Children need to feel challenged in order to grow. In fact, researchers have found that when children don’t feel challenged in a certain activity, they’ll often change the activity to make it challenging.¹Â Young students have a natural desire to learn and to develop new skills; they want to engage in activities that allow them to improve and to excel. While it’s important to keep children safe as they experiment and try out new things, parents and teachers need to be careful not to interfere with important steps in a child’s learning process, even if those steps are difficult, frustrating, or even emotionally painful for the child.

In her blog, “Why It’s Important to Let Your Child Make Mistakes,” research psychologist Dr. Peggy Drexler explains the difference between keeping a child safe and protecting her from necessary failures:

“…[O]ur responsibility is to keep kids unharmed. That doesn’t mean shielding them from all possibility of defeat. It means letting them fail safely.”

She gives a few tips to help parents to accomplish this fine balance (these same tips can also be applied to a classroom setting):

• “Aim to be reliable, but non-interfering.”
• “Involve [the child] in the decision making.”
• “Let [the child] solve her own problems.”

When given the freedom to choose their own paths and the risks they want to take, children will naturally take bold steps forward. It’s important for adults not to dampen that boldness, or else their children might not be fully prepared to be successful, autonomous adults when they’re older.

In a similar blog by Time writer Paul Tough, “Back to School: Why Grit Is More Important Than Good Grades,” Tough makes the argument that school is the perfect environment for learning because students can fail safely. Thinking about grades only, this might not be readily apparent, but there are other educational benefits to consider. Tough explains: “…[W]hat we don’t think about enough is how to help our children build their character — how to help them develop skills like perseverance, grit, optimism, conscientiousness, and self-control, which together arguably do more to determine success than S.A.T. scores or I.Q.”

This idea, that success is more firmly rooted in strength of character than academic achievement, is supported by research. Tough cites a recent study that “found that adults who had experienced little or no adversity growing up were actually less happy and confident than those who had experienced a few significant setbacks in childhood.” If parents (or teachers) try to minimize the amount of difficulty that kids experience in school, however, whether that’s by helping too much with homework or encouraging kids to focus only on subjects they’re good at, these same children will grow up more disadvantaged than if they had only had a mediocre SAT score.

As reported in the Edutopia blog “Experienced Teachers Reflect on Their First Year,” one teacher, when asked what she’d learned that was most important since her first year of teaching, explained her philosophy for challenging children: “Create a learning environment in which students feel comfortable, and they’ll take the risks of making mistakes.” Since kids will seek out challenges of their own accord, it’s important that teachers and parents create an environment, both in the classroom and at home, that will help kids feel comfortable enough to take risks and make mistakes without fear of shame or rejection. This environment needs to be both physically and emotionally safe, free of both safety hazards and put-downs. Once that’s accomplished, and the students feel secure enough to move around and explore, the possibilities are endless.

LifeBound is dedicated to helping students embrace the best that is within themselves through learning what they have to offer the world, to taking the risks to go after what they dream for, to following through with people and actions which can make those dreams a reality. Coaching is one of the tools that can help students learn to understand themselves, solve problems, evaluate options, and move through challenge and difficulty with grace and ease. We conduct coaching training for students and educators who work with students. To learn more, visit www.lifeboundcoaching.com.

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¹Mandigo, James L., and Nicholas L. Holt. “Elementary Students’ Accounts of Optimal Challenge in Physical Education.” Physical Educator 63.4 (Early Winter 2006): 170-183. Academic Search Complete. Web. 6 June 2012.

Many of today’s students are familiar with the option of “extra credit” on an assignment.  Many high school classes give this as an option. Yesterday, I spoke with a professor who works with freshmen at a major state university. He doesn’t believe in “extra credit” because he feels that students should want to do a quality job because it’s important not because they get extra brownie points.   There may be a place and time for extra credit at the college level, but with some caveats.

Many college professors and employers share this professor’s sentiments. When it comes to students or employees going beyond the task at hand in the adult world, it’s a given for competence. Extra credit doesn’t exist. Doing your “extra credit” at work or in college — or having a 110% work ethic — is what’s expected of a stellar student or worker. Your reward for doing extra credit in the real world? Employment. As you show your employer you are an indispensable player on the team, you might get a raise, promotion, or a good letter of recommendation, but these career milestones aren’t points for putting in extra work; they are the reality.

For young children and teens, bribery or compensation might be one way to approach chores, eat the vegetables, or do homework, but as they age, students need to drop the idea that doing an exceptional job or more than is asked of them is anything but the norm. How can K-12 educators and college professors help students realize going beyond — or simply doing your job — in the real world doesn’t always come with an extra reward?  How can we encourage young adults to learn to love the challenge and the reward that doing your best provides?  How can we move from a perspective of constant extrinsic encouragement—a trophy for every child no matter what they accomplish on the playing field—to a more lasting and deeper intrinsic motivation from accomplishing real work through pitfalls, difficulties, and obstacles?

When students and employees put in the work, grow, and contribute, they will get noticed. However, no one will be there to ask them to do the extra work. How can you encourage your students to embrace challenge to get ready for college and the working world? How can your classroom reflect more of these workplace norms that successful grads will encounter  in the real world?   Ask students: who would you rather hire—the person who needs extra credit or the self-starter who enjoys over delivering?  In countries like China, India, Germany, Sweeden, Finland, and Singapore students have the inner drive to succeed.  Will your students be ready to work side by side and stand toe to toe with these students in the global world of work?

