Teaching Confidence

Jay Mathews posted a list of 8 "essential life skills" schools should help children develop. They include organization, teamwork, friendship, and thinking critically. I don't disagree with any, and feel attached to at least 5 more. But to avoid crowding the discussion, I'll whittle my must-add "essentials" down to just one: informed confidence.

By informed confidence, I mean a series of beliefs. (These beliefs are frequent topics of conversation in education today, and form cornerstone beliefs of programs including KIPP, Teach for America, and now, DC Public Schools.) The series goes like this: 1) Making an impact on the world is important. 2) Academic skills and knowledge help me make an impact on the world. 3) I can develop skills and knowledge through hard work. Building this investment in the long term and confidence in their own potential is critical for students' success, and often doesn't come organically for students in communities which often haven't succeeded in mainstream America.

A student in my own kindergarten class reminded me of this reality yesterday. Aaliyah (pseudonym) presents herself as one of the most confident students in class -- singing, dancing, and volunteering answers with abandon. So I was surprised when yesterday morning she came up to me with a friend and said, "Whitney's so smart. I'm not smart like her." I embarked on a little-kid explanation of plasticity, the simple and increasingly popular belief that people do not possess abilities in fixed measures, but all have the capacity to better those abilities. Adult view of the situation: Yes, Whitney has reached higher success on some traditional measures of achievement, including reading level. But, Whitney came in with a huge store of background knowledge which most of my students don't. I'm pretty sure that if I compare growth this year, Aaliyah has made even greater gains then Whitney -- indicating she is just as able of reaching those same high levels of achievement -- as long as she spends more time working.

If I could contribute one thing to the Work Hard/ Get Smart rhetoric in schools, it would be this: Agency -- not college -- is the end goal. In our desire to give under served students more agency, we often hit them so hard with the college message that little else gets through. Yes, we need to be talking about college from Day 1 so it becomes a living, breathing, absolutely possible entity in our students' minds. But, if we stop the conversation at college, what will they do when they graduate? In the end, college is a means to having more choices -- the choice to earn a comfortable income, or debate policy, or build a skyscraper.

If we believe informed confidence -- or any other "life skills" are important -- we must assess their development in some way. Social and life skills are vulnerable to crowding out of the curriculum because they are so hard to measure. Although I don't have the answer, some organizations have begun to look. Under the new Teaching and Learning Framework, one ninth of a teacher's Teach score depends on "investing students in their learning," including developing the belief that hard work leads to success -- and is possible for every student. If you're curious about how observers go about measuring this, take a look at the Teach 7 section of the rubric. In the rush to move students to the top, how are we valuing the beliefs that will actually help get them there?

Light Bulb about the Light Bulb

Catherine Gewertz at Curriculum Matters recently shared a fascinating finding from Harvard Business review: a sense of making progress in their work motivated adult knowledge workers more than incentives, public recognition, or interpersonal support. As Catherine points out, this finding has important implications for both teachers and students.

Last week, I wrote a post about alternatives to incentives in the classroom. In my own work, I've found "explicit, incessant discussion of why content is important" and "logical consequences, both positive and negative" to motivate students in powerful ways, especially when practiced school-wide.

Gewertz' post points toward an important third tool for building up successful, intrinsically motivated students: helping students see their own progress. I'll call this "the light bulb about the light bulb." Although students make progress all the time, they often need help to SEE and understand that progress themselves. Helping students see the light bulb about their own light bulbs has led to some pretty powerful moments in my own teaching. For example, when Dewan (pseudonym) buckled down and applied new skills to a piece of his writing, a subject he usually finds frustrating, he excitedly raised his hand to show me the product. To drive home his own growth, I pulled out a much less accomplished story he wrote the week before, and asked him to name some of the differences. His expression shifted, from in-the-moment elation to thoughtful pride. By naming how his own work had improved, I think Dewan began to generalize his feeling from "Look, I made this cool thing!" to "I'm getting better at writing." Facilitating concrete comparisons of a student's current achievement to their past difficulties gives kids motivation that no teacher-constructed consequence, positive or negative, can match. These light-bulb-about-the-light-bulb moments also provide great reference points for continued motivation. For example, when a student starts to give up on a challenging task, her teacher, peers, and eventually even she herself can remind her of a specific time in the past when she persevered and achieved.

