Over the last year, I’ve been involved in a project with my Solution Tree colleague and friend Tim Brown. We’ve been writing a book called You Can Learn: Building Student Ownership, Motivation and Efficacy with the PLC at Work Process.
Our argument in You Can Learn is a simple one: There is nothing more important than helping students to become confident learners.
In the course of writing You Can Learn, I came across this interview with Deborah Feldman, a researcher who has worked to better understand the reasons that high school students drop out of school.
One quote in the interview stood out to me. Here it is:
“There were very distinct patterns we see with kids starting to pull away usually in middle school.
The through line in many of their stories was some kind of academic challenge that undermined their faith in themselves as learners, that then led to helplessness and hopelessness about their ability to be a student, which was their primary job in life.”
Deborah Feldman, “Some of the surprising reasons students drop out,” NEA Today, December 19, 2017.
Stew in that for a moment, would you?
How heartbreaking is it that the common pattern that Feldman found in her interviews with high school dropouts was that individual moments of academic challenge in middle school undermined the faith that students had in themselves as learners — and that those individual moments led to feelings of hopelessness and doubt that students carried with them for years?
No wonder they dropped out.
It’s hard to be persistent in an environment where you aren’t convinced that you can actually succeed.
So, how exactly do we build confident learners?
There may be some hints in this video, where researcher John Hattie defines collective efficacy:
The quote that stands out to me is this one:
“It isn’t just growth mindset. It’s not just rah-rah thinking; it’s not just, ‘Oh – we can make a difference!’
But it is the combined belief that it is us that causes learning.
It is not the students. It’s not the students from particular social backgrounds. It’s not all the barriers out there. Because when you fundamentally believe that you can make the difference, and then you feed it with the evidence that you are, that is dramatically powerful.”
Now, Hattie is talking about collective efficacy in groups of teachers that are working together to study their practice. But think about what this quote would mean to students if we made a few simple edits to it:
“It isn’t just growth mindset. It’s not just rah-rah thinking; it’s not just, ‘Oh – I can make a difference!’
But it is the belief that I cause learning.
It is not my teachers. It’s not my parents. It’s not all the barriers out there that get in my way. Because when I fundamentally believe that I can make the difference, and then I feed it with the evidence that I am, that is dramatically powerful.”
Is this making sense to all y’all?
If we want students to succeed in school and in life, we have to convince them that they can be successful regardless of the circumstance.
When students begin to doubt their abilities as learners — something that Deborah Feldman argues starts in middle school — we have lost them.
That raises an important question: What steps are YOU taking to build confident learners?
- Are you helping ALL students to track their own progress towards mastering important outcomes?
- Are you helping ALL students to spot gaps between what they know and what they need to know — and to identify steps they can take to close those gaps?
- Are you helping ALL students to develop the skills necessary to assess themselves accurately?
- Are you helping ALL students to tell the story of their own academic successes?
- Are you helping ALL students to feel capable and competent in your classroom?
In the end, nothing else that we do in schools really matters.
#simpletruth
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