How do we get them to aspire to more?
The most educationally debilitating mind set in anyone is a belief that they cannot achieve. Where does this belief come from? Who cares! What matters is how to get rid of it. To change a young person’s ability in a particular subject or in all subjects, the teacher must first change the way they view themselves or think about themselves.
When a child comes to me for help with an aspect of Maths or Chemistry the first thing I do is try to identify what they think of themselves as Maths students or as students in general. Sometimes a student wants help because they are very confident in the subject, are scoring 70% to 80% in the subject, but just want to know how to get to the top and be scoring over 90% consistently. This student needs very specific help in understanding what kind of mistakes they are making, and what to practice. They are already pretty motivated if they are achieving at this level. Here I would be having them try some quite advanced questions to see the kind of errors they are making and then show them how to consistently see the quirks and tricks in questions, how to solve problems, how to analyse them and identify exactly what it is the question is looking for. Always the language is encouraging; “You are a very capable Chemistry student”; “you will find this easy when I have pointed a couple of things out to you”; “you will find that with practice you will really enjoy this kind of question”. Note that every comment is a positive – “you will, you can, you are …”
If the student is coming for help because they are struggling with a subject or they are coming because their parents are forcing them to, the approach is quite different. Actually the language is the same, but the approach is different. Most subjects are about confidence. Students who are afraid of failing are often poor students. We need to show them that failing or getting a question wrong is actually a good thing because it shows you that that method does not work. The world does not come to an end because you got it wrong, you are not a worse person because you got it wrong and all the people who have achieved great things in their lives have failed at some point in their lives – sometimes disastrously. Fear of failure can be quite debilitating in a student. While building up confidence by starting with the basics is essential, giving them opportunities to fail safely is even more important. Language like, “Great, you made a good effort and now I can see how you were thinking; We can easily fix that; you will become good at this with some practice!”
It is so important not to lie to students and say things that they know to be untrue just because we want to build them up. We can’t say to a student, “You are a great maths student”, when they know they are scoring 3 out of 20. But we can say, “if you can get 3 right, we can find a way for you to get them all right eventually”. We get more of what we focus on and so if we focus on 3 right we will get more right, if we focus on 17 wrong, we will get more wrong.
Focus on the positive, use strengthening language and structured questioning and you can easily transform the self-perception of any student. They will want to learn and they will lift their sights higher and higher.
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