Giving our kids A’s and B’s is setting them up for failure
In reality, we know that the path from A to B is not linear. It goes up and down and backwards and in circles before it gets to B.
But often when we read about our heroes, the path from A to B looks a little more like this:
This is the way our heroes’ stories are usually told.
It’s also the same story we’re teaching our children today: yes, through Youtube compilations of Messi’s top 10 goals and through the perfectly polished music videos of Ariana Grande, but also in the classroom.
Traditional education revolves around quantifiable moments in time: an exam score, a final grade. The education system is fixated on these kinds of measurements — so much so that we reward children based only on their ‘end results’.
The problem with all of this is that we effectively disregard the hours and hours of tiresome, difficult and emotionally-gruelling work that often goes into any kind of success. And if you’re not in love with the process of developing and improving, you’re more likely to give up the moment it begins to feel tough.
This is why we need students to learn more about the process and the journey behind the end results. We need to break down success into a step by step path. We need to show them the squiggly, upwards and downwards, sometimes circular line. We need to teach students to develop a growth mindset and a genuine love of learning.
Process over end result:
Last month I travelled from Bogotá to Philadelphia for a 2-day conference from the brilliant folk at Character Lab. Angela Duckworth and her team pulled together a pool of experts and 400 educators to dive into the topic of Character education, which included sessions on gratitude, compassion, self-control, philosophy for young people, and the importance of sleep,
(to name a few).
While there were so many progressive and profound ideas that arose over the course of the conference, there was one simple theme that came up again and again: educators need to start explaining, teaching, and celebrating the process more than the end result.
It wasn’t until I attended a particularly compelling panel discussion, however, that I fully understood the significance of this idea. We heard from peak performance psychologist (and author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise), Anders Ericsson, and high performing Los Angeles student Cedrick Argueta (1 of only 12 students to achieve a perfect score in calculus across the US last year) and his brilliant teacher Anthony Yom.
The discussion focused on Cedrick’s story and everything he and his teacher had to do in order for Cedrick to achieve such unprecedented success. But the value of the discussion was in discovering how he got there, not in talking about his final result.
Why is this important?
From the moment a child steps into the classroom they are competing for the highest ‘end result’. Over and over again, children are told to be the best, beat the rest, don’t be wrong, get up the ladder, failing is bad. The system we’ve built to educate children on the ways of the world focuses on end results; a world where you are only successful if you get ‘x’. This system was real for me — I attended a competitive all boys school which emphasised one goal over everything else: achieve the best possible result in your national exams.
When we focus on the end result, we place the emphasis on whether you can do something (get the score, win the race) or can’t. What about the squiggly line from A to B? We ignore what it means to improve and develop over time.
Throughout the discussion, psychologist, Anders Ericsson highlighted the importance of helping children improve and get better: “The self-confidence of mastery and attributing it to their own doing — that will put them in a good position when they start a professional career.”
As Ericsson suggests, if we can help children develop a growth mindset (the belief that you are in control of your own ability, and can learn and improve) they will be better prepared and equipped for the real world. By focusing on the process as opposed to the end result, children will also learn to embrace their full selves, recognising the way things like failure are necessary and important parts of the process and of life.
So what should we do differently?
On a global scale, one thing that needs to change is the way we tell stories and celebrate success. Ericsson emphasised this in the discussion saying, “What about creating videos that document the entire trajectory…the road to success…showing improvement and not just the end result?” We need to start being more open and honest about that squiggly line from A to B.
In the education world, there are a number of things we can do: promoting and developing character skills (empathy, self-reflection, determination, decision-making etc.) helps to equip children for process-focused learning. We can also pay attention to praising the effort the child is putting into their work as opposed to the ‘talent’ or the outcome, for example, saying “you tried really hard and look how well you’ve done,” as opposed to saying “you’re really good at spelling.” You could even ask children to design their own homework, encouraging them to acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses and the ways they like to be challenged.
“…There are no shortcuts to excellence. Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time―longer than most people imagine….Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it…it’s doing what you love, but not just falling in love―staying in love.”
Angela Duckworth, Grit: Passion, Perseverance, and the Science of Success
The best stories, movies and books are compelling because they don’t just skip to the end. They indulge in the process. We need to bring this to education. We need to stop focussing on gold stars and A+’s. Instead, we all need to fall in love with the process of learning and improving.
Because in the end, that squiggly line, that rollercoaster journey, is the thing that really matters.
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At CoSchool we are about to start testing a 12-hour certification process for teachers who want to embed character teaching and growth mindset into their classrooms. If you’re interested in finding out more, please drop me an email at hmay@coschool.co and I’ll be happy to tell you more.
