For years, a continuing lament of teachers is students’ ‘learned helplessness.’ I witnessed this time and again: students who eschew pencils on the ground or break them then repeatedly asking for another, treating provided materials with disdain, echoing phrases of “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand,” and waging a war of attrition: who’s going to break first– me or them–when it comes to clarifying instructions or letting them become overly frustrated? (I usually just answer questions with questions, but somehow that doesn’t always inspire.) How could they NOT be getting this?! The learning targets and success criteria are written with great thought and precision every single day: why won’t they look at the board, and tuck into this delicious buffet of knowledge and enlightenment I’ve offered? The old phrase ‘students should work harder than the teacher’ often didn’t happen. Some folks think grit may be the answer, but to date no one knows how to ‘teach grit,’ or even if it should be taught.
If asked what the learning target/success criteria is for any given lesson, students are trained to parrot back what’s on the board, robotically and usually, joyless. If an evaluator is in the room, this signal from teachers to students is an expectation, and often students are pulled away and quietly asked, “What is the learning target today?” as a check-point for the teacher. The locus of control and agency shifts from student engagement to teacher accountability. And the learned helplessness increases.
I now know why.
And I want my colleagues to pay attention and collaborate with me, and see if we can do better.
How we learn to be helpless—and unlearn it
Learned helplessness keeps people in bad jobs, poor health, terrible relationships, and awful circumstances despite how easy it may be to escape. Learn how to defeat this psychological trap, thanks to the work of Martin Seligman.
BY DAVID MCRANEY
Here’s Seligman’s experiment in a nutshell: a box, electric shocks, dogs, and a tone. When the dogs hear the tone, receive a shock, they would jump to the ‘safe’ side. In the second group, they took away the tone, the dogs learned to prepare on their own, and learned to go to the ‘safe’ side. Bring back group one, no tone, and the dogs gave up –whimpered and cried–they learned that without the signal/tone, the dogs had no chance of an ‘epiphany’ or mindset growth.
When Seligman put those three groups in the room with the electric floors and wall, groups one and two quickly learned to jump over the wall when the tone alerted them to incoming shocks. The third group did not. Instead, they curled up on the floor and whimpered. The previous experiment had taught them there was no point in trying to figure out a pattern. It was as if they thought bad things just happen sometimes, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Even though they could have escaped the pain, they didn’t even try.
Could it be in all this talk about growth mindset having students parrot back learning targets is the complete opposite of what we’re asking them to do? Are we asking them to give up, that there is no point in trying to figure out what the purpose of any given lesson is because it’s handed to them?
We need to change things up, but what exactly? I did my own experiment last year, by which I covered up the learning target/success criteria, taught the lesson, and as an exit ticket had students write down what they thought the targets were. Approximately 60% of students were either spot-on (develop an argument as to whether or not aliens exist) or darn close (claim/evidence/reasoning) and about 30% confused it with the performance task (work well in a group/do group work). This happened toward the end of the year, so they had been accustomed to the ‘tone’ of the learning target all year, so that they stopped hearing it. By requiring them to think and reflect, they owned the lesson much more deeply.
Some might argue that learning targets and success criteria show students what happens in ‘the real world.’ Yes and no: depends on which ‘real world.’ Minimum-wage jobs have very strict guidelines and protocols, and do not encourage free-thinking or innovation. If you ask me today the weight and required temperature of a Starbucks’ latte I could probably recall that information. My husband and I were talking about this, and his 25 years of experience in design and UX tell a very different story: if you’re hired by a company in a salaried job, you’d better come prepared to think on your own, and offer your own insights and experience. No one gives you a ‘learning target’ script. This may be one cultural factor which Chinese and Indian educational systems speak of — they are highly trained in routine and computational thinking, but not innovation. Their words, not mine.
And just why is thinking critically so darn important, anyway? The world doesn’t come with warnings. I want my students to be hungry for learning when they come in my classroom, not passive and spoon-fed. I don’t want them to ask ‘why we have a bell?’ when I say I am the one to dismiss them. I want the end of the class to come as a surprise because they were so deep in their work they lost track of time. I have seen this less and less during the past two to three years of the “Learning Target/Success Criteria” regime. We need to spring from our haunches, prepare and adapt. It’s one thing to have drills and escape routes: that provides options. It’s altogether a different beast when we suffer from the notion that nothing we do will affect change. (Including taking down a flag as step one when there are so many other steps to take, too.)
Innovation’s enemy is learned helplessness. All of us need to be ready to jump and move. This has potential for deep implication in the inclusion model classroom, whereas in order to get all students moving forward, some have had years of entrenched learned helplessness and distract the teacher’s energy so that the process and purpose gets stuck in the mental mud.
The learning targets and success criteria should not become the ‘tone” for students to put aside all of their thinking, to passively accept they know the end game, so why play at all? This teacher activity (and observed by evaluators) has taken up way too much discussion and educational space for their return on learning time investment.
I would love your ideas and thoughts: I believe in purpose, I believe in objectives/goals/targets, and assessment and responsiveness. What ways do you keep students from wallowing in learned helplessness?
