Bad Goals Dressed as Good Ones

Dear colleagues,

A lot of times, the students who present as highly motivated in school are actually very poorly motivated for learning. This is basically what I argued via keynote at an AP Best Practices conference a year and a half ago.

So let me unpack some definitions of success that APPEAR good but actually ARE NOT good when you zoom out at the grand scale of a student's life OR the grand scale of the public education system:

• I want to be top 10 in my class.
• I want to be valedictorian.
• I want to go to a prestigious college.

So to be clear, what I'm saying is these are BAD GOALS at the grand scales of:

1. A student's whole life and
2. The public education system.

What's my reasoning for these being bad goals at those to grand scales?

1. They are scarce. Each of these goals requires students to compete for limited spots. This increases pressure on students, often past what is optimal.
2. They emphasize and external locus of control. What I mean is, success at these goals depends to a large degree on factors outside an individual student's influence rather than their own actions and choices. Ending up top in your class? It depends on who you're up against, what those competitors' teachers were like, and lots of other things. Getting in to an elite school? Up to the admissions committee, the applicant pool, and who knows what else.
3. They aren't critical to long-term flourishing. I've never met a flourishing adult who goes around talking about how being top in their class or going to Columbia made THE difference in their life. Are these things cool? Yeah. Am I happy for folks who achieve them? Honestly, it depends on whether or not they achieved them without sacrificing the other pillars of high school success. Does being #1 in your class or getting into Harvard guarantee you're going to life a flourishing life? For sure not. (E.g., See Shawn Achor's work re: the unhappiness of the average Harvard student.)
4. Setbacks toward these goals are extremely high stakes. When you're trying to be valedictorian, every single test and project and essay is make-or-break. When you want into that Ivy League school, every activity needs to be elite. Again: it's like you're being pulled away from optimal pressure.
5. Goals like this tend to blind us toward the beauty and power of today. Always looking to the future is a sad way to live. Ask a guy who had to learn this the hard way! You start viewing your days not as good in themselves but as utilitarian stepping stones to someplace better.

So look: my goal isn't to be critical here. I have students who have the exact goals I'm critiquing here, and I love and respect them very much. Nonetheless, I believe in the veracity of each of the critiques I've brought.

The way we — us, our students — define success is critical to student motivation. This is why “Define Success: WISELY, Early, and Often” is one of the 10 strategies I selected for The Will to Learn. When a student is motivated to get a good grade in your class so that that grade can move them toward the goal they have…. that's a student who will be:

• threatened by challenge;
• fragile when faced with a bad outcome; and
• quit once they've “arrived” at what they want.

When things are going their way, sure — they'll present as motivated for the work of learning. But this motivation will be hollow because they'll be doing the work for where it gets them and not for the work's inherent Value.

This is a hard problem to solve. It takes careful, consistent heart-gardening on the part of teachers. It takes a light touch, too. We don't want to denigrate goals like this because, c'mon — these are hard things to accomplish and we do hard things! (See pp. 57-58 of These 6 Things and pp. 230 and 237 of Will to Learn for discussion of the “do hard things” ethos.) It's not a terrible thing to want the things in the list above. But when your identity becomes rooted in this hoped-for achievement, you're going to tend to experience learning as somewhat of a miserable and meaningless chore.

And that is a huge waste because learning, fundamentally, is about exploring the cosmos and becoming a human.

So all of this is just to raise awareness and improve clarity around this common problem in high schools. I leave the solutions up to you, and I encourage a careful reading of the Value, Effort/Efficacy, and Belonging sections of The Will to Learn. That's my playbook for moving students into definitions of success that are wiser and more humane.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR