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This article explains the benefit of bringing play into high school classes and shares resources. This article is impactful to me because it reminds me how important play is. Teenagers are still just kids navigating the world. I need to include play in as many lessons as possible. I need to include opportunities for free choice, invention, designing, creativity, and problem-based learning. I want to implement these features as much as possible.

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How to Bring Playfulness to High School Students | KQED

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Play is often the domain of young children, but as those kids become teens, learning playfully maintains its importance, especially as academics and competitive sports take over.

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To have a brave classroom means students can share difficult or heavy things with each other and others will be able to acknowledge and work through difficult feelings towards said difficult thing. In the classroom, bravery must go both ways. The giver and the receiver must both be willing to be brave. Sharing and listening to hard things. Not everything shared in a class will be agreeable or comfortable to all. By establishing a brave classroom discussion can be more open and real. This article also gives advice on how to set it up and possible guidelines for a brave classroom. I feel a brave class is a good stepping stone for CRP and any social justice studies.

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In fostering inclusive, equitable and safe schools, we encourage educators to develop group guidelines for respect and safety in the classroom. These classroom guidelines can be created in a variety of ways and the list typically includes recommendations such as: share air time, actively listen, show empathy, respect confidentiality, participate fully, assume good will, be sensitive to feelings, and others. However, there is often a need to go further and frame guidelines around the concept of bravery instead of safety.

Why brave vs. safe?

There are a few reasons for this. While these group agreements work for some, they don't always help everyone feel safe, respected or included. For example, people of color and/or those who are members of marginalized groups may want to share real and sometimes harsh testimony about their experiences, something they might need to do in order to feel included and be able to participate. They may want to caucus with others in their same identity group in order to feel safe. Or, they may feel that being able to challenge others' bias is what is necessary to build empathy. Therefore, what they require to feel safe may not subscribe to the typical list of guidelines. In addition, sometimes when those who feel marginalized express strong feelings and ideas, the people in majority and/or power groups sometimes say they feel "unsafe."

In diverse groups and especially when the goal is equity and safety for all, it is important to be aware that the word "safety" is open to interpretation and how it is understood depends on the person. This means people have different ideas about what it means to "feel safe," "assume good will," "participate fully," etc. These different perspectives may be attributed to whether one is part of a marginalized or majority group in school or society.

One example that illustrates this is the concept of "assuming good will." This may seem like a guideline everyone can agree to. However, if you belong to a marginalized group that has been harmed in the past by these conversations-by other students'/participants intent or impact-you may not be able to assume good will. In fact, it may be safer to assume the opposite or at least be neutral about trusting that there is positive intent on the part of others.

Brave is defined as: "To have or show physical, emotional or moral strength in the face of difficulty, danger or fear." When you're brave, you do something that is hard for you. In a classroom or group, bravery goes both ways-giving and receiving. This means taking a risk to say something that is difficult or scary. It is also brave to listen fully and hear hard things that people may tell you. A brave space is one in which we accept that we will feel uncomfortable and maybe even defensive when exploring issues of bias, injustice and oppression. A brave space is one in which we take risks, doing so with care and compassion.

Strategy for setting up brave guidelines in your classroom

Ask students to define brave. You can use the definition above ("to have or show physical, emotional or moral strength in the face of difficulty, danger or fear") or come up with one that works for you and your students.

Have students close their eyes and think of a time they felt brave; then ask them to share some of the images, thoughts, feelings and behaviors that came to mind. Alternatively (especially for younger students), you can have them draw something that reflects a time they felt brave.

Have students talk with a partner (or share in concentric circles, if time permits) asking students to respond to the following prompts:

What does bravery mean to you?

When was the last time you felt brave in school?

What do you need to feel brave in this classroom?

Have students share their thoughts aloud or on post-it notes that you can hang somewhere in the classroom for all to see. From these conversations and shared thoughts, have students come up with a list of guidelines for being brave in the classroom.

Make sure everyone agrees with the guidelines; you can get verbal agreement or have everyone sign a pledge or a classroom poster that lists the guidelines.

Possible guidelines for brave classrooms
(Keep in mind that it's ideal that the list is generated by the group.)

1. Be open to different and multiple viewpoints and perspectives, especially those that differ from yours.

2. If people share experiences and feelings that are different or unfamiliar to you, show respect by taking it seriously and understand the impact of your response.

3. Explore, recognize and acknowledge your privilege.

4. Even if you are uncomfortable or unsure, contribute and take risks.

5. Make space by sharing speaking time; try to speak after others who have not spoken.

6. Listen actively, even and especially when people say things that are difficult to hear.

7. View the candor of others as a gift.

8. Find ways to challenge others with respect and care and be open to challenging your own points of view.

9. Work hard not to be defensive if people challenge what you say or the impact of your words.

10. Commit to confidentiality and not disclosing what people say; at the same time, take responsibility for sharing important messages and themes outside the group/class. One way to think about this is: "stories stay, lessons leave."

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Moving from Safe Classrooms to Brave Classrooms

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In fostering inclusive, equitable and safe schools, we encourage educators to develop group guidelines for respect and safety in the classroom. These classroom guidelines can be created in a variety of ways and the list typically includes recommendations such as: share air time, actively listen, show empathy, respect confidentiality, participate fully, assume good will, be sensitive to feelings, and others.

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This article explains what the opportunity gap is and how to fix it, by starting early. We need to lay a strong education foundation for all students, no matter how much they have. A quote that stood out to me was, “every American will not go to college. But all our children should be given an equitable chance to be prepared for college”. Many of my students will be at a huge academic disadvantage. I need to do my part to help raise these kids up and close the opportunity gap where I can.

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Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education

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In this op-ed, Prudence Carter and Kevin Welner ask, why do we ignore that poverty is what produces the achievement gap?

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Intrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from within. Extrinsic motivation is from outside sources. Both can be effective, but you need to know when and how to use them. It is important that I know how to motivate my students properly so I can help them develop and engage fully in their learning. I need to be aware of why a student is motivated in order to help them continue to grow. If they are already interested in a task, for example, I will just let them be to not disrupt and ruin their intrinsic motivation.

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Why do we do the things we do? What drives our behavior? Psychologists have proposed different ways of thinking about motivation, including looking at whether motivation arises from outside (extrinsic) or inside (intrinsic) an individual.