We teachers and schools often go to so much trouble to construct elaborate incentive and investment systems. But in the end, there seems to be no substitute for the real-world feeling of getting better at a skill you deeply value.

Teach Kids As We Want to Be Treated

As teachers, we possess incredible power to shape the actions of future generations. Why, then, are so many of us careless with one of the most important lessons we can teach -- why people do what we do? As Claus von Zastrow discussed recently, incentives are "all the rage" for motivating both teachers and students. In particular, incentives and punishment are integral parts of many "high-achieving" school models touted by the media and political leaders. I am no expert on KIPP, but at first blush, KIPP's "paycheck" system strikes me as about incentive-y as you get. There are 2 fronts to approach this on. First, the moral ground. Yes, adults are often motivated by incentives and punishments -- but do we want to be? Do our best actions come from them? As adults, we should educate children to live the best lives possible, not just maintain the status quo. Second, with possibly more universal appeal, is the pragmatic ground. Even when incentives give us shorter-term results like better test scores, in the long run they can cripple students, as von Zastrow points out, and Alfie Kohn argues beautifully in his book, Punished by Rewards.

Before I start sounding like a teacher-saint, let me fully disclose that I relied heavily on incentives to manage my class last year. And even that was preferable to my first year, when I had barely heard the term "classroom management," let alone developed any kind of system for it. Now, in my third year, I'm not above using them as a scaffold for kids behaving in ways that seriously interfere with learning. But, I am happy to say I have made progress, thanks to great teacher-mentors, training in social curriculum (more below,) and a good kick in the ethical pants from reading Punished by Rewards last summer.

So, without further ado, let's delve deeper into HOW we get kids to value "learning for its own sake" -- or at least for the sake of more worthwhile and/or realistic things than stickers, money, food, grades, etc. Here are two tools I've found relatively successful:

1. Explicit, incessant discussion of why content is important. In kindergarten, I give lots of concrete examples of what kids CAN do if they getter better at a certain skill. "If you get better at reading, you CAN read that Harry Potter book in the library." "If you learn how to write numbers, you CAN write your phone number down for your friend to call." As I've found through trial and error, doing this well involves bringing the kids on it. Before kids start independent work, I'll sometimes ask them to explain why it is important. Additionally, I start to build concepts of longer-term benefits (and put in my own plug for social justice) by asking kids what they might like to do and make better in the world, then connecting their learning to their ability to do this. For example, our kids love our playground, and want there to be playgrounds everywhere -- so I explain how to build a playground, you first need to measure spaces and write down your plans.


2. Logical consequences, both positive and negative. Logical consequences are matched in CONTENT (as well as intensity and time) to a student's actions. So, if a student works hard on solving a math problem using plastic cubes, she might earn the choice of using plastic cubes AND wooden tiles for the next math problem. And if another student goofs off during his math work time, he might make up the work after school. Part of the reasoning behind this (as I was trained) is that the connection of the consequence to the original behavior reinforces or discourages the behavior more effectively than an unrelated consequence. For example, if students earn extra library time for working hard on reading, when they're in the library with books in hand, on some level they're thinking, "Wow, I like reading." If they are rewarded with a pizza party, they are more likely thinking, "Wow, I really like pizza" -- with no emotional or cognitive connection to why they got the reward.

While teachers and their training programs bear much of the responsibility for developing and implementing classroom management through tools other than incentives and punishments, schools and policy-makers need to be in there, too. One big investment of time and influence school and other leaders can make is commitment to a social curriculum. Some which emphasize alternatives to incentives and punishment are Responsive Classroom, Love and Logic, and Nonviolent Communication. My school's commitment to Responsive Classroom has made a big impact on learning. Teachers and other instructional staff receive significant training in the approach, and it appears that administrators also look for some level of philosophical alignment when they hire new staff. Becoming more consistent with Responsive Classroom across the school has made a giant difference in culture, both inside and outside classrooms. Teachers have a lot of power over the messages we send within own classrooms -- but a message of intrinsic motivation is even more powerful if the teacher down the hall isn't handing out candy for answers, and the lunchlady isn't screaming at kids in line.

This post is adapted from a comment posted on Public School Insights.