We’ve all heard anecdotes about accomplished people who struggled in school: Albert Einstein failed his first college entrance exam. William Faulkner won a Nobel Prize for Literature without ever having accumulated enough credits to finish high school. And Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts comics had his illustrations rejected by his high school yearbook. Doing well in school is not an absolute prerequisite for later success. Still, teachers naturally want all students to get as much as they can from school. How can we optimize school for students who don’t have the raw intelligence of other students?
Americans tend to view intelligence as a fixed attribute, like eye color. If you win the genetic lottery, you’re smart; but if you lose, you’re not. In China, Japan, and other Eastern countries, intelligence is more often viewed as malleable. If students fail a test or don’t understand a concept, it’s not that they’re stupid-they just haven’t worked hard enough yet. There is some truth in both. Children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work. This belief in the malleable intelligence for students has many implications for classroom teachers and should play a role in how you administer praise and talk to students about their successes and failures.
There is overwhelming evidence that there is a general intelligence. It’s usually called g, short for general intelligence. What exactly is g? It’s not known. People suggest it might be related to the speed or the capacity of working memory, or even that it’s a reflection of how quickly the neurons in our brains can fire. Knowing what underlies g is less important than knowing that g is real. Having a lot of g predicts that we will do well in school and well in the workplace.
Still, if intelligence were all a matter of one’s genetic inheritance, then there wouldn’t be much point in trying to make kids smarter. Instead, we’d try to get students to do the best they could given the genetically determined intelligence they have. We’d also think seriously about trying to steer the not-so-smart kids toward intellectually undemanding tracks in schools, figuring that they are destined for low-level jobs anyway. But that’s not the way things are. Intelligence is malleable. It can be improved.
Slow learners are not dumb. They probably differ little from other students in terms of their potential. This should not be taken to mean that these students can easily catch up. Slow students have the same potential as bright students, but they probably differ in what they know, in their motivation, in their persistence in the face of academic setbacks, and in their self-image as students. I fully believe that these students can catch up, but it must be acknowledged that they are far behind, and that catching up will take enormous effort. How can we help? To help slow learners catch up, we must first be sure they believe that they can improve, and next we must try to persuade them that it will be worth it.
I have several suggestions in my book, including 1) praise effort, not ability; 2) tell students that hard work pays off; and 3) treat failure as a natural part of learning. Points 2 and 3 are nicely made in this You Tube video titled Famous Failures:
Try to create a classroom atmosphere in which failure, while not desirable, is neither embarrassing nor wholly negative. Failure means you’re about to learn something. You’re going to find out that there’s something you didn’t understand or didn’t know how to do. Most important, model this attitude for your students. When you fail-and who doesn’t?-let them see you take a positive, learning attitude.
Tomorrow: Great teachers are story tellers.
Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009) from which this post was adapted.
