Even for the highly motivated ones, studying certain subjects can feel like pulling teeth, especially if it stands in the way of more pleasurable options like checking updates on social media. That’s where self-control would seem to be the key. Walter Mischel’s fabled “marshmallow” experiments and follow-up studies by other researchers have established the importance of deferring gratification to future success.

But the strategies most often used by educators and parents to get students to suppress the desire for immediate pleasure – building willpower and executive function – are precisely the wrong ones.

Besides having a poor long-term success rate in general, the effectiveness of willpower drops precipitously when people are feeling tired, anxious, or stressed. And, unfortunately, that is exactly how many of today’s students often find themselves.

In fact, telling students to get a grip and use willpower may make things worse, detracting from their ability to succeed in academic work and maintain relationships with others. Trying to teach non-cognitive skills like grit and self-control through a cognitive channel can set up a vicious cycle of increasing stress, failure, and social isolation.

Instead of preaching willpower to enhance self-control and grit, educators and parents should talk to young people about gratitude, compassion, and a sense of pride in their ability. These qualities nudge the mind to accept sacrifices to cooperate with and, thereby, build relationships with others. At the heart of cooperation with others is a willingness to sacrifice immediate self-interest in order to share with and invest in others. This builds positive character traits like trustworthiness, generosity, fairness, and diligence.

When a people feels grateful they will work harder and longer to pay others back as well as pay favors forward. When a people feel compassion, they will give time, money, effort, even a shoulder to cry on to another in need. When people feel proud, they will devote more effort to developing skills that others value, and will be admired for it. These emotions enhance a willingness to sacrifice for others because they increase the value that people place on future rewards relative to present ones.

What is the implication of all this for the social-emotional curriculums being developed in many schools? That educators should focus less on willpower and grit and more on the role of positive emotions – gratitude, compassion, and pride – which have a way of indirectly increasing willpower. These emotions ease the way to perseverance toward long-term goals, and they simultaneously make people act in ways that strengthen social relationships – something that benefits the health of body and mind and, indirectly, raises educational attainment itself.

           

Here are several examples from Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride:

·         Students are praised for small steps toward a goal – “I’m really impressed with how hard you worked today; you’re getting closer to solving that problem.”

·         Students take a few moments daily or weekly to recall and focus on something they’re grateful for – a small kindness or favor someone has done for them that day, like someone helping with a math problem.

·         Doing a “reciprocity ring” – Students write on sticky notes something they need help with and post them on a board in the shape of a circle; then everyone, using different sticky notes, writes offers of help and puts them next to the problem they want to help solve. This generates gratitude and visually shows the interconnected web of support.

·         Engaging in brief (5-10 minute) mindfulness practice every day; this has been shown to enhance compassion.

Preschoolers Care about Their Social Reputations

This week’s article summary is Preschool and Kindergarten Kids Care About Their Reputations.

As the bulk of my teaching experience has been with upper elementary and middle schoolers, I’ve always been in awe of preschool teachers. I know what makes emerging adolescents tick and have always connected and related to them, but am intimidated by a class of preschoolers. From psychology courses and from years listening in faculty meetings, I had come to believe that preschool and kindergarten students are at such a egocentric developmental stage that they are more often than not oblivious to others and others’ feelings and needs. Teachers devote as much attention to social-emotional development as cognitive development, yet for our youngest students lessons about sharing and empathy take inordinate time, reinforcement, and practice to become habits I take for granted in older students.

Yet the article below is making me see that my view is perhaps too narrow as it highlights emerging research that preschool kids are in fact more keenly aware of social dynamics and how others—particularly authority figures—view them.

A few weeks ago I listened to a report on NPR that explained while human babies are prone to sharing and fairness, baby monkeys are not. The hypothesized reason is that humans learned to survive and thrive as a species by working together while monkeys—although social animals too—are much more hierarchical, meaning the alpha monkey gets—and to other monkeys deserves—more food and resources. To a monkey, a strong alpha is a comfort. To a human, fairness and equity are the way to success and happiness.

As humans have an innate predilection to share, we like to be commended for these behaviors and constantly assess place and value in our community. Yes, selfishness might ironically be at the heart of cooperation, but our genes from birth direct us to share and seek safety from our community. It logically follows that our youngest students are cognizant of social interactions and the ever-changing social dynamics in the classroom.

In preschool and kindergarten classrooms we still see much egocentrism and parallel play, but research is revealing that our young students not as unaware of social relationships and reputations as others—like me--have thought.

Joe

Five-year-old kids entering preschool care about their reputations and kindergarteners may even take adult-like pains to maintain a public image.

Young children will vary their behavior based on who is watching, and they will pass judgment on the reputational behaviors of others.

Until recently, it was unclear whether small children cared about their reputations at all. Two decades ago, it was accepted that complex reputational behavior could not emerge in children until age 9.

But a recent study found that five-year-old children are more generous when they know they’re being watched, and this effect is even stronger when they’re observed by potential reciprocators. Other studies have shown that, once children acquire a positive reputation, they’ll fight to keep it—preschoolers who are told they have a good reputation are less likely to behave dishonestly. And small children appear to recognize reputation for the social capital that it is. Five-year-olds offer positive evaluations of classmates to improve their friends’ social standings. By age six, children are suspicious of peers who harm others’ reputations.

