At Dixons Academies, one of our ‘Big Moves’ is Joy. As the Research School at the centre of our trust, we have provided support to ensure our approaches are informed by the evidence. This is the first post in a series trying to capture some of the key messages.
We use Patrick Lencioni’s critical questions, one of which is: ‘What do we do?’ Our answer? “Within our communities, we work together to establish joyful, rigorous, high performing schools, which maximise attainment, value diversity, develop character and build cultural capital.”
‘Joyful’ and ‘rigorous’ are not mutually exclusive terms, but we do know that some rigorous classrooms might not be joyful, and some seemingly joyful classrooms may not be rigorous. But how do we keep classrooms joyful while still encountering difficulty, and sometimes failure?
Learning is hard, but we can enjoy the process.
Daniel Pink1 has 3 Laws of Mastery:
Mastery is a Pain – it’s hard.
Mastery is a Mindset – how we think about it is important.
Mastery is an Asymptote – we will never reach the end.
Mastery is a pain.
But it’s worth it. Robert and Elizabeth Bjork2 coined the term ‘desirable difficulties’ to describe the counter-intuitive findings that making learning more effortful leads to longer term gains, while feeling harder in the short term. Examples include retrieval, interleaving, spacing and variation.
Success brings joy, but in order to reach it we have to suffer a little. We should talk to our students about the benefits of these desirable difficulties, such as why the struggle of spacing learning beats the comfort of cramming or why retrieving knowledge is more effective than rereading.
Model the struggle: “This is quite difficult, because there are many different steps, but I know that doing this will make it much easier next time. If I give up now, it will be even harder next time.”
We can teach ‘coping strategies’. When students are met with struggle, they can use negative approaches such as giving up or positive ones such as checking for sources of support.
Barry Zimmerman3 sets out the following as qualities of self-regulated learners: Setting goals; using appropriate strategies to attain these goals; monitoring their performance; restructuring their physical and social context; managing time efficiently; self-evaluating; attributing causation to results; adapting future methods. Model explicit strategies for each of these and we can share our own examples of the strategies we use.
Ability is fluid, not fixed. We should attribute success and failure to elements amenable to change e.g. effort, preparation, rather than innate ability. Strategies such as exam wrappers, which ask students to reflect on performance and the connection between preparation, can be helpful.
We should relish difficulty, and talk about this explicitly: “Some people find these kinds of questions difficult, but I think we’re ready to tackle them.”; “If it doesn’t challenge you it doesn’t change you.”
Mastery is an asymptote.
It’s a line on a graph that will never be reached. Because mastery is always out of reach, students may never be satisfied – they’re never going to get there. Consider your role models and heroes. Which of them exemplify striving to get better? Dan Pink references Cezanne and Tiger Woods.
We can consider relative performance – getting better. Help students to compare their performance with themselves rather than others. They won’t always improve, but this is more within their control than the performance of others.
We can promote disciplinary scholarship. They are getting better at the discipline.
We want this struggle to lead to success, but there will sometimes be failure. Peps McCrea4 suggests three ways that we can mitigate the negative emotional impact of failure on students:
Pre-empt failure: communicate that failure and mistakes happen to us all. That way, failure is seen as less of a setback and just part of the process. Reframe failure: celebrate it as an opportunity to learn and get back on track. Failure can actually be very helpful feedback if we see it as making us better. Reattribute failure: attribute it to malleable factors rather than innate qualities.
Joy isn’t effortless, and success isn’t frictionless. As long as we manage how we think about this difficulty, our classrooms can still be joyful places.
1Pink, D. H. (2011) Drive.
2Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), 475 – 479.
3Zimmerman BJ (2002) Becoming a Self-Regulated Learner: An Overview. Theory into Practice 41(2) 64 – 70
4McCrea, P. (2020) Motivated Teaching: Harnessing the science of motivation to boost attention and effort in the classroom.