Mental Health in the Workplace Webinar
On May 19, 2022, Verywell Mind hosted a virtual Mental Health in the Workplace webinar, hosted by Amy Morin, LCSW. If you missed it, check out this recap to learn ways to foster supportive work environments and helpful strategies to improve your well-being on the job.
Researchers have found that each type has a different effect on a person's behavior and pursuit of goals. To better understand the influence of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on human behavior, it will help to learn how each type works.

What Is Extrinsic Motivation?

Extrinsic motivation is when we are motivated to perform a behavior or engage in an activity because we want to earn a reward or avoid punishment.﻿﻿ You will engage in behavior not because you enjoy it or because you find it satisfying, but because you expect to get something in return or avoid something unpleasant.

What Is Intrinsic Motivation?

Intrinsic motivation is when you engage in a behavior because you find it rewarding. You are performing an activity for its own sake rather than from the desire for some external reward. The behavior itself is its own reward.﻿﻿

Extrinsic Motivation

Participating in a sport to win awards

Cleaning your room to avoid being reprimanded by your parents

Competing in a contest to win a scholarship

Studying because you want to get a good grade

Intrinsic Motivation

Participating in a sport because you find the activity enjoyable

Cleaning your room because you like tidying up

Solving a word puzzle because you find the challenge fun and exciting

Studying a subject you find fascinating

Press Play for Advice On Staying Motivated

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast shares how to stay motivated and focused even when you don't want to. Click below to listen now.

Follow Now: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Google Podcasts

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation: Which Is Best?

Extrinsic motivation arises from outside of the individual while intrinsic motivation comes from within. Research has shown that each type has a different effect on human behavior.﻿﻿

Studies have demonstrated that offering excessive external rewards for an already internally rewarding behavior can reduce intrinsic motivation-a phenomenon known as the overjustification effect.

For example, in a 2008 study, children who were rewarded for playing with a toy they had already expressed interest in playing with became less interested in the item after being externally rewarded.﻿﻿

This is not to suggest that extrinsic motivation is a bad thing-it can be beneficial in some situations. For example, extrinsic motivation can be particularly helpful when a person needs to complete a task that they find unpleasant.

Additionally, external rewards can:

Be a source of feedback to let people know when their performance has achieved a standard that is deserving of reinforcement

Induce interest and participation in an activity an individual was not initially interested in

Motivate people to acquire new skills or knowledge (once these early skills have been learned, people might become more intrinsically motivated to pursue an activity)

Extrinsic motivators should be avoided in situations where:

An individual already finds the activity intrinsically rewarding

Offering a reward might make a "play" activity seem more like "work"

When to Use External Rewards

Motivate a person to learn something new

Make a person more interested in an activity that they are not interested in

Provide feedback to people to let them know their performance is worthy of recognition

When Not to Use External Rewards

A person is already interested in the topic, task, or activity

Offering a reward would make the activity feel like "work" instead of "play"

When to Use Extrinsic Motivation

Most people assume that intrinsic motivation is best, but it is not always possible in every situation. Sometimes a person simply has no internal desire to engage in an activity. Offering excessive rewards can be problematic as well.

However, when they are used appropriately, extrinsic motivators can be a useful tool. For example, extrinsic motivation can get people to complete a work task or school assignment that they are not interested in.

Researchers have arrived at three primary conclusions regarding extrinsic rewards and their influence on intrinsic motivation:

1. Intrinsic motivation will decrease when external rewards are given for completing a particular task or only doing minimal work.﻿﻿ If parents heap lavish praise on their child every time they complete a simple task, the child will become less intrinsically motivated to perform that task in the future.

2. Praise can increase internal motivation. Researchers have found that offering positive praise and feedback when people do something better than others can improve intrinsic motivation.﻿﻿

3. Unexpected external rewards do not decrease intrinsic motivation.﻿﻿ If you get a good grade on a test because you enjoy learning about a subject and the teacher decides to reward you with a gift card to your favorite pizza place, your underlying motivation for learning about the subject will not be affected. However, rewarding in this situation needs to be done with caution because people will sometimes come to expect rewards.

How Do Intrinsic Motivation and Extrinsic Motivation Influence Learning?

Both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation play a significant role in learning. Experts have argued that education's traditional emphasis on external rewards (such as grades, report cards, and gold stars) undermines any existing intrinsic motivation that students might have.

Others have suggested that extrinsic motivators help students feel more competent in the classroom, which in turn enhances their intrinsic motivation.﻿﻿

"A person's interest often survives when a reward is used neither to bribe nor to control but to signal a job well done, as in a "most improved player" award. If a reward boosts your feeling of competence after doing good work, your enjoyment of the task may increase.

Rewards, rightly administered, can motivate high performance and creativity. And extrinsic rewards (such as scholarships, admissions, and jobs that often follow good grades) are here to stay."

-David G. Meyers, Psychology: Eighth Edition in Modules

A Word From Verywell

Both extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation drive human behavior. There are several key differences between motivation that comes from external rewards and the kind that is driven by an individual's genuine interest, including the influence of each type on a person's behavior and the situations in which each type will be most effective.

Understanding how each type of motivation works and when it is likely to be useful can help people perform tasks (even when they do not want to) and improve their learning.

Additional Reading

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Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation: What's the Difference?

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Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation can impact behavior in different ways. Learn the differences between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

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1 in 6 high school students have seriously considered suicide and 1 in 13 have actually made and attempt. As a teacher, I can be the difference between a child committing suicide or not. I am a trusted adult who, with proper actions, can help save lives. Suicide is preventable and this article has amazing resources I can use that may help me save a life one day.

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Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a key part of our development and learning. SEL can help my students develop skills that will help their whole life long. SEL can promote equity in my class and the world. SEL can be a practice I am constantly teaching my students. I want my kids to be prepared to interact with the world around them and be successful and happy. SEL can help get them there.

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We define social and emotional learning (SEL) as an integral part of education and human development. SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.

SEL advances educational equity and excellence through authentic school-family-community partnerships to establish learning environments and experiences that feature trusting and collaborative relationships, rigorous and meaningful curriculum and instruction, and ongoing evaluation. SEL can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools and contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities.

