Don't Call Your Students Smart

Can one simple line of praise affect how a child will perform in the future? Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her team of researchers discovered that it most certainly can.

In an experiment conducted on 400 fifth-graders, Dweck and her team gave each child a nonverbal IQ test, intentionally easy enough for all the children to be quite successful. After the child finished the test, the researchers told the student his score, along with a single line of praise.

Some children were praised for their intelligence and told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort and told, “You must have worked really hard.” This praise was assigned randomly and not given based on score or performance. 

The researchers went on to give the students their choice of test for the second round. The children were told that one choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first one, but they would learn a lot by attempting the puzzles. They were told the other test was “easy, just like the first.”

The results were astounding. Of the group of students who had been praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those who had been told they were smart, a majority chose the easy test.

Dweck wrote, “When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” If children believe their value comes from their intelligence, they will do anything to continue to look smart and avoid failure.

It gets even more fascinating. In a third round of testing, the fifth-graders had no choice in their test. All of them were given a difficult test, designed for seventh-graders.

Every student failed the test. But not every student had the same reaction to that failure.

Those who had been praised for their effort on the first test were very engaged in the process, trying various tactics to find the answers and finding evident enjoyment in the challenge. On the other hand, those who had been praised for their smarts seemed to assume their failure was evidence they were actually stupid. They fell apart, sweating and miserable.

In a final round of testing, the researchers gave the students tests that were the same difficulty level as the first round had been. It would seem logical that each student would achieve a similar score as the first time they had taken the test.

But again, the results were incredibly interesting—and thought-provoking. Those who had been praised for their effort improved their first score by an average of 30 percent. Those who had been praised for their intelligence did worse than they had initially by about 20 percent.

This is shocking, perhaps even horrifying. It’s almost enough to make a teacher feel terrified to say anything, lest she unintentionally damage her students. But the flip-side is also true: saying the right thing has the potential to boost students’ performance.

Dweck explains it this way, “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

As a teacher, you have the power to build new ways of thinking and talking about intelligence and effort in your classroom. In another study, two groups of students were given the same set of lessons on study habits. However, half of the students were also given a special module about how intelligence is not innate. They looked at pictures of brain scans and learned about how the brain can grow new neurons when challenged.

The students who had learned that intelligence can be developed through hard work clearly improved their study skills and grades. Their teachers, who hadn’t known which students were in which group, could easily identify which students had received training in the value of pushing through difficulty to increase intelligence. They were living proof that it was possible.

You, too, can give your students the gift of this knowledge. Why not take part—or all—of a class period to teach them about the way their brains work? Teach your students about the miracle of neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to grow and change). Explicitly tell them that intelligence is not fixed. They are not stuck with the brain they’re born with. They can work hard at something and change the way their brain is wired.

An analogy that is often helpful for students is comparing the brain to a muscle that must be worked out to grow stronger. Just like other muscles in the body won’t grow significantly stronger without focused effort, the brain needs to be pushed through difficulty in order to grow. “No pain, no gain,” is not only true while working out at the gym.

In addition, here are three other areas you can focus on to shift your students’ patterns of thinking to effort-based instead of intelligence-based.

Normalize Making Mistakes

Every day in a classroom, there are hundreds of opportunities for failure—both big and small. How you as a teacher respond to mistakes is crucial. Work hard to make your classroom a place where making mistakes is as normal and undramatic as possible. Tell your students often that making mistakes is a normal part of learning. If they aren’t making any mistakes, then they aren’t learning anything new.

Encourage students to see failure as a chance to learn and grow. You may find this also necessitates a mindset shift in yourself. It can be easy to overlook mistakes or try to minimize them because that makes life easier for you as the teacher. However, the brain is wired so that in the moments after making a mistake, it is seeking to make sense of the incongruity. Our brains are primed to learn in the aftermath of failure—but not if they are shut down by shame. Normalizing mistakes and helping students learn from them are some of the most valuable learning experiences you can give them.

Promote a Growth Mindset

“Growth mindset” may be a bit of a buzzword in education right now, but it’s for good reason. The self-talk that students allow to fill their brains can make a huge difference. Changing the words they use can be incredibly powerful.

There are many ways you could promote growth mindset in your classroom, whether verbally, on posters, or on small cards each student can keep in their desk to refer to when they need a reminder.

Examples of growth mindset switches you could exemplify for your students might include:

Instead of: I can’t do this.

Say: I can learn how to do this.

Instead of: I give up.

Say: I can try a different strategy.

Instead of: This is too hard.

Say: If I work hard, this will get easier.

Instead of: I’ll never be smart enough to do this.

Say: It might take some time for me to learn how to do this.

Some have discarded growth mindset as psychobabble, but in many ways, it’s an excellent example of how the Devil wants to trap us in lies. And the antidote to lies is the truth.

Celebrate Effort and Hard Work

Your students should know you as someone who recognizes and celebrates hard work. Be on the lookout for moments when students show exceptional effort, and praise them for it. You can even praise the whole class for their effort. For example, after a particularly difficult math lesson, you might say, “Thank you for your hard work this morning. I’m proud of you for pushing through some difficult concepts.”

Celebrating effort can even come out in subtle language shifts. Perhaps your students have been working for weeks on a large project. At the end of the project, you want to celebrate their achievement with a reward of some sort. Instead of saying, “We’re going to have cinnamon rolls to celebrate being done with your projects,” you could say, “We’re going to celebrate all the hard work you poured into your projects.” One celebrates the fact that the task is completed, the other celebrates the hard work the students exhibited through the process. It’s a small shift, but as Dweck’s research showed, small shifts can make a big difference.

When students are struggling to understand a difficult concept, acknowledge that struggle. But follow it up by reminding them that they are capable of understanding; it just might take some hard work to push through their feelings of confusion. Tell them, “I can see that this is difficult for you to understand. But I know that you can get it if you don’t give up. Keep pushing through.”

All of these things may seem unnecessary or extra. However, as the research clearly shows, our brains are powerful, and what we believe about ourselves can have profound impacts on our learning. Give your students a new way of seeing themselves and the world by teaching them to value hard work and effort. The results may astonish you.

Bibliography:

Bronson, Po. “The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids.” New York Magazine, 9 Feb. 2007, nymag.com/news/features/27840/.

Grose, Jessica. “Teach Your Kids to Fail.” The New York Times, 8 Jan. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/parenting/teach-your-kids-to-fail.html.

“Tedtalks: Diana Laufenberg: How to Learn? From Mistakes.” Youtube, 15 Dec. 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up4hFj-jcTY&t=25s.

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash