How to Make Mistakes

There is no shortage of articles out there - in newspapers, magazines, parenting books, and empirical journals - that extol the virtues of helping children fail with pride. Most recently, Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, published a lengthy, informative piece about what teachers around the country are doing to introduce failure and mistakes into their classroom culture.

 

As a Learning Specialist at The Yellin Center, I find myself discussing the idea with parents on a regular basis: kids need to see the importance of not getting it right the first time. The concept matches up with Dr. Carol Dweck’s theory of mindset, which we introduced in a 2011 blog post. I even blogged about the importance of failure last fall. Despite the ongoing coverage on our blog and in the wider media universe, one big question remains. What about kids who have already learned to fear failure? How do we help rehabilitate their sense of try-try-again when they are already fearful of taking on big challenges? From a psychologist’s standpoint, I’d like to know the tools for reconditioning this aversion to failure out of our older students, and instilling in them a new appreciation for the learning curve. This common situation is often brought up by parents who are looking for tips and tricks to reteach their children (and themselves) how to make mistakes.

One very powerful example of the benefits of failure continues to pop up in articles and books – learning to walk. Babies spend quite a bit of time and energy pulling themselves up, only to fall back down. And once they’ve finally got standing under their belt, they are even more motivated to continue failing at walking. That is, until they succeed, as they all do, eventually. Babies don’t know that they’re supposed to be good at everything the first time; it seems like we’re hard-wired to push past our failures until we’ve accomplished our goal. If toddlers gave up trying to speak every time their words were misunderstood, we’d all be mute. Sharing this story with our middle- and high-schoolers can be one step in helping them rethink hardship.

One story, however, is not the cure-all. Many schools are already starting to incorporate a love of mistakes into their curriculum and climate, but it’s important for families to work together with schools so that students are surrounded by a supportive environment that values mastery over, for example, how something looks on a college application.

There are other strategies for parents to work on at home while classrooms are being slowly transformed into failure-friendly settings. First, be a positive role model. Consider the language you use about your own abilities, and introduce some new, visible challenges into your own life that your kids can watch you learn from. Even better is to involve them in the process. Maybe this means trying that really difficult recipe you’ve been putting off for years because you know it’s going to be a mess the first time around, or maybe you’ve always wanted to learn how to knit but you’ve made it known that you’re just not good with your hands. Now is your chance to model a new way of thinking about “ability” and growth. Give that recipe or that new hat a go, and laugh about it with your kids afterwards. And don’t forget to let them know how good you feel that you took a risk, and how excited you are to keep trying, because you know that deliberate practice is way more important than “talent.” Check out this episode of Freakonomics for more information about using deliberate practice to learn a new skill outside your comfort zone.

Once you’ve modeled the behavior, you can move on to offering the experience to your tweens and teens at home. It may be too much pressure for a middle- or high-schooler to give up the drive for perfection at school just yet, but any low-risk activity is a great starting point. This might be a really challenging video game, a new hobby, or a strenuous group activity like rock-climbing (there’s a reason we wear harnesses, right?). Paired with the right casual conversation about taking risks and messing up, any activity can jump start a child’s appreciation for falling off the proverbial horse. These activities, which don’t come with the same baggage as an upcoming math exam or the SAT, allow parents to embed little life lessons and healthier ways of thinking into conversation.

While you and your kids are working on making mistakes at home, it’s important to keep the conversation going with their teachers. Are students allowed to rewrite essays and correct their exams? Do teachers encourage students to take risks or, conversely, just to get high marks? Have teachers introduced the students to the language around mindset, grit, and failure? Odds are, your child’s school is already working to make failure an important and stress-free part of the learning process. Teachers and other school professionals could be a great resource for parents to learn more about how to support their children’s development, and open communication between parents and teachers is beneficial for everyone involved.

For more information about mindset, making mistakes, grit, and deliberate practice, check out the following books and resources:

• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. 

• A quick you-tube tutorial on mindset

• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth 

• A podcast interview with Duckworth, the author of Grit

• A User-Friendly Explanation of Deliberate Practice

• "Mistakes Were Made" in the Harvard Ed. magazine, referenced at the beginning of this post.

Building Success through our Approach to Failure

With this post, we are pleased to introduce the newest member of our blogging team, Yellin Center Learning Specialist Jacqui Kluger, M.S., Ed. Jacqui has spent the past five years as an instructor for graduate and undergraduate psychology and education students in the City University of New York system, as well as working at several public and private schools. Welcome aboard, Jacqui!

We already know that when we view our abilities as plastic, or malleable and always growing, we (and our kids) approach roadblocks and challenges in a more constructive way. The question, then, is how to pass a growth mindset along so students have the tools to persevere in the face of hardships at school. A recent study by Kyla Haimovitz and Carol Dweck began to answer this question. They found that the way a parent approaches experiences of failure predicts how students perceived “being smart.” In other words, parents’ “failure mindsets” were related to whether children viewed their own abilities as fixed or plastic. 

