Celebrate Learning Over Achievement
Why celebrating the process of learning is more important than celebrating the outcomes.
I wasn’t present when my daughter took her first steps. She was sixteen months and had been flirting with walking for quite a while. She was born premature, just early enough that there was a small but lingering possibility of developmental challenges. Walking was the first really complex neuromuscular task we’d be able to observe. As the days and months ticked by, we watched her learn to stand, balance, and start to move her feet. We held her hand as she practiced her steps and coordinated her movements. We celebrated her improvements to encourage her learning process. And, we avoided reacting to falls so as not to scare her from taking risks.
In the days before she walked, my spouse and I agreed that when our daughter decided she was ready, she would likely walk the length of the room rather than take a couple of steps. That was exactly what happened. That day, my mother-in-law texted me a video of my daughter standing up and walking 15 paces unassisted. She sat down, picked up a toy, and walked 15 paces back to where she started. Because we celebrated and had faith in her learning process, she developed meaningful understanding in her own time and way. As much as I wish I was there for her performance, I’m thrilled I was able to celebrate the learning as it happened each day leading up.
Principle of Learning and Teaching #10:
Celebrate every win.
In traditional education, we celebrate specific types of “wins.” A high test score, impressive report card, and recognition for standing out among our peers are all common. These are celebrations of achievement.
Unfortunately, these are not celebrations of learning. While it is important to celebrate outcomes, we too often fail to celebrate the process of learning. This means that the student who learned 95% of the mathematics necessary to solve a problem isn’t celebrated because they hadn’t yet arrived at the right answer. It means the student who finished the year reading two grade levels behind after starting the year three grade levels behind isn’t celebrated because they aren’t yet at grade level. It means the student who faces significant personal challenges but still shows up isn’t celebrated. All of these students have demonstrated a commitment to their learning process but aren’t celebrated because they haven’t arrived at an outcome on someone else’s timeframe.
If you didn’t catch it, the word “yet” shows up in each of those examples. Carol Dweck points to the crucial importance of using this word with students in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. At any given moment, there is a virtually limitless amount left for each of us to learn. When we orient learning toward a celebration of a commitment to good process, we encourage learners to look ahead to when their next learning opportunity rather than the moment when their learning is done.
I’m not promoting the idea of celebrating effort. Students can put forth an enormous amount of effort in classrooms without learning. They can demonstrate exceptional “grit” in churning through assigned tasks and “mastering” content without engaging in a process of meaningful learning about the world and themselves. Celebrating effort, like performance, fails to highlight what learners and educators are supposed to be doing: meaningful learning. When we celebrate a strong learning process, we’re pointing to excellent collaboration among learners and educators to create a space and culture where meaningful learning can occur.
Celebrating as a Means to Many Ends
This principle isn’t the final in the list of Principles of Learning and Teaching because it is what happens at the end of the learning process. It’s the last on the list because we must critically engage the other principles to ensure we are celebrating the right things. There is danger in celebrating every win if we aren’t consistently engaged in improving our practice. The risk is that we pat ourselves on the back for what we have done without considering all that is left to do. When we shift to celebrating learning processes rather than outcomes, we acknowledge that meaningful learning should be an ongoing process, and that outcomes like grades, test scores, and college admissions are only benchmarks along the way. Celebrating is a means to an end: highlight and reinforce the value of specific actions and attitudes in order to encourage their continuation.
At Thinking Beyond Borders, the education institution I founded and led for 13 years, our educators took cohorts of adolescents abroad for seven month programs. Over the years, we dealt with increasing incidents and severity of mental health challenges in both students and faculty, akin to the ongoing college mental health crisis. While our extensive efforts to train staff, provide the highest quality mental support, and partner closely with students and their families resulted in some wonderful learning and growth successes, we also had cases in which sending a student home was the best course of action.
It was always a heart wrenching decision. The faculty and staff, the student and their peers, and their family were universally disappointed. I often reminded our team that while their sense of defeat was a normal thing to feel, it was also important to celebrate the win in the situation. As a team of educators and mental health experts, we were evacuating a student to receive advanced care for a serious condition that they and their family either weren’t previously aware of or had neglected. Our actions to connect the student with services were part of a learning process that could help the student achieve stronger mental health for years to come.
As a school leader, I didn’t just push this perspective to support the team when they were down. I also did it to ensure that the team wouldn’t turn a blind eye to issues in the future for fear that addressing them would lead to students being sent home. Sometimes, celebrating every win is a way to reframe the emotional challenge of both loving our students and making the tough decisions to care for them.
Integrating Celebrations Into the Process of Learning
If you’ve been following my series on the Principles of Learning and Teaching, you may have noticed that each principle relates to the others. Understanding how they relate to one another can make each come alive. Here are examples of how “Principle #10 — Celebrate every win” relates to many of the others:
- Because learning is neither linear nor immediate, we must celebrate wins as we see them. So many of the learning and growth outcomes we help create as educators will happen long after our daily work with students is done.
- Celebrating every win shapes the narrative of potential for achieving greatness in a broader culture that often offers oppressive narratives.
- Because there is no right way to learn, we have to celebrate examples of great learning in whatever forms they take. It reinforces the sense that the process for each learner is valid and valuable.
- While each must take responsibility for their own learning, we celebrate every win to reinforce that the responsibility they have taken is a productive investment.
- Because no one holds a monopoly on truth, celebrating every win ensures we value the understanding we develop through our process.
- Because the relationship among student, teacher, and subject of study is triangular, celebrating every win is an opportunity to appreciate the commitment each makes to the process, and the intentionality and care inherent in the relationships.
Learning and teaching require faith. The learning that matters most involves complex subjects that change dynamically moment to moment. We must have faith that consistent commitment to critical inquiry will lead to meaningful understanding. It takes faith to learn in the face of barriers that our culture, politics, and society place before us. It takes faith to teach when it seems so much within the educational system is stacked against student learning. When we celebrate every win, we affirm the reasons for our faith; we gather evidence of its rationality, and we stockpile positivity. Celebrating every win is a way to remind ourselves as learners and educators that there can be humanizing joy in the process of learning, and that when we recognize those moments, we set the stage for more of them in the future.
This post is part of a series supporting educators in reflecting on their pedagogy and practice. Read the intro to this series If We Don’t Work on Pedagogy, Nothing Else Matters or explore the most recent posts below.
Great Expectations in Education ← P R E V I O U S
N E X T → The Key to Great Schools: Teachers Who Learn Every Day