New to Social and Emotional Learning? Start here (2 min. read).

Think of a young person in your life. What skills will they need to achieve their hopes and dreams?

Chances are, you just named social and emotional skills - like staying motivated, communicating effectively, practicing curiosity, and working with others to solve problems. Social and emotional learning, or SEL, helps develop the skills we need for life.
Hear why students, parents, and educators want SEL in schools. Here are 3 things to know about social and emotional learning:

1. Social and emotional learning is a foundation for many of our most pressing priorities: SEL helps young people - and adults - learn and practice skills that set them up for academic success, fulfilling careers, healthy relationships, and responsible civic engagement.

2. The research is clear: Social and emotional learning in schools leads to positive outcomes, including better academic performance, and decreases in stress and anxiety.

3. There's no one-size-fits-all approach: Social and emotional learning brings families, schools, and communities together to make sure every child has caring relationships and what they need to learn, grow, and thrive.

Subscribe now for our expertly curated 3-part email series delivered straight to your inbox. We'll roundup the key facts from our website on SEL is, it matters, and it shows up in schools.

By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: . You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact

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SEL can help all young people and adults thrive personally and academically, develop and maintain positive relationships, become lifelong learners, and contribute to a more caring, just world.

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Feedback is so important to get students to the milestones they need to hit. In order to give effective feedback, it should be "goal-referenced; tangible and transparent; actionable; user-friendly (specific and personalized); timely; ongoing; and consistent". When I give feedback to my students, I want them to already know what I will be looking for. From start to finish we should have clear, consistent, and personalized feedback. This will ultimately get my students to hit their academic goals.

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Vol. 70

No. 1

Abstract

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

Feedback Essentials

Progress Toward a Goal

"But There's No Time!"

Advice, evaluation, grades-none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback-and how can it improve learning?

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Abstract

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

Feedback Essentials

Progress Toward a Goal

"But There's No Time!"

Who would dispute the idea that feedback is a good thing? Both common sense and research make it clear: Formative assessment, consisting of lots of feedback and opportunities to use that feedback, enhances performance and achievement.

Yet even John Hattie (2008), whose decades of research revealed that feedback was among the most powerful influences on achievement, acknowledges that he has "struggled to understand the concept" (p. 173). And many writings on the subject don't even attempt to define the term. To improve formative assessment practices among both teachers and assessment designers, we need to look more closely at just what feedback is-and isn't.

What Is Feedback, Anyway?

The term feedback is often used to describe all kinds of comments made after the fact, including advice, praise, and evaluation. But none of these are feedback, strictly speaking.

Basically, feedback is information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal. I hit a tennis ball with the goal of keeping it in the court, and I see where it lands-in or out. I tell a joke with the goal of making people laugh, and I observe the audience's reaction-they laugh loudly or barely snicker. I teach a lesson with the goal of engaging students, and I see that some students have their eyes riveted on me while others are nodding off.

Here are some other examples of feedback:

A friend tells me, "You know, when you put it that way and speak in that softer tone of voice, it makes me feel better."

A reader comments on my short story, "The first few paragraphs kept my full attention. The scene painted was vivid and interesting. But then the dialogue became hard to follow; as a reader, I was confused about who was talking, and the sequence of actions was puzzling, so I became less engaged."

A baseball coach tells me, "Each time you swung and missed, you raised your head as you swung so you didn't really have your eye on the ball. On the one you hit hard, you kept your head down and saw the ball."

Note the difference between these three examples and the first three I cited-the tennis stroke, the joke, and the student responses to teaching. In the first group, I only had to take note of the tangible effect of my actions, keeping my goals in mind. No one volunteered feedback, but there was still plenty of feedback to get and use. The second group of examples all involved the deliberate, explicit giving of feedback by other people.

Whether the feedback was in the observable effects or from other people, in every case the information received was not advice, nor was the performance evaluated. No one told me as a performer what to do differently or how "good" or "bad" my results were. (You might think that the reader of my writing was judging my work, but look at the words used again: She simply played back the effect my writing had on her as a reader.) Nor did any of the three people tell me what to do (which is what many people erroneously think feedback is-advice). Guidance would be premature; I first need to receive feedback on what I did or didn't do that would warrant such advice.

In all six cases, information was conveyed about the effects of my actions as related to a goal. The information did not include value judgments or recommendations on how to improve. (For examples of information that is often falsely viewed as feedback, see "Feedback vs. Advice" above and "Feedback vs. Evaluation and Grades" on p. 15.)

Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning (see Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Hattie, 2008; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Compare the typical lecture-driven course, which often produces less-than-optimal learning, with the peer instruction model developed by Eric Mazur (2009) at Harvard. He hardly lectures at all to his 200 introductory physics students; instead, he gives them problems to think about individually and then discuss in small groups. This system, he writes, "provides frequent and continuous feedback (to both the students and the instructor) about the level of understanding of the subject being discussed" (p. 51), producing gains in both conceptual understanding of the subject and problem-solving skills. Less "teaching," more feedback equals better results.

Feedback Essentials

Whether feedback is just there to be grasped or is provided by another person, helpful feedback is goal-referenced; tangible and transparent; actionable; user-friendly (specific and personalized); timely; ongoing; and consistent.

1. Goal-Referenced

Effective feedback requires that a person has a goal, takes action to achieve the goal, and receives goal-related information about his or her actions. I told a joke-why? To make people laugh. I wrote a story to engage the reader with vivid language and believable dialogue that captures the characters' feelings. I went up to bat to get a hit. If I am not clear on my goals or if I fail to pay attention to them, I cannot get helpful feedback (nor am I likely to achieve my goals).

Information becomes feedback if, and only if, I am trying to cause something and the information tells me whether I am on track or need to change course. If some joke or aspect of my writing isn't working -a revealing, nonjudgmental phrase-I need to know.

Note that in everyday situations, goals are often implicit, although fairly obvious to everyone. I don't need to announce when telling the joke that my aim is to make you laugh. But in school, learners are often unclear about the specific goal of a task or lesson, so it is crucial to remind them about the goal and the criteria by which they should self-assess. For example, a teacher might say,

The point of this writing task is for you to make readers laugh. So, when rereading your draft or getting feedback from peers, ask, How funny is this? Where might it be funnier?

