Student Success: Genius or Perseverance?

Monday, August 10th 2009 by Andra BrichacekcloseAuthor: Andra Brichacek Name: Andra Brichacek
Email: Abrichacek@iste.org
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When I read the post “To Succeed We Must Fail—A Lot” on Wesley Fryer’s blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, it reminded me of the keynote speech that Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success, gave at NECC ’09 in June. Gladwell said that one thing many successful people have in common is not talent but, as Wes calls it, perseverance.

Although it’s not impossible to build this trait as an adult, as I see it, that’s something that is best learned early in life, at home and at school. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems like kids in the U.S. are falling short in this all-important area. We’ve known for some time that U.S. students are low and falling in the global educational ranks. Is it because we’re not cramming enough facts into their heads, or is it something more basic than that?

According to Gladwell, it’s not an innate ability to do math that makes Asian students, for example, far outperform U.S. students; it’s their willingness to persevere in the face of a difficult math problem until they figure it out, compared with the typical U.S. student’s tendency to give up after just a few minutes of pondering.

So why are U.S. students so lacking in perseverance? Maybe it has something to do with our culture’s idea of what it means to succeed. I recently came across this Psychology Today blog that summarizes research showing that one of the major reasons some students underachieve is a fear of failure. The blogger, Steven Reiss, PhD, pointed out that “since failure hurts less when they do not try, students who are devastated by failure tend to underachieve because they hold back effort.” I think a lot of us can relate to this observation. Personally, some of my biggest “failures” have been those times when I didn’t dare to try because I was worried that I might not succeed. It’s not surprising to me that many students reason, consciously or subconsciously, that trying something new or challenging—in other words, something they’re likely to not succeed at right away—is not worth it if they’re just going to be written off for their mistakes.

Gladwell made the point that for most people, learning follows a circuitous path through many trials and errors. The myth that Western culture seems to be enamored with, however, is the idea of the genius who is so endowed with talent at birth that he or she succeeds spectacularly on the first try. In contrast, most true “masters,” including Bill Gates (to use one of Outliers’ examples), didn’t become masters until they had slogged through about 10,000 hours of trial and error. That’s a lot of perseverance and a lot of mistakes.

This myth of the instant genius has been exacerbated by our celebrity culture, where we and our kids are bombarded 24/7 with airbrushed images of a select few who turn out polished performances without, it might appear to the viewer, any practice or failures along the way. Sure, we hear plenty of stories about the devastating falls of some celebrities and politicians, but the long and arduous path through many mistakes and minor pitfalls is rarely considered sexy enough to get a lot of media play.

Web 2.0 may be the antidote to this phenomenon, however. My teenage son and his friends now spend a lot more time on social networking sites and YouTube than they do watching TV. So instead of a parade of celebrities, they are exposed to a steady diet of comments from their friends, videos of beginning singer-songwriters and budding commentators, and blogs written by thinkers experimenting with ideas. Though I hate to admit it, even reality TV, with its (sometimes overdramatized) depictions of real people, also falls into this category.

But what message are our kids getting at school? Are we somehow propagating the myth of the instant genius in our classrooms? I’d say that as long as we continue to sort kids into high-achieving and low-achieving ranks early in life, and as long as we fill their learning time with rote memorization of “facts” presented by established experts in textbooks with the sole goal of achieving specific numbers on high-stakes standardized tests one time a year, at the expense of the time it would take to let them try out new ideas and think creatively and critically, we’re not giving them the message that it’s OK for learning—and succeeding—to be a messy, hands-on, lifelong process.

According to Gladwell, the priceless reward we all gain for our mistakes is feedback. Every time we fail, we get feedback from others or from ourselves that puts us a little bit closer to success. That’s where 1:1 programs and Web 2.0 offer a big advantage: They allow students to get instant feedback on their work and on their thoughts, from teachers and from peers.

But the truth is, they’ll only want to keep trying if the feedback they receive is constructive rather than dismissive, collaborative rather than competitive. They have to believe that mistakes are not only OK, they’re an important part of the learning process. And that, as long as they keep trying again and getting feedback, after a while—maybe after 10,000 hours—they will succeed.
In that light, I wonder if we can apply the feedback we’ve been receiving for the past decades toward the improvement of the U.S. educational system.

What mistakes have we made, and what can we learn from them? Should we bother with trying to change the black-and-white, all-or-nothing culture of the system as well as its outdated processes? Maybe, rather than pointing fingers, we should focus on collaborating on ways to make the most of this learning process.

(pic from wired.com)

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