Preface
For as long as I can remember I held to the traditional notion that for children to thrive in life they needed to be shielded both from failure and from the impact this supposedly had on their self-esteem. The mantra ran that if we focused on a child’s area of perceived weakness the resultant dip in confidence would leave them bereft of the ability to tackle any task they deemed difficult. Two things came to challenge and ultimately change my thinking in this regard. Firstly I appointed a new deputy and secondly I stumbled across the work of Carol Dweck.
Working with the Year 6 Class
I appointed Jon Westwood to the staff in 2004 and he has worked here as the Deputy and Year 6 teacher since that time. In 2009 Ofsted arrived and whilst they noted that the teaching was outstanding throughout the school they felt compelled to comment that; Teaching is especially effective in Year 6. However it wasn’t simply the quality of Jon’s teaching that caused me to rethink through the issue of self-esteem. The challenge came from watching a quality classroom practitioner produce standards of work from children that set new benchmarks and yet seemingly with little regard to the traditional view of protecting children’s self-esteem. Needless to say I was intrigued!
The first thing to say about Jon is that his relationships with children are exceptional and there is a real respect and warmth about everything he does. They respond in kind and truly enjoy working with him. This is the basis upon which everything else in Jon’s class is built, and it is this element that forms the foundation on which the argument spelt out below is built. The aspect that interests me most about Jon’s teaching style is that he is not afraid to “tell it like it is”. If he feels a child is not performing to the best of their ability, or that a piece of work is not up to the standard he would expect then he is never reticent in making his feelings known. He is never sharp with any child, never raises his voice he just points out to them that he feels they are underperforming. I have observed him on many occasions informing a child that the piece of literacy they have produced was “pants” and yet bizarrely by the end of the year the children appear to have grown in confidence and their attainment has rocketed. So with my traditional views on self-esteem seemingly in shreds I decided to interview the children one at a time to get their take on Jon’s approach and it was this that opened my eyes to a brave new world.
The children were more than happy to spill the beans on their teacher’s style of classroom management. There was a general acceptance from all the children that Mr Westwood’s style was more direct than other teachers. “If your work is pants he will tell you” one girl proudly informed me and they all noted the same. However it was their reaction to this methodology that transformed my own standpoint. One boy articulated what appeared to be the general consensus within the class when he said “If he tells you that you can do better this means he believes you can and he expects you to achieve even more than you have and that makes you feel good about yourself. If teachers always tell you your work is good then you feel like you can’t do better but here you can do more. You could become the best in the class” None of the children appeared to be phased by the apparent “criticism” In fact they had turned it on its head and saw it in a highly positive light. They felt intrinsically that no teacher would ask a child to do something they could not achieve and thus the challenge to better themselves came across as a message of affirmation to the child that Jon believed in them as learners and this in turn inspired them to achieve more. As another boy said “If he tells you your work is pants then it means that he thinks you can do better, he has faith in you and believes you can work to a high standard and that makes me feel good about myself”
My head was reeling from the simplicity with which they expressed their views. They appeared to have taken the self-esteem debate turned it inside out and upside down and left me with the feeling that my traditional “Candy Floss” view of self-esteem was left very wanting. We appeared to have children believing they could achieve more than they had before and some believing they could (apparently) “become the best in the class” They all seemed to respond positively and as one child put it; “I like it because it makes you feel you can do better, he believes in you and he thinks you can do it.” It should not have escaped anyone’s notice that the underpinning for all this hinges on Jon’s relationship with the children and their respect for him, without this the whole process would unravel very quickly but the power and effectiveness of the feedback being given was seemingly undisputable. Far from feeling deflated by the seeming criticism one boy stated that “When you are told it is wrong it makes you feel good about yourself because it makes you feel like you can do even better” I found the whole thing totally counter intuitive; how could a child claim that “when you are told it is wrong it makes you feel good about yourself” Yet I could see their point of view and could appreciate what Jon was doing for them.