Much of the research includes children being put in situations where reputation is relevant, and shows that children vary their behavior in surprising and sometimes deceptive or strategic ways. But it’s unclear whether children are actively being deceptive. Are preschoolers smooth operators who fake generosity to get ahead, or are they simply more open about their inherent kindness when there’s something to be gained by showing off?

Future studies will examine how parents and teachers can leverage the fact that preschoolers do care about their social reputations to encourage good behavior.

Until then, there are a few takeaways for moms and dads. When interacting with your preschoolers and kindergarteners, keep in mind that they probably care quite a bit about how others view them—and that they’re constantly taking cues from you. If you tell them they have a good reputation, they’ll fight to maintain it. And if you maintain your own reputation by bragging obnoxiously, odds are they’ll do it too.

The Self-Handicapping Student

This week’s article summary is The Unexpected Reason Some Students Procrastinate.

I have two kids, both grown now.

As students they were like day and night.

My older one was the ideal student in every way: self-starter, well organized, bright but not top-of-the-class bright, knew when he needed help and where to get it, saw the connection between effort and progress. He earned pretty high grades and always received excellent narrative comments in progress reports.

My other son was much stronger cognitively. Neither one ever took an IQ test, but I’m confident my second son’s IQ exceeds my other son’s, my wife’s, and mine. Yet he struggled as a student: left assignments and projects to the last minute, rarely was prepared for class, if he studied for tests is was a night-before cram session, never took notes, even bragged about being able to ‘wing it’ in classes. Not surprisingly neither his grades nor teacher comments were very good.

As you’ll see in the article, I’m pretty sure he was a self-handicapper: by not putting in effort in school, his low grades and mediocre comments from teachers to him were not a reflection of his lack of achievement but lack of interest.

As I read the article I thought of many students I had through the years who like my one son struggled in school and were also self-handicappers.

What made things worse was as a parent and teacher I didn’t help my son and other students overcome their tendency to self-handicap. Rather I further galvanized their fixed mindset by telling them things like, “I see so much potential in you” or “I know how smart you are” or “I need to see your performance equal your abilities.”

While helping kids develop a growth mindset is one strategy in the article, there are others as well teachers can use to help kids overcome this common reality of masking feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy behind a façade of bravado.

Joe

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There's a student that's familiar to many teachers: He's the one who stumbles into class with sleep in his eyes after staying up late from writing his paper at the last minute. He probably avoids studying for tests, too. And maybe his backpack is a jumbled mess of crumpled papers and unorganized notes.

And there's also a common explanation for his bad habits: He probably doesn't particularly care how he does in school. But psychologists say that, for some students, that's a totally inaccurate assumption.

Some students engage in so-called self-handicapping behaviors not because they don't care. Rather, those students care a great deal about success and they are trying to protect themselves from the negative emotions they might feel if they fail at an academic task. So they put off studying for the big test, giving themselves an excuse in advance for a low score. And they might not always realize why they are doing it.

Self-handicapping is kind of release valve for the anxiety some students associate with academics.

Research on self-handicapping has been around for decades, but the findings take on fresh relevance when coupled with a growing understanding of how students' self perception and understanding of the learning process affects their academic success. For these individuals, how others perceive them is more important to them than what they do for themselves. They think, 'If I can engage in some behavior that sort of dupes other people, then those other people can think, well, he's not dumb, he's just really busy or whatever.'

But students aren't just focused on fooling their peers; they also want to fool themselves. Some researchers have found students self-handicap in secret, with behaviors that might not be evident to classmates or teachers.

Students are more likely to self-handicap if they perceive an outcome as certain when it's actually uncertain. The combination of a low sense of control (inability to do well on a test) over a situation and a high regard for the outcome (wanting a high score) can lead to a fear of failure.

One possible response is teaching students that they have more control over their academic success than they think. Rather than focusing their energy on giving themselves an excuse for possible failure, they could try to avoid failure all together through smarter studying strategies and goal setting exercises. Some schools have worked with students to plan ahead for how they will study for a test, to anticipate distractions and challenges, and to prepare to work through them.

Another related response is to help students confront their fear of failure. Carol Dweck's popular research on growth mindsets emphasizes teaching students how to learn through failure. Students with a growth mindset believe that skill and academic strength can be developed through effort and practice. That's contrasted with students with a fixed mindset, who believe their intelligence and skill sets are as unchangeable as the color of their eyes. Students with fixed mindsets may be more likely to fear failure because they believe it reflects on their own value. 

Some schools have built on that research, working to "normalize failure" by framing it as an opportunity to learn. Those schools give students more chances to revise their work so they can learn new strategies to solving problems and answering questions.

It's also possible that some students aren't totally aware of the mental and emotional games they're playing to buffer themselves from a fear of failure. One teacher told me her first approach when she suspects a student is self-handicapping is to simply sit them down and tell them about the behaviors she's observed. Then she makes an effort to follow up in the future.