As you prepare a table poster to display the findings of your science project, remember that the aim is to interest people in your work as well as to describe the facts you discovered through your experiment. Self-assess your work against those two criteria using these rubrics. The science fair judges will do likewise.

2. Tangible and Transparent

Any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but also tangible results related to the goal. People laugh, chuckle, or don't laugh at each joke; students are highly attentive, somewhat attentive, or inattentive to my teaching.

Even as little children, we learn from such tangible feedback. That's how we learn to walk; to hold a spoon; and to understand that certain words magically yield food, drink, or a change of clothes from big people. The best feedback is so tangible that anyone who has a goal can learn from it.

Alas, far too much instructional feedback is opaque, as revealed in a true story a teacher told me years ago. A student came up to her at year's end and said, "Miss Jones, you kept writing this same word on my English papers all year, and I still don't know what it means." "What's the word? " she asked. "Vag-oo," he said. (The word was vague!)

Sometimes, even when the information is tangible and transparent, the performers don't obtain it-either because they don't look for it or because they are too busy performing to focus on the effects. In sports, novice tennis players or batters often don't realize that they're taking their eyes off the ball; they often protest, in fact, when that feedback is given. (Constantly yelling "Keep your eye on the ball!" rarely works.) And we have all seen how new teachers are sometimes so busy concentrating on "teaching" that they fail to notice that few students are listening or learning.

That's why, in addition to feedback from coaches or other able observers, video or audio recordings can help us perceive things that we may not perceive as we perform; and by extension, such recordings help us learn to look for difficult-to-perceive but vital information. I recommend that all teachers videotape their own classes at least once a month. It was a transformative experience for me when I did it as a beginning teacher. Concepts that had been crystal clear to me when I was teaching seemed opaque and downright confusing on tape-captured also in the many quizzical looks of my students, which I had missed in the moment.

3. Actionable

Effective feedback is concrete, specific, and useful; it provides actionable information. Thus, "Good job!" and "You did that wrong" and B+ are not feedback at all. We can easily imagine the learners asking themselves in response to these comments, What specifically should I do more or less of next time, based on this information? No idea. They don't know what was "good" or "wrong" about what they did.

Actionable feedback must also be accepted by the performer. Many so-called feedback situations lead to arguments because the givers are not sufficiently descriptive; they jump to an inference from the data instead of simply presenting the data. For example, a supervisor may make the unfortunate but common mistake of stating that "many students were bored in class." That's a judgment, not an observation. It would have been far more useful and less debatable had the supervisor said something like, "I counted ongoing inattentive behaviors in 12 of the 25 students once the lecture was underway. The behaviors included texting under desks, passing notes, and making eye contact with other students. However, after the small-group exercise began, I saw such behavior in only one student."

Such care in offering neutral, goal-related facts is the whole point of the clinical supervision of teaching and of good coaching more generally. Effective supervisors and coaches work hard to carefully observe and comment on what they observed, based on a clear statement of goals. That's why I always ask when visiting a class, "What would you like me to look for and perhaps count?" In my experience as a teacher of teachers, I have always found such pure feedback to be accepted and welcomed. Effective coaches also know that in complex performance situations, actionable feedback about what went right is as important as feedback about what didn't work.

4. User-Friendly

Even if feedback is specific and accurate in the eyes of experts or bystanders, it is not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it. Highly technical feedback will seem odd and confusing to a novice. Describing a baseball swing to a 6-year-old in terms of torque and other physics concepts will not likely yield a better hitter. Too much feedback is also counterproductive; better to help the performer concentrate on only one or two key elements of performance than to create a buzz of information coming in from all sides.

Expert coaches uniformly avoid overloading performers with too much or too technical information. They tell the performers one important thing they noticed that, if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement ("I was confused about who was talking in the dialogue you wrote in this paragraph"). They don't offer advice until they make sure the performer understands the importance of what they saw.

5. Timely

In most cases, the sooner I get feedback, the better. I don't want to wait for hours or days to find out whether my students were attentive and whether they learned, or which part of my written story works and which part doesn't. I say "in most cases" to allow for situations like playing a piano piece in a recital. I don't want my teacher or the audience barking out feedback as I perform. That's why it is more precise to say that good feedback is "timely" rather than "immediate."

A great problem in education, however, is untimely feedback. Vital feedback on key performances often comes days, weeks, or even months after the performance-think of writing and handing in papers or getting back results on standardized tests. As educators, we should work overtime to figure out ways to ensure that students get more timely feedback and opportunities to use it while the attempt and effects are still fresh in their minds.

Before you say that this is impossible, remember that feedback does not need to come only from the teacher, or even from people at all. Technology is one powerful tool-part of the power of computer-assisted learning is unlimited, timely feedback and opportunities to use it. Peer review is another strategy for managing the load to ensure lots of timely feedback; it's essential, however, to train students to do small-group peer review to high standards, without immature criticisms or unhelpful praise.

6. Ongoing

Adjusting our performance depends on not only receiving feedback but also having opportunities to use it. What makes any assessment in education formative is not merely that it precedes summative assessments, but that the performer has opportunities, if results are less than optimal, to reshape the performance to better achieve the goal. In summative assessment, the feedback comes too late; the performance is over.

Thus, the more feedback I can receive in real time, the better my ultimate performance will be. This is how all highly successful computer games work. If you play Angry Birds, Halo, Guitar Hero, or Tetris, you know that the key to substantial improvement is that the feedback is both timely and ongoing. When you fail, you can immediately start over-sometimes even right where you left off-to get another opportunity to receive and learn from the feedback. (This powerful feedback loop is also user-friendly. Games are built to reflect and adapt to our changing need, pace, and ability to process information.)

It is telling, too, that performers are often judged on their ability to adjust in light of feedback. The ability to quickly adapt one's performance is a mark of all great achievers and problem solvers in a wide array of fields. Or, as many little league coaches say, "The problem is not making errors; you will all miss many balls in the field, and that's part of learning. The problem is when you don't learn from the errors."

