I want to share several stories about students with you and at the end of each I invite you to consider this question- what does the student believe? Hopefully you’ll find the stories interesting and instructive. Afterward, I’ll explain why I’m sharing these stories.
I had a student once who was in her beginning year. She made it clear and obvious that she really didn’t want to be there. Every time I said that it was time to get started she would loudly say something like, “Oh no! Do we have to?” Every time that I would tell the class it was time to wrap up, she would shout out “Finally!!” like Christmas had come early. By the end of the year, I was so frustrated that I often had a burning desire to snap back at her. I wanted to say, “Ok, I get it. You don’t like my class. You can stop saying it!” Thankfully, I had grown up a little as a teacher by then and I kept it to myself. So I watched as she floundered in the class, mostly didn’t do her homework, and struggled. Except sometimes you could just tell she was lying. If you got her involved in a discussion, or if we started talking about something that she was interested in, the act would drop for a minute and she would act like it was her favorite class in the world.
So I was surprised and not surprised when she came back for a second year. In the second year she had a huge jump in her performance and attitude. She participated, tried hard, did most of her homework, and generally did successful student things. One day, she asked for help with an oratory that she was writing. It was about not needing other people’s approval. She confided in me that she had lost all her friends the year before and that was really hard for her. Writing the oratory seemed like a really good step for her though. I ended up teaching her for many years and having a really lovely relationship with her.
So when she was feigning dislike for the class for that whole first year, what did she believe?
In a different year, a different student told me that he needed to quit the class. I was surprised. He was doing reasonably well. His track record on homework wasn’t stellar, but it also wasn’t terrible. I asked him why and he told me that he couldn’t take the pressure of failure anymore. Every week, he knew that he was going to fail on his homework. Every time he went to a tournament he knew that he was going to do a poor job preparing. And it turned out he was always right (at least in his mind) and he was feeling terrible about himself and he just wanted it to stop. I told him that if he needed to stop taking the class, that was ok, but I asked him if together we could try to see if there was a better way to look at the situation.
Over several weeks of discussions, I asked him to consider a proposition. I asked him to entertain the idea that he had the situation backward. In his mind, the process went like this: first, he was a poor student who made poor choices. Second, as a result he felt bad about himself. I told him that there may be some truth to that process, but I asked him to consider whether or not what was going on was the reverse. First, he felt bad about himself as a student and person. Second, as a result he had little mental and emotional energy left to be a good student. I told him that I had much more often observed this to be the case with students and that students who conceptualized their experience this way made progress as a student much more reliably. In other words, I asked him to consider that he was caught in a loop of self fulfilling prophecy about his incompetence.
He had a hard time buying the idea. It just seemed so clear to him that he deserved the contempt he felt for himself and the best way to deal with it was to remove himself from situations where he would have to repeatedly witness his failures. He quit shortly thereafter and I’ve always regretted that I wasn’t able to reach him better.
So, in this circumstance, what did this student believe?
I taught a student this year who confided that she was frustrated with her progress. She was working hard, doing all the right things, and just didn’t feel like she was getting any better. I didn’t see it the same way. It certainly seemed like she was growing to me. But I could understand her frustration. She wanted the growth to be easily visible and measurable. To me it looked like she was really deepening the way she was thinking. You could envision her like a tree that was putting down deep roots in preparation for growth in the branches and leaves. But that’s hard for a student to see in the moment.
I asked her to envision two sticks. You want the sticks to get further away from each other because that represents growth. But the sticks have lots and lots of rubber bands that surround them both. Some are tight, some are loose. Sometimes you just have one tight rubber band, so when you snip it, the boards really spread apart in a visible way. But sometimes there are lots of rubber bands that are tight. They layer over and interact with each other. So if you snip one, the boards don’t spread apart very far. You are growing, but it isn’t very visible. She walked away from the conversation still concerned but willing to consider what I had to say. As the year progressed, I watched her put herself into the class, continue to grow and then write a moving reflection to end the year. The reflection included the following paragraph, which I share with permission.
“You told me a metaphor about rubber bands holding two boards together. Life’s almost like we’re constantly trying to pull these two boards apart, and whenever you snap a rubber band and the top board moves upward, it’s like overcoming something and growing. Sometimes there’s just one rubber band holding the boards tightly; when it breaks, the boards noticeably move apart. But sometimes there are many tight rubber bands, and snapping one doesn’t seem to make a big difference. I guess I’ve come to realize that maybe some rubber bands will never break, and maybe they aren’t meant to. Maybe they just stretch and stretch. Sometimes you get tired, and they get a little tighter again. But perhaps that’s the whole point, because if all the rubber bands broke, wouldn’t the boards just fall apart? I think that’s kind of been the theme of my semester: slow, sometimes invisible growth; the kind that might not look so good in a trophy case or show up on a ballot, but that’s working to stretch something inside of me, one little rubber band at a time.”
