Stories of Us - August 27, 2021

Stories of Us - August 27, 2021
Posted on 08/27/2021
Partnership Educators,

A Sense of Hope,

Educators, at least the ones that I know, have always held the premise that educational attainment is the great equalizer.  People from all walks of life can get where they want to go by using learning as the vehicle to get them there.

I remember wanting to be a professional baseball player as a young child.  I was a fairly good player.  I was a shortstop and hit the ball well enough to make all-star teams.  I was confident, and I have to admit, a bit cocky in my approach towards my sport.  Looking back, I really didn’t understand what it took to be a professional baseball player.  I just knew I liked doing it, was fairly good at it, and I thought as most kids do about future plans, that if you were good enough you just become one.   No surprise to you but I didn’t become a professional baseball player.  I still play ball but it is now on the “for the enjoyment of the game” level.

Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, would say that this is the difference between motivation and volition.  Think of it this way,  I was extremely motivated to become a professional baseball player.  Playing a game for a living, traveling, and making lots of money;  “Ok that sounds great, let’s do that.”  However, I didn’t have the volition, willpower, or self-control to put in the necessary 10,000 hours of training, Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, that it would take to achieve my dream.  Gladwell’s work might further suggest that I also didn’t have the access to the level of play necessary to be able to fulfill the 10,000 hours of training it would take.  Nor did I understand the pathway to get there. 

The field of social psychology states “that much of how we act and who we are reflects the situations in which we find ourselves.”  Set kids up for extended competitions with high stakes and you will elicit increased aggression and/or cheating. If people move to smaller towns, they will be more likely to help a stranger.  In fact, so common is the tendency to attribute to an individual’s personality or character that is actually a function of the social environment that social psychologists have dubbed this the “fundamental attribution error.”  It is about creating an environment that supports those traits that lead to high rates of success.

The late W. Edwards Deming, author-lecturer, is mostly associated with Total Quality Management ideas.  The heart of what Deming said is that the “system” of an organization largely determines the results.  Every system is built to get the exact results that they are getting.  In fact, the educational arm of Deming’s work trains on using strong relationships, learned self-reliance, and data to transform classroom behaviors.   Deming, along with social psychologists, might suggest that transforming our school systems to support behaviors is the way to build stronger character in our students rather than trying to remake the students themselves.

Many of you are asking yourself why I labeled this post with the word hope in its title.  Hope is an interesting construct.  None of those things discussed above are directly related to hope but they are all components of why people have hope.  The definition of hope is “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.”  The late Dr. C.R. Snyder, professor of social psychology and leading specialist in hope, represents hope as an ability to conceptualize goals, find pathways to these goals despite obstacles, and have the motivation to use those pathways.  To put it simply we feel hope when we a) know what we want, b) can think of a range of ways to get there, and c) start and keep going.

My current belief around helping students achieve better behavior and/or character, for that matter higher learning, in our schools, revolves around students' abilities to have a future with hope.  When “we know what we want”, the first condition of hope, we set goals (condition of Communication & Critical Thinking) around interests we have or a personal identity that we have for ourselves (conditions of Critical Thinking and Responsibility).  What might that look like?  We need to help kids learn about themselves and set goals around who they are.  Some students come with these skills, techniques, or knowledge but many more don’t.  We also may need to engage kids in the discussion of what effort means and then have them actively evaluate their own effort as compared to their achievement.  Building student ownership of learning.  Maybe that is an effort rubric that students and staff develop together?  The second condition is thinking of ways to get to the goals.  What did David Levin say about KIPP Academy kids who were successful college completers?  They were students who “persisted” had “optimism” and “resilience” and would seek “extra help” 

These are all learnable skills for students.  Fully implementing an environment where we are connecting to kids using Capturing Kids Hearts can help students develop resilience and persistence.  How can we use our connections to help students learn to deal with failure for moving forward?  The effort rubric activity for older students might help and/or using the term “not yet” when students don’t seem to demonstrate learning.  Teaching students what "seeking help" looks like, and how they can know when they are getting help.  The last condition is starting and to keep going.  The motivation of students is about little successes and feedback tied to mindset.  Students who see failure as a learning opportunity and actually believe the school can help them change their learning outcome will keep them going.   The Schlechty Center on engagement would say that students need to see that the effort is worth the accomplishment and that they still feel that they can accomplish it with help and guidance.

Deming’s work suggests that in order to help all students learn these important life lessons and if some students aren't learning them, then the system must change.  The lessons from social psychology say that our character is “actually a function of the social environment we are in.”  Building a strong supportive environment that truly changes the construct of social behavior on campus will not only help the behavior we face each day but will help students achieve more of the content they are charged with.  It is going to take continued trial and error of focused educators studying those skills, attitudes, techniques, and knowledge that students need.  We will make mistakes and have some profound successes while we work to build a system that supports all students learning and build those attributes within our students that will truly make a difference.  

We can’t change kids into who we want them to be.  All we can do is create a social environment that helps them choose those behaviors that will get them to where they want to go.

Thanks for your continued efforts.

Rob Adams

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