7. Consistent

To be useful, feedback must be consistent. Clearly, performers can only adjust their performance successfully if the information fed back to them is stable, accurate, and trustworthy. In education, that means teachers have to be on the same page about what high-quality work is. Teachers need to look at student work together, becoming more consistent over time and formalizing their judgments in highly descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances. By extension, if we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful, students have to be trained to be consistent the same way we train teachers, using the same exemplars and rubrics.

Progress Toward a Goal

In light of these key characteristics of helpful feedback, how can schools most effectively use feedback as part of a system of formative assessment? The key is to gear feedback to long-term goals.

Let's look at how this works in sports. My daughter runs the mile in track. At the end of each lap in races and practice races, the coaches yell out split times (the times for each lap) and bits of feedback ("You're not swinging your arms!" "You're on pace for 5:15"), followed by advice ("Pick it up-you need to take two seconds off this next lap to get in under 5:10!").

My daughter and her teammates are getting feedback (and advice) about how they are performing now compared with their final desired time. My daughter's goal is to run a 5:00 mile. She has already run 5:09. Her coach is telling her that at the pace she just ran in the first lap, she is unlikely even to meet her best time so far this season, never mind her long-term goal. Then, he tells her something descriptive about her current performance (she's not swinging her arms) and gives her a brief piece of concrete advice (take two seconds off the next lap) to make achievement of the goal more likely.

The ability to improve one's result depends on the ability to adjust one's pace in light of ongoing feedback that measures performance against a concrete, long-term goal. But this isn't what most school district "pacing guides" and grades on "formative" tests tell you. They yield a grade against recent objectives taught, not useful feedback against the final performance standards. Instead of informing teachers and students at an interim date whether they are on track to achieve a desired level of student performance by the end of the school year, the guide and the test grade just provide a schedule for the teacher to follow in delivering content and a grade on that content. It's as if at the end of the first lap of the mile race, My daughter's coach simply yelled out, " B+ on that lap!"

The advice for how to change this sad situation should be clear: Score student work in the fall and winter against spring standards, use more pre-and post-assessments to measure progress toward these standards, and do the item analysis to note what each student needs to work on for better future performance.

"But There's No Time!"

Although the universal teacher lament that there's no time for such feedback is understandable, remember that "no time to give and use feedback" actually means "no time to cause learning." As we have seen, research shows that less teaching plus more feedback is the key to achieving greater learning. And there are numerous ways-through technology, peers, and other teachers-that students can get the feedback they need.

So try it out. Less teaching, more feedback. Less feedback that comes only from you, and more tangible feedback designed into the performance itself. And, of course, send me some feedback on this article at gwiggins@authenticeducation.org.

Feedback vs. Advice

› You need more examples in your report.

› You might want to use a lighter baseball bat.

› You should have included some Essential Questions in your unit plan.

These three statements are not feedback; they're advice. Such advice out of the blue seems at best tangential and at worst unhelpful and annoying. Unless it is preceded by descriptive feedback, the natural response of the performer is to wonder, "Why are you suggesting this?"

As coaches, teachers, and parents, we too often jump right to advice without first ensuring that the learner has sought, grasped, and tentatively accepted the feedback on which the advice is based. By doing so, we often unwittingly end up unnerving learners. Students become increasingly insecure about their own judgment and dependent on the advice of experts-and therefore in a panic about what to do when varied advice comes from different people or no advice is available at all.

If your ratio of advice to feedback is too high, try asking the learner, "Given the feedback, do you have some ideas about how to improve?" This approach will build greater autonomy and confidence over the long haul. Once they are no longer rank novices, performers can often self-advise if asked to.

Feedback vs. Evaluation and Grades

› This is a weak paper.

› You got a C on your presentation.

› I'm so pleased by your poster!

These comments make a value judgment. They rate, evaluate, praise, or criticize what was done. There is little or no feedback here-no actionable information about what occurred. As performers, we only know that someone else placed a high or low value on what we did.

How might we recast these comments to be useful feedback? Tip: Always add a mental colon after each statement of value. For example,

"Good work: Your use of words was more precise in this paper than in the last one, and I saw the scenes clearly in my mind's eye."

"This is a weak paper: Almost from the first sentence, I was confused as to your initial thesis and the evidence you provide for it. In the second paragraph you propose a different thesis, and in the third paragraph you don't offer evidence, just beliefs."

You'll soon find that you can drop the evaluative language; it serves no useful function.

The most ubiquitous form of evaluation, grading, is so much a part of the school landscape that we easily overlook its utter uselessness as actionable feedback. Grades are here to stay, no doubt-but that doesn't mean we should rely on them as a major source of feedback.

References

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.

Mazur, E. (2009, January 2). Farewell, lecture? Science, 323, 50-51.

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Advice, evaluation, grades-none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback-and how can it improve learning?

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This article breaks down three commonly used rubrics: holistic, analytic, and single-point. It is important to know about rubrics in order to give solid feedback to my students. I like the single-point rubric the most. It allows for lots of flexibility but also is specific enough for students to follow. I want to make sure I give my students good feedback using strong rubrics.

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Whether you're new to rubrics, or you just don't know their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.
So let's talk about rubrics for a few minutes. What we're going to do here is describe two frequently used kinds of rubrics, holistic and analytic, plus a less common one called the single-point rubric (my favorite, for the record). For each one, we'll look at an example and explore its pros and cons.

Off we go!

A holistic rubric is the most general kind. It lists three to five levels of performance, along with a broad description of the characteristics that define each level. The levels can be labeled with numbers (such as 1 through 4), letters (such as A through F) or words (such as Beginning through Exemplary). What each level is called isn't what makes the rubric holistic - it's the way the characteristics are all lumped together.

Suppose you're an unusually demanding person. You want your loved ones to know what you expect if they should ever make you breakfast in bed. So you give them this holistic rubric:

When your breakfast is done, you simply gather your loved ones and say, "I'm sorry my darlings, but that breakfast was just a 2. Try harder next time."

The main advantage of a holistic rubric is that it's easy on the teacher - in the short run, anyway. Creating a holistic rubric takes less time than the others, and grading with one is faster, too. You just look over an assignment and give one holistic score to the whole thing.