Haimovitz and Dweck point out that a parent’s approach to failure is visible to students through parent behavior towards student failure. How a parent reacts when a student comes home with not-so-good news has a big impact on how that student feels about his or her abilities and intelligence. Some adults have a “failure-is-debilitating” view, which is the belief that failure is a reflection of our ability and is a setback. Others have a view of failure as an opportunity and a time of growth that leads to increased ability and mastery down the road. When parents focus on students’ current performance or fixed ability in the face of failure, kids do the same. When we focus on the opportunity at hand – the learning and mastery that comes after the initial failure – then kids begin to develop the growth mindset we know is so important for academic and socio-emotional success.

All students experience failure at some point in their educational careers, whether it’s a low exam grade or not getting the lead role in the winter play. According to the study, we should react to students’ failure with support for their learning and mastery. This may include providing strategies for different study methods, seeking outside support, promoting interest and enjoyment of material beyond quantifiable performance, or simply highlighting the idea that learning is an ongoing process. Let’s not forget that the journey is more important than the destination.

Photo: Erin Resso for flickr cc

This Friday, April 11th, Dr. Paul Yellin will be the Keynote Speaker at a forum titled Silent Crisis: The Impact of Chronic Stress and Trauma on Early Childhood Learning and Development. His presentation will look at a number of important considerations in the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral development of children under stress from the environment in which they live.

Starting with the famous "marshmallow experiment" and its follow-ups, he will look at how children's impulses are shaped by whether they have - or don't have - a reliable, trusted adult in their lives. He will discuss how early language skills are acquired and the importance of exposure to language in this process. He will then proceed to look at how the developing brain is impacted by stress, using images of brains in different circumstances to clarify his examples. 

Dr. Yellin will then speak about  neuroplasticity - rewiring our brains - to see how this ability is part of resilience, the ability to bounce back, recover, and ultimately overcome adversity. When children have a "turnaround" person in their lives, they are often able to succeed even if their early development was fraught with stress and lacked the language input and emotional support that is optimal for brain development. 

This event, with other speakers including Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH, Assistant Commissioner of the Brooklyn  Public Health Office of the NYC Department of Health; Evelyn K. Blanck, LCSW, from the NY Center for Child Development and Renee Wilson-Simmons, Dr.PH, Director of the National Center for Children in Poverty, is co-sponsored by Healthy Start Brooklyn, Central Harlem Healthy Start, and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Downstate New York Healthy Start, in collaboration with the Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership.

The forum will be held at the Oberia Dempsey Mult-Service Center, 127 West 127th Street in Manhattan and admission is free and open to the public. It begins at 9 a.m.

Book Claims Children Must Fail If They Are To Succeed

In a recent essay for the Wall Street Journal, author Paul Tough summarizes evidence presented, with increasing frequency, by experts and researchers in diverse fields (from neuroscience to economics) that will cause many parents to heave a huge sigh of relief: Your child’s success as an adult doesn’t hinge on the preschool s/he gets into. Really.

In his recently published book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Tough examines the factors that make a child a successful adult.  His Wall Street Journal article explains that the cognitive hypothesis, an idea which states that the kind of intelligence measured by IQ tests is the strongest predictor of success, is logical and comforting to people. It seems so reassuringly simple: A (a high vocabulary, a solid knowledge of math procedures) leads to B (unadulterated, life-long success), and to increase the odds of B occurring, parents need only be sure that A is well in order. This means cramming as much information into children’s heads as possible, and starting young to maximize the time available to do this. However, Tough reports that numerous studies are calling this hypothesis into question. It seems that character, a list of personal qualities that make a person motivated and resilient, is pretty important, too. In fact, Tough believes it might be even more important.

Central to this notion is the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who compared the experiences of holders of GED diplomas (General Educational Development, also called high school equivalency) to the outcomes of high school drop-outs. In theory, the GED holders had the same knowledge base as high school graduates, and it seemed logical that they should have enjoyed the same positive life outcomes. Instead, Heckman found that GED recipients had the same rates of negative outcomes like illegal drug use, divorce, unemployment, and low income as high school drop-outs, despite their good test performance. This result caused him to consider that something more powerful than academic achievement must drive success, and to conclude that the traits which caused GED holders to drop out in the first place were a more important predictor of their futures than their intellectual prowess.

Tough suggests that parents need to step back and allow their children to fail (offering a child empathy, one assumes, but not a solution). In fact, he writes that teachers and administrators at high-achieving schools report overly protective parents as their primary concern for students’ well-being. Children work hard and many who attend prestigious schools experience pressure and stress, but their success in life is all but guaranteed. While many parents think they are being kind to their children by shielding them from life’s pitfalls, Tough posits that actually giving a child the chance to face adversity may be the kindest thing a parent can do.