What was more interesting was the children’s articulation of how this approach was changing the learning culture within the classroom as a whole. The children were almost contemptuous about experiences in previous classes (probably mine!) where the teacher always looked for a positive slant on their work. One boy said “Some teachers say that work is good when it isn’t and that makes me feel weird” He articulated how he felt a real sense of dissonance when a teacher made an encouraging comment about work he either believed was not his best or work where he knew he had not totally applied himself. He went on to say “Also if they say it is good then you wouldn’t try harder next time because you have reached the standard. In fact when they say it is good and I know it isn’t it makes me feel like they have not read it properly and that they don’t care much” It was in statements like this that I could see how Jon’s philosophy was driving such a strong culture of achievement into the children in his class. Some expressed thoughts in terms of the teacher simply raising expectations “It makes us work harder the next time because we know what the expectations are and if we don’t want to have to do it again we know what to avoid” but others attached this raising of the bar to their own intrinsic development as learners “Being criticised feels OK because I know he thought I could do better.” The simple truth was expressed by one girl who said; “If the teacher says your work is good all the time it stops you trying harder”
The children were also very cognisant of the fact that it was the quality of the teacher’s feedback that enabled their learning to move forward. One child commented that “There is no point telling you that your work is pants and then not telling you how to improve it, so he always tells you what is wrong with it and what you can do to make it better”. As John Hattie has found in his meta-analysis of what contributes to quality learning, one of the key features is the quality of feedback that children receive from their teacher. So we have ended up with a class that has the most robust comments I have witnessed and yet children who appear to be emotionally thriving in a culture that raises standards and drives children’s desire to learn forward apace.
The power of this fundamental shift in thinking was clearly illustrated late one afternoon. As the children were completing a writing task, one of the girls called Jon over to look at her work. At the end of a long day Jon sped read the work and told her it was fine. As he turned to move away he felt a tug on his shirt and he heard the girl say “Now read it again and tell me what I need to do to improve it” To have children pro-actively seeking out “criticism” of their work so they can improve it has to be one of the most powerful drivers in any learning culture.
Carol Dweck’s work on Mindsets
It was around this time that Carol Dweck published her work on Mindsets and upon reading it I suddenly found that someone had developed a framework into which my new thinking on self-esteem fitted seamlessly. There have always been subtle clues that the traditional view of self-esteem that sought to shield children from failure was somewhat flawed. For example, if this were the case then one might expect that secure self-esteem would reside in all the high achievers and low self-esteem would inflict those who were more academically challenged. However any teacher will tell you issues of self-esteem span the complete ability range.
The crux of Dweck’s work focused not on the child’s ability but on how the child perceived themselves in terms of their learning. She developed the dual concepts of “Fixed” and “Growth” mindsets.
Those with a Fixed Mindset held the view that intelligence was inherently innate and that no amount of work or effort would alleviate your ability to succeed. So if presented with an activity that presented any form of challenge would readily conclude that their failure to achieve was due to their lack of natural ability. Children with this mindset quickly became victims of “learned helplessness” as they limited their potential to learn anything that offers any sense of challenge.
Those with a Growth Mindset on the other hand saw challenge as an opportunity to “give it a go”. They viewed learning as a process not a performance and therefore were able to see failure as a stepping stone in the learning process rather than an indictment on their innate ability. They developed tenacity in their learning, happily working in Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” without any challenge to their perception of their own intelligence
Dweck concluded that children’s perception of themselves and their personal view of their own self-esteem was not related to their ability but whether they saw their ability as fixed and a previously determined factor or one of unlimited potential to be explored. She noted that when children tackled a given task in school how they perceived it at the outset had a huge impact on their view on what might constitute success. Those children in a fixed mindset invariably saw every task through a “performance” lens, meaning they saw the task as one that needed to be completed successfully so as to confirm their own status of perceived ability. To fail would only confirm to them that “they weren’t smart”. They therefore held a natural preference for activities where they knew they would succeed because this would lead to their gaining approval and would shield them from what they perceive as any unwelcome assessment of their ability. Conversely the growth mindset children viewed tasks as an opportunity to learn. They were not deterred by whether they were successful in the ultimate sense of the word but held greater store on whether they had taken their own personal learning forward.