The main disadvantage of a holistic rubric is that it doesn't provide targeted feedback to students, which means they're unlikely to learn much from the assignment. Although many holistic rubrics list specific characteristics for each level, the teacher gives only one score, without breaking it down into separate qualities. This often leads the student to approach the teacher and ask, "Why did you give me a 2?" If the teacher is the explaining kind, he will spend a few minutes breaking down the score. If not, he'll say something like, "Read the rubric." Then the student has to guess which factors had the biggest influence on her score. For a student who really tries hard, it can be heartbreaking to have no idea what she's doing wrong.

Holistic rubrics are most useful in cases when there's no time (or need, though that's hard to imagine) for specific feedback. You see them in standardized testing - the essay portion of the SAT is scored with a 0-6 holistic rubric. When hundreds of thousands of essays have to be graded quickly, and by total strangers who have no time to provide feedback, a holistic rubric comes in handy.

An analytic rubric breaks down the characteristics of an assignment into parts, allowing the scorer to itemize and define exactly what aspects are strong, and which ones need improvement.

So for the breakfast in bed example, an analytic rubric would look like this:

In this case, you'd give your loved ones a separate score for each category. They might get a 3 on Presentation, but a 2 on Food and just a 1 on Comfort. To make feedback even more targeted, you could also highlight specific phrases in the rubric, like, "the recipient is crowded during the meal" to indicate exactly what went wrong.

This is where we see the main advantage of the analytic rubric: It gives students a clearer picture of why they got the score they got. It is also good for the teacher, because it gives her the ability to justify a score on paper, without having to explain everything in a later conversation.

Analytic rubrics have two significant disadvantages, however: (1) Creating them takes a lot of time. Writing up descriptors of satisfactory work - completing the "3" column in this rubric, for example - is enough of a challenge on its own. But to have to define all the ways the work could go wrong, and all the ways it could exceed expectations, is a big, big task. And once all that work is done, (2) students won't necessarily read the whole thing. Facing a 36-cell table crammed with 8-point font is enough to send most students straight into a nap. And that means they won't clearly understand what's expected of them.

Still, analytic rubrics are useful when you want to cover all your bases, and you're willing to put in the time to really get clear on exactly what every level of performance looks like.

A single-point rubric is a lot like an analytic rubric, because it breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria. What makes it different is that it only describes the criteria for proficiency; it does not attempt to list all the ways a student could fall short, nor does it specify how a student could exceed expectations.

A single-point rubric for breakfast in bed would look like this:

Notice that the language in the "Criteria" column is exactly the same as the "3" column in the analytic rubric. When your loved ones receive this rubric, it will include your written comments on one or both sides of each category, telling them exactly how they fell short ("runny eggs," for example) and how they excelled ("vase of flowers"). Just like with the analytic rubric, if a target was simply met, you can just highlight the appropriate phrase in the center column.

If you've never used a single-point rubric, it's worth a try. In 2010, Jarene Fluckiger studied a collection of teacher action research studies on the use of single-point rubrics. She found that student achievement increased with the use of these rubrics, especially when students helped create them and used them to self-assess their work.

The single-point rubric has several advantages: (1) It contains far less language than the analytic rubric, which means students are more likely to read it and it will take less time to create, while still providing rich detail about what's expected. (2) Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended. When using full analytic rubrics, I often find that students do things that are not described on the rubric, but still depart from expectations. Because I can't find the right language to highlight, I find myself hand-writing justifications for a score in whatever space I can find. This is frustrating, time-consuming and messy. With a single-point rubric, there's no attempt to predict all the ways a student might go wrong. Similarly, the undefined "Advanced" column places no limits on how students might stretch themselves. "If the highest level is already prescribed then creativity may be limited to that pre-determined level," says Fluckiger. "Students may surprise us if we leave quality open-ended."

The main disadvantage of single-point rubrics is that using them requires more writing on the teacher's part. If a student has fallen short in many areas, completing that left-hand column will take more time than simply highlighting a pre-written analytic rubric.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

Sources:

Fluckiger, J. (2010). Single point rubric: A tool for responsible student self-assessment. Teacher Education Faculty Publications. Paper 5. Retrieved April 25, 2014 from http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/tedfacpub/5.

Mertler, C. A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 7(25). Retrieved April 30, 2014 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25.
Know Your Terms is my effort to build a user-friendly knowledge base of terms every educator should know. New items will be added on an ongoing basis. If you heard some term at a PD and didn't want to admit you didn't know what it meant, send it to me via the contact form and I'll research it for you.

Keep in touch.
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Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics

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Whether you're new to rubrics, or you've used them for years without knowing their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.

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This article dives into growth vs fixed mindset with an emphasis on a concept called the effort effect. This article was impactful because I see the negative effects of the effort effect in my husband. Things have always come easily to him but when he gets in a slump it takes forever to dig his way back out. I am making him read this. This paper will help my future practice in that I want to have a heavy focus on growth mindset and the wordings I use in my classroom.

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ONE DAY LAST NOVEMBER, psychology professor Carol Dweck welcomed a pair of visitors from the Blackburn Rovers, a soccer team in the United Kingdom's Premier League. The Rovers' training academy is ranked in England's top three, yet performance director Tony Faulkner had long suspected that many promising players weren't reaching their potential. Ignoring the team's century-old motto- arte et labore, or "skill and hard work"-the most talented individuals disdained serious training.

On some level, Faulkner knew the source of the trouble: British soccer culture held that star players are born, not made. If you buy into that view, and are told you've got immense talent, what's the point of practice? If anything, training hard would tell you and others that you're merely good, not great. Faulkner had identified the problem; but to fix it, he needed Dweck's help.

A 60-year-old academic psychologist might seem an unlikely sports motivation guru. But Dweck's expertise-and her recent book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success -bear directly on the sort of problem facing the Rovers. Through more than three decades of systematic research, she has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don't-why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn't ability; it's whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed.

What's more, Dweck has shown that people can learn to adopt the latter belief and make dramatic strides in performance. These days, she's sought out wherever motivation and achievement matter, from education and parenting to business management and personal development.

As a graduate student at Yale, Dweck started off studying animal motivation. In the late 1960s, a hot topic in animal research was "learned helplessness": lab animals sometimes didn't do what they were capable of because they'd given up from repeat failures. Dweck wondered how humans coped with that. "I asked, 'What makes a really capable child give up in the face of failure, where other children may be motivated by the failure?'" she recalls.

