CHARACTER

My frustrations:

Teachers seem to be working harder Spoon feeding students Not allowing students to fail Not preparing students for life after

Broughton Hall

Not developing independent learners

Me – Aged 5???

11 Plus

St Malachy’s College

Belfast

O Levels

4 Grade B’s 4 Grade C’s

Aberdeen University

First Class Honours

Me and my Brothers

The importance of Character Why did I not achieve my full

potential before university? Family reasons; lack of confidence; lack of self-control

Why did I do better at university? Developed confidence; my own space; grit; self-control; persistence

WHAT SORT OF BISCUIT ARE YOU?

Always ducking and divingAlways has an excuse why work isn’t

done

A plain biscuit!Doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary –

wont go the extra mile

Crumbles under the slightest bit of pressure

Needs to manage time better!

Poor attendance and punctualityAttendance is affecting progress!

Not much in the middleNo drive, passion or hunger

The king of biscuits!Doesn’t break when you dunk it!

Solid, determined, reliable, hardworking

“I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures... I divide the world into the learners and non-learners.”

Benjamin Barber, Sociologist

Why would any of us want to be a non-learner?

We are all born with an intense drive to learn……..

Babies don’t worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward. What could put an end to this exuberant learning? The fixed mindset...

A person with a fixed mindset views their talents and abilities as fixed – unchangeable and go through life avoiding failure and challenge

“I just can’t do it”

“It’s too hard”

“I don’t have the talent”

“I’m not clever enough”

“What’s the point, I’m not as clever as others in the class”

People with a growth mindset see themselves as a work in progress.

“If I keep trying I know I will get better”

“Failure is merely an opportunity to learn and grow”

“I’m going to keep seeking new challenges even if it makes me look less than perfect”

Carol Dweck’s theory of motivationFixed Mindset 15% are undecided Growth Mindset

Ability comes from talent“It’s in my genes”

In the face of difficulty the student gives up, declines learning support, guesses etc.

Ability comes from time and effort spent learning

In the face of difficulty, the student tries harder, asks for help etc.

• Research shows that there is no correlation between success at school and the theory the student holds (especially at GCSE level)

• Differences in performance only show when the student is challenged or is facing difficulty, for example, when they move from GCSEs to A Levels. As one might expect, research shows that the untapped potential theorists perform much better at A Level.

THE IMPORTANCE OF

CHARACTER

Basic idea of Book

What determines success in life?

Not IQ....

instead.....Character

David Levin – KIPP

Leader of a US Charter School – Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) – based in South Bronx.Class of 2003 was the fifth highest performing class in NYC, but, only 8 students completed a four year college degree.

“As the dropout rates rolled in, not just from the first KIPP class but from the second and third too, Levin noticed something curious. The students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP. Instead, they seemed to be the ones who possessed certain other gifts, skills like optimism and resilience and social agility. They were the ones who were able to recover from bad grades and resolve to do better next time.” Tough, page 52.

Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism

A professor of Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, he explained that optimism is a learnable skill, not an inborn trait. Pessimistic adults and children can train themselves to be more hopeful, Seligman says, and if they do, they will likely become happier, healthier and more successful.

Dominic Randolph – Headmaster of Riverdale Country School

“Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was always this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get eight hundreds on their SATs, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest.” Tough, page 56-7.

These two people, together

with Angela Duckworth,

began to work together to uncover the mysteries of CharacterResearch by Angela Duckworth,

Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that self-discipline scores were a better measure of academic performance than IQ tests. She began working with Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, who is famous in social-science circles for a study known informally as the marshmallow test.

The Marshmallow Test

After Mischel’s initial experiment, he tracked down the students involved in it. He discovered a strong link between the children’s marshmallow wait time and their academic success.

How does this experiment link to education?

If we coach students to develop self-control will it lead to improved academic performance?

Angela Duckworth conducted such an experiment, leading students through self-control exercises and giving them rewards for completing homework

But when the researchers looked at the students ratings of self-control, homework completion rates, performance in standardised achievement tests, they got zero effect. Why?

No long-term goal! Big difference between concentrating for 20 minutes to get an extra marshmallow compared to more long-term, abstract goals like graduating from university.

