How to set the right "perseverance point" in your classroom

Originally posted June 12, 2014 on Scholastic EduBlog

Everything is relative. Okay, maybe not “everything,” but many of our daily decisions are influenced by a comparison to what Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman called anchors or reference points. For example, the list or suggested retail price of an item is a reference point for whether or not you think you’re getting a good deal. Look up just about anything on Amazon and you see a list price with a line through it above the price you pay and the amount you save. In fact, discounting has become such a powerful motivator that retail price is often only used as a reference point created by marketers to get us to believe we’re saving money by buying the product or service; no one actually pays the MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price). 

Reference points also exist in school, and sometimes they’re quite subtle. When a teacher praises a student with, “You’re so smart, you got that so quickly” a reference point is set that smart = quick and correct. If you struggled to get the right answer or never got the right answer, you must not be smart. Xiaodong Lin at Columbia’s Teachers College has been investigating the power of stories of struggle as motivating reference points for students. Many of us, for instance, have grown up with larger than life stories of what a genius Albert Einstein was. Lin, however, found that these stories of achievement can actually be de-motivating. The reference point is, once again, being a genius, having easy success. When she shared stories of Einstein’s intellectual struggles, how he failed the entrance exam to a university, perseverance and performance improved. Struggle became the new norm.

So what can you do to set the right ESPP (educator’s suggested perseverance point) in your classrooms? Here are 5 suggestions:

◦    Give students challenging, but achievable, tasks. There’s no perseverance without a challenge. Make it the norm: “In this class we challenge ourselves.” It’s critical, though, that you believe in your students’ ability to meet these challenges, not on the first try, but with sustained and thoughtful effort.

◦    Introduce tasks with the expectation of struggle. Instead of “Let’s start with an easy one,” Try “This might take a few tries.” A student who struggles on the “easy one” might feel defeated for the rest of the class. If she gets it right away, it’s a great confidence booster. She got a great deal!

◦    Share examples of intellectual struggle. Thomas Edison tried 1600 different combinations of filaments before he got the right one for his lightbulb. You have your own stories to share. Make sure to focus on obstacles that students can control, and target academic issues. Students have more control over doing well in school than they do overcoming poverty or neighborhood violence.

◦    Make mistakes yourself and show how you learn from them. You can set the norm in your own teaching. “Wow, that was a great mistake I made. Let me see what I did. I’ll try never to do that again.”

◦    Praise getting smart not being smart. Intelligence, expertise, and genius are all built through hard work. Set the norm for praise at finding and fixing mistakes not getting things quickly. “I love the way you reviewed your steps and tried new strategies.”

Okay, one more bonus anchoring suggestion from Carol Dweck. Use the word “yet” to reinforce the expectation that success will come. “You haven’t figured out that problem…yet.” Your words matter. Use them well.

©Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Reprinted with permission