The Shame of Failing at Learning
“How well children grow through the traumas, challenges, and disadvantages they experience depends on how well they learn. How well they rise to the opportunities and advantages they experience depends on how well they learn. From their emotional health and maturity to their mental health and wisdom, their innermost growth and outermost achievement depends on how well they learn. It’s not just what they learn or how they learn, our children’s futures depends on how well they learn in general — on the health of their learning.” — David Boulton
Shame is a fundamental and ancient human emotion. We can feel shame about all kinds of things — our backgrounds, our relationships, our abilities. And just like we can feel shame about our body, we can also feel shame about our mind. What happens to any of us when we grow up being ashamed of our mind or our ability to learn?
Says vulnerability researcher Brene Brown, the sexes perceive shame in the same way — do not be weak. Shame motivates us to change, quickly. When we experience shame, we often erect a shame screen, which is a defense mechanism we employ to deal with the shame. This is summoned by the deepest and oldest part of our brain, evoking the fight or flight mechanism. That is, in the face of shame, we withdraw (stay silent, keep secrets), get aggressive (try to control) or seek to please (try to fit in).
When it comes to shame around the mind and learning, David Boulton at learningstewards.org suggests we can demote the importance of whatever we feel the shame about, making learning not important or not cool. This is something I can certainly relate to seeing in many of the learners I have worked with over the years as well as in my own personal learning. When shame makes you feel dumb, concluding that being smart or that needing to learn is not important can be an easy next step.
Mind shame may all begin in childhood with hearing the word ‘no’ — a gentle form of shame says psychotherapist Dr. Joseph Burgo — that is often intended to act as a brake to curb curiosity and keep children safe. It’s effect? It dampens positive affect or in this case the child’s excitement and joy. The response? If it’s my almost 3-year-old son we’re talking about then it’s an immediate collapse to the floor accompanied by tears and howls. What if the, “No, that’s not correct,” is directed at a learner? What’s the response then?
While shame is important in certain contexts, like the shame a convicted murderer should feel about his/her actions, it’s not the right emotional response in an educational or training environment. The better emotion, believe it or not, is guilt. Says Brene Brown, shame is not the same as guilt. Shame is a focus on self (I am bad), while guilt is a focus on behaviour (I did something bad). Guilt in a learner’s mind says, “There’s a standard I aspire to reach and I’m not there yet”. Shame in a learner’s mind says, “I’ll never reach that standard because I’m not good enough’.
And Brown notes that shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide and eating disorders. Guilt, on the other hand, is inversely correlated with those things. In her March 2012 TED Talk she states that shame needs secrecy, silence and judgment to make it grow exponentially. However, if you overwhelm it with empathy, it can’t survive.
The mind shame a learner can feel because of the perceived fear of failing becomes a powerfully engrained habit with age. Breaking that cycle of learning shame is no easy task. Kathleen Cushman provides three ways to keep shame from affecting learning in the classroom.
However, imagine that a teacher was willing to share his/her vulnerability with the learners as a way to help them overcome their own deep-seated vulnerabilities about fear of failure and learning shame. Brene Brown became a vulnerability research because she first studied shame and then saw that the act of being vulnerable was a catalyst to the cure. She did and continues to advocate for vulnerability despite her complete lack of comfort in being vulnerable herself. Vulnerability is not weakness. She considers it the highest form of courage. So if you are an educator responsible for a group of learners, the two most powerful words when we’re in struggle says Brown: me too.