Expectancy-value theory of motivation

According to the theory, a learner’s motivation is determined by how much they value the goal(s) you or they are setting and whether they expect to succeed. The motivation is given by the following theory:Motivation

= ExpectancyThe extent to which the learner expects success in their learning

X ValueThe value of the learning to the learner

How would your students score value and expectations of success?

Can we shift a person’s motivation!

The M&M experiment shows that in the short-term, it can be surprisingly easy!

Researchers from the University of Florida conducted an experiment by selecting a group of students and getting them to complete an IQ test.

After this they did the following:

M&M Experiment

“[T]hey divided the children into three groups according to their scores on the first test. The high-IQ group had an average IQ score on the first test of about 119. The medium-IQ group averaged about 101, and the low-IQ group averaged about 79. On the second test, the researchers offered half the children in each IQ category an M&M for each right answer.... The others in each group received no reward. The medium-IQ and high-IQ kids who got candy didn’t improve their scores at all on the second test. But the low-IQ children who were given M&Ms for each correct answer raised their IQ scores to about 97, almost erasing the gap with the medium-IQ group.” Tough, page 65This experiment challenges conventional wisdom about intelligence, which held that IQ tests measured something real and permanent – something that couldn’t be changed dramatically with a few M&Ms. For the low-IQ students, what was their true measure of intelligence: 79 or 97?

Does this mean that giving students M&Ms will end low achievement amongst some of our students?

The answer is, clearly, No!

Instead, it again proves that trying to motivate students over the long-term is very difficult.

If a student perseveres, works hard and gets a really good job, they would be able to buy as many M&Ms as they want!

The importance of conscientiousness

When trying to motivate people, part of the problem is that different personality types respond to different motivations. We know this because of a series of experiments carried out by Carmit Segal in 2006.

Segal wanted to test how personality and incentives interacted and used the coding-speed test, which provides an evaluation of basic clerical skills.

Participants are given an answer key similar to the one below and then, a little lower down the page, a multiple choice test that offers five four-digit numbers as the potential correct answer for each word.

Answer Key: game 2715chin 3123arm 4054hat 5604room 5654

Q.1 Game 3458 2348 2715 5642

Segal’s findings:

Segal located two large pools of data that included scores from thousands of young people on both the coding-speed test and a standard cognitive-skills test:a) National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY)b) Data from a group of military recruits who took the coding exam as

part of a range of tests they had to pass in order to be accepted into the US Armed Forces.

For the high-school students who were part of the NLSY, they had no incentive to exert themselves in the coding-speed test as they had no bearing on their academic records. For the recruits, it mattered much more! Bad scores could keep them out of the military.

Segal discovered that, on average, the college students did better than the recruits on the cognitive tests. But on the coding-speed test, it was the recruits that did better. Why? The recruits had more at stake! As a result, that extra level of exertion was enough for them to beat their more-educated peers.

The NLSY tracked people’s progress afterward for many years. Segal found that the kids who did better on the cognitive-skills test were making more money. But so were the kids who did better on the simple coding test!

Why were those kids who scored high on the coding test earning more money?

Segal argued that it is because these people try harder. A non-cognitive skill that is vital in the labour market!

This then links to the low-IQ students from the M&M experiment. Was their IQ 79 or 97?

“You could certainly make the case that his or her true IQ must be 97. You’re supposed to try harder on IQ tests, and when the low-IQ kids had the M&Ms to motivate them, they tried hard. It’s not as if the M&Ms magically gave them the intelligence to figure out the answers; they must have already possessed it. So in fact, they weren’t low-IQ at all. Their IQs were about average. But what Segal’s experiment suggests is that it was actually their first score, the 79, that was more relevant to their future prospects. That was their equivalent of the coding-test score, the low-stakes, low-reward test that predicts how well someone is going to do in life. They may not have been low in IQ, but they were low in whatever quality it is that makes a person try hard on an IQ test without any obvious incentive. And what Segal’s research shows is that that is a very valuable quality to possess.

This quality is called Conscientiousness

Character

Character

The seven set of strengths identified by Randolph, Levin and Duckworth which, according to research are especially likely to predict life satisfaction and high achievement are as follows: