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How to make it safe for kids to fail

Rebecca Zook — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:00:26 +0000

I had the great pleasure of meeting one of my intellectual heroes, science journalist Ashley Merryman, and seeing her speak about her book, Nurtureshock: New Thinking About Children.

In her talk, Merryman passionately spoke to the fact that we absolutely need to make it safe for kids to fail. We live in a culture where parents want their kids to succeed at everything they attempt, without realizing that without making mistakes, it is not possible to take risks and actually reach our full potential.

After Merryman’s talk, I overheard moms discussing this in the ladies’ room. How can we make it safe for our kids to fail?, they were asking themselves. From the urgency in their voices, I could tell that Merryman’s message had hit home.

But even though I’ve been mulling over Merryman’s book, NurtureShock, for over a year now, and have several chapters more or less memorized, I wasn’t sure I knew what the answer was either.

I found a partial answer from a completely unrelated source: marketing mastermind Seth Godin’s blog. Godin points out: “There is no category of ‘does risky exploration, never fails.’”

Yet why do we persistently believe this category exists? Whenever I hear a story about an artist, scholar, or athlete who struggled to find success and acceptance, I never fail to be surprised. Jim Carey lived out of a car and bombed his first comedy gig? Drama coaches told Lucille Ball that she “had no future at all as a performer“? Madeline L’Engle’s first book, A Wrinkle in Time, was rejected by 26 publishers before winning the Newbery Medal? Thomas Edison was told he was “too stupid to learn anything”? Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job as a TV reporter because she was “unfit for TV”? Winston Churchill failed sixth grade?

We hear about the successes, but not the failures and struggles. We see the red carpet, the accolades, the public adulation. How would kids know that it’s safe to fail when the media just focuses on the polished final product, not the process of mastery?

One way to communicate to kids that it’s safe to fail is to tell these stories of our heroes’ early failures. If we mess up, it doesn’t mean that we’re not like them. When they were getting started, these heroes really weren’t all that different from us.

“This is really neat”

Rebecca Zook — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:30:25 +0000

Given the counterintuitive new research that has found that certain kinds of praise can undermine student motivation and achievement, I’ve been working over the past year to refine how I praise my students.

Here’s some very specific advice from NurtureShock co-author Ashley Merryman’s blog archive (to read the original, keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling until you get to the post titled “How not to talk to your kids – Part 4″):

A common praise technique that people use (I know I did it with my tutoring kids… up til a few weeks ago, that is….) is to use a present success to control future performance. For example, if a typically-sloppy child writes an essay that’s atypically legible, a parent or teacher may say, “That’s very neat: you should write all of your papers like this.”

Even if it’s meant as sincere praise and encouragement, the research shows that’s not only an ineffective way to praise. In fact, like praising for intelligence – it can actually damage a child’s performance.

Here’s what is going on. While the first part of the sentence was positive, rather than focusing on that success, the latter part of the sentence (“You should write all like this”) was negative, doubly-so.

First, rather than simply focusing on the present achievement, the second half of the sentence reminds the child about all the past mistakes. Second, it’s an expression of pressure to continue at this level in the future. But the kid may think that the work he just completed was very difficult, and he doubts he can live up to these new expectations.

Even worse, a child who suddenly wrote more legibly did it on his own volition. But if the praiser qualifies the praise with the expectation of future performance, now if the child continues to perform, he’s not doing it because he wanted to: he’s doing it to fulfill the praiser’s expectation.

Basically, the whole exchange kills the kid’s intrinsic motivation to improve. Furthermore, studies have shown that children’s performance actually may go down: they will even intentionally underperform, just to show that they refuse to follow the attempted control. In other words, yes, they do badly just to spite you.

The better thing to have said was, “This is really neat,” and left it at that.

I have been waiting for a year for a chance to try this out with one of my own students. I finally had a chance to implement this a few days ago while tutoring a rising fifth grader online.

He did a particularly neat job of writing out a problem on the online whiteboard, so I told him, “You did a good job of writing that out neatly and lining up the decimal points and the columns.” That’s it. I didn’t say anything about how he should write future math problems.

When he wrote out the next problem much less neatly than the last, I didn’t say anything.

Without me saying anything at all, he scratched out the messy version. And then he started over and wrote out a new, neat version, all my himself.

As a tutor, I am so excited that this style of feedback encouraged him to manage this on his own, without any cajoling or controlling from me — just an objective assessment of what he did well.

And I love having this clear guidance from Ashley Merryman’s archive on how to praise my students without worrying that I’m doing it the wrong way.

What Makes Kids Plow? (aka “Toning Down the Praise – Experiment #1″)

Rebecca Zook — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:20:03 +0000

This comment on GeekDad’s post about my homework help tips really warmed my heart:

“nothing is more satisfying then spending time with my children helping them with their math homework and witnessing the ‘light bulb’ moment when they get it and plow through the rest of the problems on the page” – Pabut

RIGHT ON!!! That moment is so satisfying and exciting. AND totally unpredictable. Creating the circumstances where “light bulb moments” happen totally varies from kid to kid and day to day. What can we do to maximize those light bulb moments and help kids plow?

