Poor Students, Rich Teaching. Eric Jensen

student effort, motivation, and attitudes to succeed. They are all teachable skills.”

      I sometimes hear teachers say things like, “By this grade, they should be able to motivate themselves. If they can’t do it, they’re not going to make it anyway.” If you blame the students, parents, or your circumstances and make every teaching problem someone else’s fault, you’re stuck as a professional and won’t get better. But if you choose to help your students succeed, you’ll bravely hold up a mirror. The mirror reminds all of us, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” The achievement mindset shows that when the conditions are right every one of us can and will achieve.

      Think about your current approach to students’ success and failures. When students succeed, you’ll want to consistently attribute it to their preparation, effort, planning, strategies, focus, positive attitude, and persistence—elements under a student’s control. Therefore, when students fail, avoid using comfort words for failure, like “You tried so hard” or “At least you have other strengths.” These are detrimental, and when you use phrases like these, it lowers the student’s expectations of himself or herself, motivation drops, and the student actually does worse (Rattan, Good, & Dweck, 2012).

      The achievement mindset is a way to combat these detrimental statements. It’s a combination of Carol Dweck’s (2008) growth mindset, Daniel Pink’s (2009) drive mindset, Angela Duckworth’s (Robertson-Kraft & Duckworth, 2014) and Paul Tough’s (2012) grit mindset, and my own work. Yes, I do stand humbly on the shoulders of giants. Each of these mindsets is powerful, but when combined with each other and with highly effective classroom strategies, your success is almost ensured. After all, when students are already motivated, it has a solid effect size of 0.48 on achievement (Hattie, 2009). In the following chapters, you’ll see how to boost that number.

       A Hard Look at the Evidence

      Your students’ brains are designed to respond to environmental stimuli (Draganski et al., 2004; Lee et al., 2014; May et al., 2007; Stewart et al., 2003). When you introduce new stimuli, the brain responds. So, when you introduce a different mindset in the right way, students can learn it (Job, Walton, Bernecker, & Dweck, 2015).

      The teacher’s mindset is a critical approach in the art of getting students to succeed (Elliot & Dweck, 2005). In fact, even more than IQ, socioeconomic status, or reading ability, the teacher’s mindset predicts student success (Tough, 2012). The mindsets of struggling teachers commonly create a stifling stranglehold on student achievement. Many teachers unconsciously use outdated methods, such as behaviorism, social class, race, or IQ, as a biasing limiter on their own expectations, which then influences their students (Amodio et al., 2004; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1992). But you can be different. You can change your approach from one that uses weak responses such as rewards, adverse consequences, or shallow praise to one that identifies invisible motivators, fosters growth mindsets, and drops the labels.

       Learn the Invisible Motivators

      A more contemporary approach to education reveals that to motivate students, you’ll want to start paying attention to and digging into how you shape students’ achievement mindsets. Why? Build the mindsets, and you’ll get better achievement (Cimpian, Arce, Markman, & Dweck, 2007; Grant & Dweck, 2003; R. Jackson, 2011).

      The fact is, our brain is designed to pick up countless social, physical, and linguistic cues. In some cases, it is the aggregate of factors that you use that makes the miracle happen. Every one of these factors can be a tipping point for student energy, motivation, and effort. Although I won’t go deeply into each of the following five factors, and you learn about many other relevant motivators in upcoming chapters, they do matter a great deal: (1) Approach, frame, and define the task appropriately, (2) manage the self-talk from you and the student, (3) provide core background subskills needed for the task, (4) identify stereotype threats and remove them, and (5) frame failures so students grow from them.

      In the next few chapters, you’ll learn specific strategies to embrace several of these elements to begin the shift in classroom motivation.

       Foster a Growth Mindset

      Put simply, an achievement mindset is teachable. Lisa Blackwell, Kali Trzesniewski, and Carol Dweck’s (2007) two-year longitudinal study examines two groups of students. One group fostered a growth mindset (students were told intelligence is malleable, not fixed), and another group fostered a fixed mindset (students were told research confirms intelligence is stable). Students with a growth mindset outperformed the other group on test scores and had more effort and interest over three times as often. Figure P2.1 (page 40) shows differences between these two groups: having a growth mindset influences scores by 4 percent two years after intervention.

Figure P2.1: Middle school mathematics mindset influences scores.

      Another study shows that early skill development in disadvantaged students leads to more motivation and a large percentage of students succeeding later in life, in regard to school achievement, employment, advanced degrees, and home ownership (Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron, & Shonkoff, 2006).

      Alternatively, what hurts performance is the effect of stereotype threat—when students feel stereotyped due to religious, ethnic, or gender bias. This bias can cripple a student’s academic achievement scores. Ultimately, it is the unresolved emotions (fear, anger, disgust, sadness, or so on) within a student that hinder the cognitive capacity, resulting in lower scores (Mangels, Good, Whiteman, Maniscalco, & Dweck, 2012).

       Drop the Labels

      Motivation is rarely in the pep talk category. It is actually a carefully targeted message, spoken with love, that pulls out of each student his or her deepest drive to move forward. I am grateful for the guidance from Yvette Jackson (2011) on this matter. For example, drop the following labels from your vocabulary.

      • Minority students: Latino, African American, and Asian students make up 50.3 percent of U.S. public K–12 classrooms (Maxwell, 2014). Therefore, they are the majority school population. Calling these students minorities implies they have less power. Use persons or people of color, or use the name for the ethnicity you are referring to, such as African American.

      • Low achievers or low students: These terms imply some sort of deficit when the truth is that the student may have had underperforming teachers for several years. A student may “underperform” with certain teachers as compared to the district mean, if that’s your reference point.

      • Disadvantaged or disabled students: Students from poverty are more likely to be school dependent for their enrichment, and many are inappropriately labeled as disabled when, in fact, they have poverty-related differences, such as stress disorders, or unaware teachers.

       A Look Ahead

      The upcoming chapters dig into three of the most effective achievement boosters of all time. There is no ascending or descending order of importance. In fact, these ideas play off each other with a synergistic effect.

      1. Set gutsy goals.

      2. Give fabulous feedback.

      3. Persist with grit.

      Be patient in building the class campfire of energy. Every spark you bring to the classroom campfire will build the student fires of desire. The content you teach might remain the same; however, the circumstances for learning, your context, and your strategies can create highly motivated students, if you know how to do it. Get psyched!

      CHAPTER 4

      SET GUTSY GOALS

      What would you predict is the greatest single contributing factor to student achievement? Would you say parental support, genes, or school quality? Would you