At the time, the suggested cure for learned helplessness was a long string of successes. Dweck posited that the difference between the helpless response and its opposite-the determination to master new things and surmount challenges-lay in people's beliefs about why they had failed. People who attributed their failures to lack of ability, Dweck thought, would become discouraged even in areas where they were capable. Those who thought they simply hadn't tried hard enough, on the other hand, would be fueled by setbacks. This became the topic of her PhD dissertation.

Dweck and her assistants ran an experiment on elementary school children whom school personnel had identified as helpless. These kids fit the definition perfectly: if they came across a few math problems they couldn't solve, for example, they no longer could do problems they had solved before-and some didn't recover that ability for days.

Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure-and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, "really supported the idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the helpless and mastery-oriented patterns." Her 1975 article on the topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary psychology.

Attribution theory, concerned with people's judgments about the causes of events and behavior, already was an active area of psychological research. But the focus at the time was on how we make attributions, explains Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross, who coined the term "fundamental attribution error" for our tendency to explain other people's actions by their character traits, overlooking the power of circumstances. Dweck, he says, helped "shift the emphasis from attributional errors and biases to the consequences of attributions-why it matters what attributions people make." Dweck had put attribution theory to practical use.

She continued to do so as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, collaborating with then-graduate student Carol Diener to have children "think out loud" as they faced problem-solving tasks, some too difficult for them. The big surprise: some of the children who put forth lots of effort didn't make attributions at all. These children didn't think they were failing. Diener puts it this way: "Failure is information-we label it failure, but it's more like, 'This didn't work, I'm a problem solver, and I'll try something else.'" During one unforgettable moment, one boy-something of a poster child for the mastery-oriented type-faced his first stumper by pulling up his chair, rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips and announcing, "I love a challenge."

Such zest for challenge helped explain why other capable students thought they lacked ability just because they'd hit a setback. Common sense suggests that ability inspires self-confidence. And it does for a while-so long as the going is easy. But setbacks change everything. Dweck realized-and, with colleague Elaine Elliott soon demonstrated-that the difference lay in the kids' goals. "The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something," Dweck says, and "learning goals" inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than "performance goals."

Students for whom performance is paramount want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which they're sure to shine-and avoid the sorts of experiences necessary to grow and flourish in any endeavor. Students with learning goals, on the other hand, take necessary risks and don't worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn. Dweck's insight launched a new field of educational psychology-achievement goal theory.

Dweck's next question: what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura (daughter of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura), and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, "ability" means different things to the two groups. "If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you-whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable," Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an "incremental theory," and use the term "entity theory" for the fixed mind-set.) The model was nearly complete (see diagram).

Growing up in Brooklyn in the '50s, Dweck did well in elementary school, earning a spot in a sixth-grade class of other high achievers. Not just any spot, it turned out. Their teacher, Mrs. Wilson, seated the students in IQ order and even used IQ scores to dole out classroom responsibilities. Whether Mrs. Wilson meant to or not, she was conveying her belief in fixed intelligence. Dweck, who was in row 1, seat 1, believes Mrs. Wilson's intentions were good. The experience didn't scar her-Dweck says she already had some of the growth mind-set-but she has shown that many students pegged as bright, especially girls, don't fare as well.

Tests, Dweck notes, are notoriously poor at measuring potential. Take a group of adults and ask them to draw a self-portrait. Most Americans think of drawing as a gift they don't have, and their portraits look no better than a child's scribbles. But put them in a well-designed class-as Betty Edwards, the author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, has-and the resulting portraits look so skilled it's hard to believe they're the work of the same "talentless" individuals. The belief that you can't improve stunts achievement.

Culture can play a large role in shaping our beliefs, Dweck says. A college physics teacher recently wrote to Dweck that in India, where she was educated, there was no notion that you had to be a genius or even particularly smart to learn physics. "The assumption was that everyone could do it, and, for the most part, they did." But what if you're raised with a fixed mind-set about physics-or foreign languages or music? Not to worry: Dweck has shown that you can change the mind-set itself.

The most dramatic proof comes from a recent study by Dweck and Lisa Sorich Blackwell of low-achieving seventh graders. All students participated in sessions on study skills, the brain and the like; in addition, one group attended a neutral session on memory while the other learned that intelligence, like a muscle, grows stronger through exercise. Training students to adopt a growth mind-set about intelligence had a catalytic effect on motivation and math grades; students in the control group showed no improvement despite all the other interventions.

"Study skills and learning skills are inert until they're powered by an active ingredient," Dweck explains. Students may know how to study, but won't want to if they believe their efforts are futile. "If you target that belief, you can see more benefit than you have any reason to hope for."

The classroom workshop isn't feasible on a large scale; for one thing, it's too costly. So Dweck and Blackwell have designed a computer-based training module to simulate the live intervention. Their hip multimedia software, called Brainology, is still in development, but thanks to early buzz from a Time magazine article and Dweck's recent book, teachers have begun clamoring for it, one even asking to become a distributor.

Unlike much that passes for wisdom about education and performance, Dweck's conclusions are grounded in solid research. She's no rah-rah motivational coach proclaiming the sky's the limit and attitude is everything; that's too facile. But the evidence shows that if we hold a fixed mind-set, we're bound not to reach as high as we might.

Although much of Dweck's research on mind-sets has taken place in school settings, it's applicable to sports, business, interpersonal relationships and so on. "Lots and lots of people are interested in her work; it touches on so many different areas of psychology and areas outside of psychology," says Stanford psychology professor Mark Lepper, '66, who as department chair in 2004 lured Dweck away from Columbia, where she'd been for 15 years. "The social psychologists like to say she's a social psychologist; the personality psychologists say she's a personality psychologist; and the developmental psychologists say she's a developmental psychologist," Lepper adds.

By all rights, her appeal should transcend academia, says New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, who is well known for making psychological research accessible to the general public. "One of the most popular pieces I ever did relied very heavily on work done by Carol Dweck," he said in a December interview in the Journal of Management Inquiry. "Carol Dweck deserves a big audience. It is criminal if she does not get that audience." Perhaps Mindset will help; it was written for lay readers.