I stumbled across a possible answer while approaching a different conundrum. All this new research on praise has been troubling me, and I’ve been questioning my praise strategies.

I used to eagerly cheer on students at the end of every problem, or even at the end of every step of the problem (“yes, exactly, that’s right, you got it, uh-huh…”). But what I’ve recently learned makes me wonder if frequent praise might actually be damaging my students instead of helping them.

So I tried an experiment. I recently worked with a rising fifth-grader. Since it was only our second meeting, he didn’t have months of meetings with me where I’d given him tons of praise. So I tried praising him very infrequently, just to see what happened.

I found that if I just stayed quiet, my student would happily plow through page after page of math problems, only stopping when he hit something really unfamiliar.

At first, I worried that if I didn’t indicate that something was correct, he wouldn’t know whether or not he had gotten the answer right. But I realized that if I only spoke up when he made a mistake or got off track, he would know he was right if I didn’t say anything.

This really surprised me. In the past, when I praised my students at almost every step, I believed that I was cheering them on. But I was really training them to expect feedback at almost every turn.

This particular student was so focused when I said nothing at all. So perhaps frequent praise would have hurt his concentration and kept him out of the “don’t stop me I’m doing math” zone.

The conclusion? I’m going to try to tone down the frequency with all my students and see how that goes.

Tips on Effective Praise from Ashley Merryman

Rebecca Zook — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:15:52 +0000

After reading Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s thought-provoking article about the power and peril of praising kids, I was eager to know—how should I be praising the kids I tutor? I was totally pumped to find a series of excellent posts on her and Po’s blog which offer specific tips on how to praise kids.

Here’s a summary.

1. Don’t offer global statements. For example, if a kid makes a vase, instead of saying, “you’re such a talented artist!”, compliment the making of the vase.

2. Be sincere.

3. Don’t use empty praise. (Once you do, your credibility is gone.)

4. Scale back the amount of praise. “Instead of saying how great something is, just a pat-on-the-back and it’s over, start a conversation with the child about her work. ‘Look how you used the color red instead of green for the grass. Tell me about why you did that.’ ”

5. Be specific. Instead of, “you’re a great writer,” say something like, “I like the way you introduced his character in your story—it’s very clear that he’s who the story’s about.”

6. Praise the process. Example: “It was a good idea to finish reading the chapter before playing video games, instead of stopping in the middle.” “I noticed you paid attention to the coach through the whole game.” But don’t praise only effort—also praise strategies, decisions, and other aspects of the student’s approach.

7. Don’t connect praise with promises of future success. Don’t say, “…and I’m sure you’ll do well.” It’s too uncertain.

8. Don’t confuse praise with encouragement. “When a kid gets stuck, don’t say, “You’re smart; I know you can do this.” “Rather than B.S.ing the kid with an empty attempt at boosting his self-esteem, the better thing to have said is, ‘Honey, I know it seems hard, but we’ll work on it together. I think if you work hard, you can get this,’ or ‘Just do what you can, and if you’re stuck, we’ll figure out where you got lost,’ or even just, ‘You can do it.’”

9. Timing is everything. “Don’t interrupt a kid who’s working really hard to tell him, ‘You’re working really hard.’” Praising a kid can ruin their concentration and redirect their focus away from their task to worrying about what you think of them. “Hold your applause to the very end.”

10. Avoid praising in public.

11. Don’t praise to avoid giving criticism or addressing failure.

12. Don’t praise underserved success.

13. Know your praise audience. While “a younger child takes your praise at face value… by the time a kid’s a teenager, no praise at all—just straight unadorned feedback—may be more effective than actual words of praise.”

14. Avoid praise inflation.

15. The praise uber-tip: be honest.

Ashley’s original posts explain the reasoning behind each tip in glorious detail!

The Power of Praise (1)
The Power of Praise (2)
The Power of Praise (3)
On Stickers
When Learning Feels Like a Forced March

Why Sleep is Awesome

Rebecca Zook — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:17:21 +0000

Here’s a thought-provoking article about kids and sleep from one of my favorite writers, Po Bronson.

Compared to 30 years ago, most kids get about an hour less sleep per night. Shocking fact: losing just this one hour of sleep causes kids to function cognitively as if they are two years younger. Adults are affected too. After 2 weeks of getting only 6 hours of sleep per night, adults act “just as impaired as someone who has stayed awake for 24 hours straight.”

My favorite bitlet:

Sleep is a biological imperative for every species on Earth. But humans alone try to resist its pull. Instead, we see sleep not as a physical need but a statement of character. It’s considered a sign of weakness to admit fatigue, and it’s a sign of strength to refuse to succumb to slumber. Sleep is for wusses.

(Bronson and his collaborator, Ashley Merryman, also discuss this same research in their recent book NurtureShock, which I highly recommend–it’s totally amazing.)