Dweck’s research included a raft of experiments that substantiated her thinking. In one of them she used a questionnaire to divide children into those with fixed or growth mindsets. They were then given 12 mathematical problems to solve, 8 of which were relatively straightforward followed by 4 that were relatively unsolvable. As the children moved onto the complex questions those of a fixed mindset started to denigrate their own ability and lost interest in the difficult questions very early on. However those in the growth mindset continued to work seamlessly on the tasks and actually managing to solve some of the more complex questions. Just as poignant were the conclusions drawn from a debriefing afterwards. In this only a third of the fixed mindset children believed they would be able to successfully tackle the easy questions correctly if they tackled them again and whilst most had scored 8 correct answers they perceived their personal scores to be much lower. Whilst it would be unwise to draw sweeping conclusions from a single experiment (and Dweck doesn’t, she has banks of similar data) it is easy to see that the fixed mindset undermines any construct of learning. As Guy Claxton once said “If you are not in the fog you are not learning”. These children are prevented from entering the learning space, hampered by their desire to always be correct and to see every learning activity as an assessment of their ability rather than an opportunity to learn fresh concepts and develop new understanding.
No surprise then that when children with a fixed mindset were given the option of an easy task with little chance of making a mistake; a hard task but possible to achieve with some effort; or a hard task designed to expose children to a new concept 80% of them chose one of the first two. In fact 50% chose the easier of the two options. However in the growth mindset group over 60% chose the challenging task that offered the opportunity to learn. In similar vein the same children were asked if they would prefer to get a good grade in class or to do something that presented a challenge. 65% of those with the fixed mindset chose the good grade option whilst 68% of those with a growth mindset chose the opportunity to be challenged by a task. Without feeling the need to spell out the obvious it should be clearly evident to all that the fixed mindset legislates against learning in every context. It is a powerful disabler and if left unchecked will hinder a child’s achievement throughout the entirety of their school life.
If you have followed the thread of Dweck’s argument it will not surprise you to find that she has found that the most vulnerable students, who often crash and burn at some point are higher ability girls. They are those who have maybe never found any challenge in learning but often in adolescence or later at university they hit the brick wall of “failure” (or challenge as we might term it) for the first time. Unless they have been well schooled with a growth mindset this is often the time that the performance based culture they have lived in for so long leads them to conclude that they were not as intelligent as they first thought. If they stay in this mindset then their ability to continue learning will be ultimately undermined by their lack of understanding of Guy Claxton’s fog.
It may well be argued that such students had never been placed in a meaningful, challenging, learning arena where they had the chance to taste seeming failure before experiencing that moment when the light dawns as understanding fills the mind. If it is true this is a sad indictment on schools and maybe Dweck is right when she says “Primary schools typically provide a low-key environment in which the work tends to be carefully paced and teachers try to keep failure to a minimum. However if vulnerable children do not encounter difficulty they will be greatly hampered in their achievement” (Mindset p 20)
My reception teacher once showed me a piece of writing from one of her pupils. It was an outstanding piece of writing for a child in their first year at school. I asked her what feedback she had given to the child. She replied “I told her to put it in the finished tray, well there is not a lot one can say when work is that good” That good? What does “that good” mean? Did the work contain a semi colon, an adverbial clause or the correct use of a hyphen? Whilst we should celebrate a child’s success at every point in their educational life we should at the same time ensure that they are placed on the growth mindset road rather than leading them subliminally and in this instance unwittingly into a performance orientated culture. So feedback should be an elemental part of the learning experience for every child lest we end up unwittingly building into children the notion that for them performance is the end goal to all learning and of course it isn’t it is about constantly moving forward.
Can a fixed mindset be redeemed?
Here lies the most crucial of questions for if the answer is not in the affirmative it would seem to infer that many children are condemned to a miserable existence of swimming against the tide of learning.