What's The Message?

There’s an important lesson I learned while taking a Research for Better Teaching Course. RBT (which heads up The Skillful Teacher course – highly recommended if you’ve never taken it!) believes there are a few key messages we must deliver to our students:

This is important.

You can do this.

I’m not giving up on you.

Sounds simple, right? But so, so powerful.

A couple weeks ago, my husband and I were listening to some TED talks on NPR centered around education (yes, I’ve turned my husband into an education junkie like myself – he was the one who actually suggested we listen!). Two of these stories in particular really struck me because they reminded me of the above messages and just how powerful they can be.

Here’s a summary of the first:

An education scholar in India was conducting a study on just how much children will teach themselves when presented with a challenge (you’re going to have to forgive my lack of specifics here – we listened to this in the car, and I only had a napkin to jot my notes down on!). After he plunked down a computer in the middle of a remote Indian village and discovered that children were teaching themselves English just to be able to use the computer, he began adding challenges. At one point, he asked the children (we’re talking elementary school-aged) to research and make some conclusions about some pretty complicated aspects of DNA (and trust me, he was not “dumbing” anything down; he was using what seemed to me to be college-level language and questions with these kids). Once he presented them with this challenge, they were on their own. After seeing that they immediately dug in, he soon asked a local 20 year old girl – with no background or interest in DNA – to just hang out with them while they worked on their research. She wasn’t to guide or teach them in anyway, but was to act, as the scholar put it, as “the Granny” – simply standing behind or beside the children and making statements like, “Wow! You know how to do that?,” “You can do that type of research on this computer?,” “I’m so impressed,” etc. What the scholar found was that this worked! Although she wasn’t able to provide any sort of instruction or help, just her words of praise and encouragement allowed the children to move further along with their research and findings.

[Note: In NO WAY I am suggesting that students don’t need us to teach them. I’m merely pointing out what a long way certain messages can go to help our students achieve.]

Here’s story #2:

You may have seen video footage of this TED talk before. A beautifully sweet, instantly likeable, grandmotherly teacher speaks about some of her approaches in the classroom through her years in education, the message always that she is not giving up on her students and will not allow them to give up on themselves.

My favorite part of her talk is when she describes how she marks a grade on a 20 question quiz. One of her students got 18 of the 20 questions wrong. But, on his paper, instead of writing -18, she wrote +2. Why?

Because -18 is insurmountable. Any student looking at that would instantly feel hopeless and may very likely just give up. But +2 gives some hope. At least that student is now presented with something positive; at least the focus is now on the fact that he got 2 right.

She describes how the student would ask, “Is this an F?,” to which she would reply that yes, it was. But her ability to get the student to focus on the +2 as a starting place for improvement instead of on the -18 as a starting place for giving up is noteworthy. And, I’d say, effective.

As educators, we hold a lot of power. What we say, how we say it, what we write on students’ papers and quizzes and tests – all of this can have a huge impact on our students. We need to consider our messages carefully, and be sure they have a positive impact on the growth of our students and their learning.