3 Keys to Fostering Resilience in Children with LD and ADHD

Dr. Yellin recently contributed an article about a favorite topic of conversation here at The Yellin Center, resilience, to the newsletter of Smart Kids with Learning Disabilities, a Connecticut-based non-profit organization dedicated to empowering the parents of children with learning disabilities and attention-deficit disorder.

Paul B. Yellin, MD, FAAP

In the article, Dr. Yellin writes: "So many of the children I see in my practice are their own harshest critics, exaggerating their weaknesses and diminishing their strengths. Helping children appreciate their strengths and talents is often the first step to resilient thinking."

Read 3 Keys to Fostering Resilience in Children with LD and ADHD here.

A Father's Story

The online home of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, LD.org, published a beautiful article this week by the father of one of our patients at The Yellin Center. With Father's Day coming up this weekend, we thought our readers would appreciate this story of perseverance, resilience, and love of family helping to dramatically transform one young man's learning experience.

"One of the greatest challenges that I confronted was when I realized one of my children had a learning disability. Throughout my life, I have been strong, resilient, confident, and maintained a “nothing will get the best of me” attitude. The day I understood the extent of my child’s disability, my leg trembled, my heart raced. I initially did not know where to turn or what to do to help my son to achieve a bright future. For the first time, I truly knew what fear was: fear for the future of a child that lives in my heart, my soul, and my being...

...my son is now receiving A’s and B’s when he used to receive C’s, D’s, and F’s a year before. He is beaming with self-confidence, which his teachers additionally notice."

You can read the inspiring article here. 

Our thanks to Mr. Rahamatulla for sharing his story and for giving us his blessing to repost it here. Happy Father's Day!

A Day in the Cosmos

I spent yesterday at the intersection of Mind, Brain and Education -- and the cosmos -- when I visited with Dr. Matthew Schneps at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. An astrophysicist, Dr. Schneps is the Director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning at the Center, which combines the resources and research facilities of the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Dr. Schneps is actively involved in dyslexia research and has asked me to serve on the Advisory Board for a research project which is looking at novel ways to deliver written material to children with dyslexia.

During my visit I was also interviewed on camera for another project, funded by the Annenberg Foundation, which is looking to create web-based materials to make information about neuroscience and learning accessible -- and practical -- for educators. Dr. Schneps is particularly interested in emerging evidence that perceptual variations associated with “learning disabilities” are actually advantageous. For example, it turns out that many of the world’s most accomplished astrophysicists have dyslexia. Dyslexia is frequently associated with an increased ability to perceive information in the peripheral visual fields -- which is advantageous when examining the cosmos. Dr. Schneps also introduced me to a brilliant and resilient astrophysicist who began losing her sight as a graduate student -- and now studies the universe using sound.

After my meeting with Dr. Schneps, I finished the day at a Board of Directors meeting for CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology). CAST continues to amaze all of its Board members with its continued progress in leading the field of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). With technology and an understanding of the wide range of normal variation in children, CAST continues to create tools to make academic material accessible to all learners. If you haven’t heard of CAST and UDL, you will soon. CAST is increasingly sought out by policy makers, foundations, and educators interested in bringing these groundbreaking ideas and technologies to schools and school districts.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Two Mindsets About Learning

Fundamental to our work is the belief that students who understand their strengths and weaknesses can learn to use strategies to strengthen their strengths and remediate their weaknesses. An article entitled Even Geniuses Work Hard  by Carol S. Dweck, a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, published in the journal Educational Leadership, builds on this belief by looking at how students' approach to learning impacts their academic growth. Dr. Dweck describes two types of students -- those with a 'fixed mindset' who believe their intelligence is an inborn trait and those who have a 'growth mindset' who believe that intelligence is something that can be developed over time.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Dweck and her colleagues have found that these two types of mindsets have an impact on how these students behave in school. Those who have a fixed mindset tend to avoid hard work and situations where they might "look stupid." Since they believe that not doing well in a particular task is a reflection of their fixed intelligence, they do not handle setbacks well. In contrast, students who have a growth mindset tend to value hard work, to appreciate the need to try different methods to achieve success, and face setbacks by looking at ways to overcome them -- a trait often referred to as resilience.

Dr. Carol Dweck

Dr. Dweck's team believes that teachers can do much to foster a growth mindset by how they teach and evaluate students. By looking at situations where individuals who have overcome challenges, teachers can impart a sense of the importance of perseverance. New information presented as a challenge, where students who have not mastered the information get a "not yet" grade, rather than failing, can build appreciation for the learning process rather than a measure of fixed competence. It is an approach to learning that involves understanding one's own mind and learning processes and results in more thoughtful students who value learning for the sake of knowledge and skills gained, not as a test of their intellect. For those who find this entire subject of interest, Dr. Dweck has published a book setting out this approach in depth.