Spring break is coming to an end and that’s a sure sign summer vacation will be here before we know it. When students go on summer vacation it is important for them to be mentally challenged. Why?  Students who aren’t engaged in learning activities don’t  retain information learned during the school year and often start the following year behind their counterparts who do grow their brains in the summer.

“All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer,” according to the National Summer Learning Association. Low-income students who aren’t engaged in summer activities typically lose more than two months in reading achievement over the summer.

This summer, as an educator or parent, how can you influence students to adopt a reading culture at home? If you teach, consider sending home a reading list to all your students or lend books from your personal classroom library. As a parent, what can you do to ensure your child has access to books over the summer, or reading groups around popular topics, or writing workshops where they can reflect on what they’ve read? You can take weekly trips to the library where they can check out a bag of books, even those they aren’t sure about. You can also start a book exchange in your neighborhood.

Recently, the Common Core Standards for English/language arts has been adopted by all but four states and requires educators to teach how to read non-fiction literature, as well as fiction. Students might not consider picking up a book about castles, how to bake a pie, or build a watch, but reading informational texts can give them a more fully developed repertoire of reading. Learning how to read informational texts is important for students because it exercises different reading skills. Fiction usually has a beginning, middle, and end, a plot, characters, dialogue, and themes. Nonfiction doesn’t provide the same structure for readers as fiction does, and requires practice — just as everything else does — in order to master it. This summer, you can help younger kids hone these non-fiction reading skills by finding a science blog for kids online or subscribe older kids to magazines like Smithsonian or National Geographic.

How can you personally help promote literacy this summer and fight summer learning losses? At LifeBound, we believe summer reading can change lives. If you work with disadvantaged or impoverished students, ask us about our book donation program for summer reading in the comments or email us at contact@lifebound.com.

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Sources:

“Districts Gear Up for Shift to Informational Texts,” by Catherine Gewertz. 14 March 2012. Education Week. Accessed on 30 March 2012. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/03/14/24informational_ep.h31.html?tkn=VUCFGGxCVWko01hd60UOyi5jZLLaUFRJvVt6&cmp=clp-sb-ascd

The National Summer Learning Association - http://www.summerlearning.org/?page=know_the_facts

One-quarter of high school students drop out every year. Of the students who do graduate, two-fifths leave underprepared for college or career and fifty-seven percent leave not having mastered remedial math, according to a recent Fast Company article.  These statistics are tragic, but anymore, they aren’t shocking. Today, there is a fight for better institutions, educators, leaders, technology, funding, parents, and students. The article goes on to share some statistics that show why the fight is more important than ever.

According to the National Science Foundation, it’s predicted that 80% of the jobs created over the next decade will demand mastery of technology, math, or science. To put this growth in perspective, consider how technology has taken over in the past 10 years. Have you been to a job interview where your computational skills were below what the position required? Over the past 10 years,  the amount of STEM jobs has grown three times greater than non-STEM jobs…and it’s not stopping.

Making STEM education available to students to prepare them for the jobs of the future is easier said than done. Low-income students in Florida are facing a problem that might never cross the minds of their more affluent peers. The students have personal devices, like smartphones, and the school has provided each student with an e-Reader. The problem is that they can’t afford Internet access to use their devices, according to the recent article “Many Low-Income Students Struggle with Lack of Internet at Home,”

Students in California recently raised money to travel to San Francisco and stand up for their technological rights at the Digital Media and Learning conference. In a Mind/Shift article, Tina Barseghian writes, the students made it clear to their listeners: “We demand access to the same technology that privileged students have in order to survive in the working world, to compete in any meaningful way, and to amplify our voices.”

For many school districts, providing outdated or limited technology is not a choice; it’s a result of not having the funding to improve their programs. For many corporations afraid of an innovation crisis, the outdated STEM education students are getting isn’t going to cut it in when today’s students become tomorrow’s workforce. That’s why corporations like Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Target, AT&T, and more are making an investment in their future by donating any where between multimillions to billions of dollars to schools.

However, giving school more money still isn’t the whole answer. “There’s this tendency to think that we can throw money at the problem and fix it. That’s simply not true. We need capacity building–companies sharing their unique resources in order to fill critical gaps,” says Sandi Everlove, interim CEO at a STEM nonprofit.

What could schools do to show big corporations the demands they have? What guidance can be given to corporations to ensure this opportunity to fund STEM programs actually helps today’s students?  How can people from various positions come to the table–professors, K-12 administrators, content providers, politicians,business people, not-for-profit leaders and educational visionaries–to chart the course for our most disadvantaged and  least championed students, teachers and parents in our society?  How can we think as differently about education as Steve Jobs did about computing?  How can we impact this urgent matter today?

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Sources:

“How Corporations Are Helping to Solve the Education Crisis,” by Judah Schiller and Christine Arena. 23 March 2012. Fast Company, Accessed on 23 March 2012. http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679529/how-corporations-are-helping-to-solve-the-education-crisis

“Many Low-Income Students Struggle with Lack of Internet at Home,” by Walter Pacheco. 18 March 2012. Orlando Sentinel. Accessed on 23 March 2012. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-18/business/os-students-without-internet-access-20120318_1_internet-access-digital-textbooks-school-districts

Students Demand the Right to use Technology in Schools,” By Tina Barseghian. 6 March 2012. Mind/Shift. Accessed on 23 March 2012. http://mindshift.kqed.org/2012/03/students-demand-the-right-to-use-technology-in-schools/