It certainly cemented Tony Faulkner's belief that Dweck could help the Blackburn Rovers soccer team. Unlike the disadvantaged kids in Dweck's middle-school study, the Rovers didn't think they lacked what it took to succeed. Quite the opposite: they thought their talent should take them all the way. Yet both groups' fixed mind-set about ability explains their aversion to effort.

But aren't there plenty of people who believe in innate ability and in the notion that nothing comes without effort? Logically, the two ideas are compatible. But psychologically, explains Dweck, many people who believe in fixed intelligence also think you shouldn't need hard work to do well. This belief isn't entirely irrational, she says. A student who finishes a problem set in 10 minutes is indeed better at math than someone who takes four hours to solve the problems. And a soccer player who scores effortlessly probably is more talented than someone who's always practicing. "The fallacy comes when people generalize it to the belief that effort on any task, even very hard ones, implies low ability," Dweck says.

Her advice for the Rovers rings true for anyone stuck in a fixed mind-set. "Changing mind-sets is not like surgery," she says. "You can't simply remove the fixed mind-set and replace it with the growth mind-set." The Rovers are starting their workshops with recent recruits-their youngest, most malleable players. (Faulkner realizes that players who've already earned millions from being "naturals" have little incentive to reshape their brains.) The team's talent scouts will be asking about new players' views on talent and training-not to screen out those with a fixed mind-set, but to target them for special training.

In his 2002 essay that relied on Dweck's work, Gladwell cited one of her best-known experiments to argue that Enron may have collapsed precisely because of the company's talent-obsessed culture, not despite it. Dweck's study showed that praising children for intelligence, rather than for effort, sapped their motivation ( see sidebar). But more disturbingly, 40 percent of those whose intelligence was praised overstated their scores to peers. "We took ordinary children and made them into liars," Dweck says. Similarly, Enron executives who'd been celebrated for their innate talent would sooner lie than fess up to problems and work to fix them.

Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer says Dweck's research has implications for the more workaday problem of performance management. He faults businesses for spending too much time in rank-and-yank mode, grading and evaluating people instead of developing their skills. "It's like the Santa Claus theory of management: who's naughty and who's nice."

Leaders, too, can benefit from Dweck's work, says Robert Sternberg, PhD '75, Tufts University's dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Sternberg, a past president of the American Psychological Association, says that excessive concern with looking smart keeps you from making bold, visionary moves. "If you're afraid of making mistakes, you'll never learn on the job, and your whole approach becomes defensive: 'I have to make sure I don't screw up.'"

Social psychologist Peter Salovey, '80, MA '80, dean of Yale College and a pioneer in the field of emotional intelligence, says Dweck's ideas have helped him think through a controversy in his field. Echoing an older debate about the malleability of general intelligence, some scholars say emotional intelligence is largely inborn, while others, like Salovey, see it as a set of skills that can be taught and learned. "People say to me all the time, 'I'm not a people person,' or 'I'm not good at managing my emotions,'" unaware that they're expressing a fixed mind-set, Salovey says.

Stanford psychology professor James Gross has begun extending Dweck's work to emotions. In a recent study, Gross and his colleagues followed a group of Stanford undergrads as they made the transition to college life. Those with a fixed mind-set about emotions were less able to manage theirs, and by the end of freshman year, they'd shown poorer social and emotional adjustment than their growth-minded counterparts.

As she approaches the end of her third year at Stanford, Dweck has embraced the challenge of cross-country culture shock in a manner consistent with the growth mind-set. Nearby San Francisco provides her with the benefits of a great city, she says, including a dining scene that rivals New York's; and the University supplies a more cozy sense of community. She's also brought a bit of the New York theater scene with her in the form of her husband, critic and director David Goldman. He founded and directs the National Center for New Plays at Stanford.

At the Association for Psychological Science convention in May, Dweck will give the keynote address. The topic: "Can Personality Be Changed?" Her short answer, of course, is yes. Moreover, holding a growth mind-set bodes well for one's relationships. In a recent study, Dweck found that people who believe personality can change were more likely than others to bring up concerns and deal with problems in a constructive way. Dweck thinks a fixed mind-set fosters a categorical, all-or-nothing view of people's qualities; this view tends to make you ignore festering problems or, at the other extreme, give up on a relationship at the first sign of trouble. (The growth mind-set, though, can be taken too far if someone stays in an abusive relationship hoping her partner will change; as always, the person has to want to change.)

These days, Dweck is applying her model to kids' moral development. Young children may not always have beliefs about ability, but they do have ideas about goodness. Many kids believe they're invariably good or bad; other kids think they can get better at being good. Dweck has already found that preschoolers with this growth mind-set feel okay about themselves after they've messed up and are less judgmental of others; they're also more likely than kids with a fixed view of goodness to try to set things right and to learn from their mistakes. They understand that spilling juice or throwing toys, for example, doesn't damn a kid as bad, so long as the child cleans up and resolves to do better next time. Now Dweck and graduate student Allison Master are running experiments at Bing Nursery School to see if teaching kids the growth mind-set improves their coping skills. They've designed a storybook with the message that preschoolers can go from "bad" one year to better the next. Can hearing such stories help a 4-year-old handle a sandbox setback?

Dweck's students from over the years describe her as a generous, nurturing mentor. She'd surely attribute these traits not to an innate gift, but to a highly developed mind-set. "Just being aware of the growth mind-set, and studying it and writing about it, I feel compelled to live it and to benefit from it," says Dweck, who took up piano as an adult and learned to speak Italian in her 50s. "These are things that adults are not supposed to be good at learning."

Read a January 2010 update on this story.

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ONE DAY LAST NOVEMBER, psychology professor Carol Dweck welcomed a pair of visitors from the Blackburn Rovers, a soccer team in the United Kingdom's Premier League. The Rovers' training academy is ranked in England's top three, yet performance director Tony Faulkner had long suspected that many promising players weren't reaching their potential.

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This article describes five key beliefs that represent the mindset of a an effective teacher. This article impacted me because it shows that a teacher can be a lifelong mentor, they can set their students up for success just by having a proper mindset, and they are the decisive element for the energy in a classroom. This article is also a great jumping off point for more articles on a teachers mindset. This article will impact my practice by helping me to have a better mindset about teaching and my students.