So while this student was feeling discouraged and frustrated, what did she believe?
Years ago I had a student offer an admission that seemed to come out of nowhere. She was smart. She was successful. I just loved teaching her. After one tournament though, I was asking all the students what they learned from their experience and her response was “I learned that I’m afraid to know if I’m good at debate.” She continued “Every time I go to a tournament I think I’m going to prepare and do such a good job getting ready and I just never do. And I’ve had a hard time understanding what is going on, but I finally think I get what is going on.” She said that she was coming to realize that as long as she didn’t prepare very well, if she got 13th place in a given event then she could always think to herself, “Well, if I got 13th and I didn’t even prepare then I must be pretty good.” But what if she prepared and she still just got 13th place? Then what? Would that mean that’s just who she was?
So as this student was constantly sabotaging her preparations, what did she believe?
I’ve had several students over the years who I would identify as chronic preparers. They are often female, but sometimes male. And they are generally the best liked students by teachers. They always do their homework. They are always prepared and more than prepared. You can just count on them like you can count on the sun coming up. They fool you into thinking everything is great. And maybe it is mostly. But every once in a very long while, circumstances break down and they just aren’t able to prepare the way that they usually do. And sometimes they’ll break down along with the circumstances.
It’s in these moments I like to have a talk with this sort of student. I ask them to consider whether the kids who are constantly failing in classes and never getting their homework done, don’t have an advantage over them? To be sure, doing your homework is a great idea, preparation can really cause you to succeed, etc. I’m not trying to negate that in any way. But I ask them to consider whether they think that they are intelligent and capable or if they just think that they are disciplined and good at preparing. I spent many years as the failing student that teachers were constantly frustrated with, and one thing that I became sure of during that time is that I was smart enough and capable enough to perform on the spot even if I hadn’t prepared well. So it isn’t the path that I would recommend and I’m glad that I learned to prepare better. But I’m also grateful for the gifts that time gave to me.
It’s interesting to see the wheels turning in their heads as they consider the idea that always being 110% prepared isn’t an absolutely unadulterated educational good.
So as these students are putting in the time, working hard, and going above and beyond what do they believe?
So now the purpose of the stories.
If you’re a teacher or a parent in the homeschooling community, I assume that you are furiously choosing, creating, reviewing, and/or refining curriculum for the coming school year. It’s time to choose classes, select books, build lesson plans, create materials, and overall make sure that you are heading into the school year prepared. And whether you create your own curriculum, purchase someone else’s, or are sending your children to a class the curriculum involved in each will largely center around two questions:
- What do I want the student to know?
- What do I want the student to be able to do?
These are great questions to guide the content and structure of curriculum. But there is a third question that is just as important and, in my experience, is not asked as frequently when thinking about how the school year will proceed. The question is
- What do I want the student to believe?
The reason this question matters is because student beliefs drive student behavior. This is true whether you are talking about a student who believes that she will be rejected by her peers if she shows how much she enjoys a class, a student who believes that he truly deserves the contempt he feels for himself, a student who believes that progress must be visible and linear for it to count, a student who believes that her value as a person is directly correlated to her capabilities in a debate class, or a student who believes that maybe if you strip away his or her ability to prepare then there will be really very little left to them.
Students carry in their hearts these and so many other beliefs that can be difficult for teachers and sometimes even for the student to see. Sometimes they believe that they are unlovable. Sometimes they believe that it isn’t safe to trust or be close to peers, teachers, or people generally. Sometimes they believe in a metaphysical cosmic ranking of humans in the sky and they believe that life consists of seeing how many people you can pass in those rankings determined by obscure measures that no one ever quite knows. Not taking these, and other beliefs into account can cause even the best laid plans for curriculum to go awry.
So as you are going into this school year, I hope you will consider that second half of the curriculum. What do I want students to believe?
For me, there are many answers to the question. I want students to believe that the ways that they are intelligent matter. I want them to believe that what they have to say doesn’t have to be perfect to have value. I want them to believe that others in their class have valuable thoughts and they will be better off if they listen to them. I want them to believe that risk is good and that failure is desirable. I want them to believe that people can disagree and still respect each other. I want them to believe that they are people worth investing in. I want them to believe that they aren’t deserving of contempt, least of all from themselves. I want them to believe that hard work and learning change a person and open opportunities for them. Perhaps most of all, I want them to believe that love and respect are not scarce and that they don’t have to compete for them. I want them to believe that they are human made resources and that we can choose how much of them we create for ourselves and each other. And a great deal of what happens in class day to day is crafted to help students believe these things.
So, as we look forward to the coming school year, I have two questions for you.
What do you want students to believe, and how will that change what happens in your classroom or home?