Unpack Outcomes – DSJR Student Motivation Guide

In The Will to Learn: How to Cultivate Student Motivation Without Losing Your Own, I lay out an approach to student motivation in which Five Key Beliefs can be influenced using just 10 basic strategies.

The ninth of those strategies is Unpack Outcomes, Good or Bad.

What is it?

The main goal of this strategy is to help students make sense of the work of learning. What did I do to learn? What did I not do? What were the outcomes of my actions or inactions? How could I improve in the future?

Unpack — examine, evaluate, reflect upon, pull apart, break into smaller pieces
Outcomes — how a learning activity (a unit, a Pop-Up Debate, a test, an essay, a lesson) went
Good or Bad — here we want to help students to get more specific than “I passed” or “I failed”

Lots of Effort and Efficacy beliefs are crushed each year because students are too quick to oversimplify outcomes into “I got an A” or “I got a D.” We want to point our students' attention toward what the outcome means, how it connects to the work they did, how they can improve in the future.

How does this strategy influence the Five Key Beliefs?

While the “unpack outcomes” strategy is found in the Effort and Efficacy chapter of The Will to Learn, it has an influence on other beliefs as well.

Common Questions and Hang-Ups About This Strategy

How can I use this strategy as simply as possible?

The simplest way to do this one is via whole-class reflection after an assessment. Here are some of the questions I ask my students to write responses to the day after an assessment:

What was the most difficult aspect of yesterday's assessment?
Can you remember a specific question/phrase/problem that caught you up?
- Sometimes I'll have students keep track of these in their notebooks during the test. You can read more about that here.
What steps did you take to complete the free response portion of the assessment?
What was your target score? How did that target compare to your actual result?
What are you still confused about that Mr. Stuart could help you with in the new unit?

It's all about pointing students' attention toward how the assessment went. Most of the magic happens just from that. But some added magic comes if you have students discuss their reflection answers with a peer or as a class. When you do this, you're getting some Normalize Struggle magic going, too.

This is by far the simplest and most efficient method — whole-class reflection via writing and/or discussing. If you notice patterns in what students struggled with, you now know what to Woodenize next.

What about when a student worked really hard at something but then still failed?

Few things are as demoralizing for a human being as working hard at something, feeling confident going into the thing they’ve worked hard at, and then failing miserably to reach their goals. Because of this, the method I’m about to describe is one of the few times I recommend secondary teachers conduct one-on-one interventions with students. The reason I do so is because it works incredibly well and can make a big difference in the life of the learner.

Whenever a student reports this experience of “effortful failure” to me, I ask them if we can meet briefly either after school or during lunch sometime in the next couple days. To avoid making them anxious, I tell them simply that I care about what they’ve reported to me, and I want to ask them more about what kind of Effort they put in and see if we can find a way to get better results for the Effort next time.

During the meeting, I do just what I’ve described:

I begin by saying that I empathize with the pain of effortful failure, and I tell them that I want us to get to the bottom of what happened.
I ask them to describe to me exactly what their effort looked like; to help, I ask them questions like:
- How long did you work?
- How many work sessions did you do?
- How distracting was the environment within which you
  worked?
- What kinds of things did you do during your work sessions?
- Did you ever become confused during your work sessions? If so, what did you do with that confusion?
I then grab an index card and tell them I see just a few things they can try next time that will help them get better results. As I’m explaining my one, two, or three recommendations — no more than three, ever — I write them down as a bulleted list on an index card. (See chart below for common student hang-ups and the solutions I recommend.)

What are the most common areas of ineffective student effort that lead to poorer-than-expected outcomes?

COMMON STUDENT HANG-UP	RECOMMENDATION I GIVE THE STUDENT
The student multitasks while studying, which can look like switching between answering e-mails, checking text messages, reviewing flashcards, looking in the textbook, etc.	Do one thing at a time for each 25-minute work session that you give to your studying. For example, during this session, review flashcards, and when you’re done with the flashcards, quiz yourself with your notes.
The student studies when exhausted and falls asleep.	Sleep begets learning — “If you have to pick between studying and sleep,” I tell my students, “pick sleep.” With that said, you often don’t need to do this. If a student has a jammed evening schedule (e.g., sports, clubs, family responsibilities), I encourage them to set a regular time each week to come and work in my classroom before or after school or during lunch.
The student studies for long periods of time without brain breaks.	I teach my students to think of studying in terms of 25-minute “deep work” sessions. No matter how big the study task, I tell them to break the work down into 25-minute sessions. When the timer goes off, they should take a five-minute restorative break — something like a walk or a chat with family tends to work best.
The student “studies” by rereading things or “looking over” their notes.	This is a classic pitfall for students because it makes them familiar with the source material — e.g., they start to really recognize what the textbook pages or their notes look like — yet they are unable to retrieve the concepts from their own mind. The best solution here is self-quizzing. I tell them to use their hand to cover up portions of the notes or the textbook and ask themselves, “What’s under here? How does that relate to the previous concept or the next one?” Self-quizzing is one of those things I find the need to constantly practice with my secondary students (in Woodenization terms, it's a Biggie); there seems to be a gravitational pull toward ineffective familiarization-based study methods.
The student studies in a needlessly distracting environment.	The most common example of this is when a student studies with their cell phone sitting next to them. This creates something you could call the Phone-Nearby-While-You-Study Hamster Wheel Effect. The solution here is for the student to turn their phone off and place it just outside the door of the room they’re working in. It’s extreme, but the students crazy enough to try it each year consistently tell me how much it helps. And guess what? You can tell the student if they’re dying to read that text, they can go ahead and check the phone during their five-minute break

How could I incorporate this strategy into Moments of Genuine Connection?

Very simply, actually.

The idea here is that, for an entire MGC series — that is, one full clipboard sheet (see page 55 of The Will to Learn or this guide for details) — you ask individual students to describe for you a time they’ve succeeded in the past. When students have a hard time recalling a situation like this, I ask them things like, “What about in the realms of video games? Hobbies? What kinds of things do you do for fun but other folks find challenging?”

Once they share, ask a follow-up question or two that helps them unpack the success:

What tactics did you use to succeed like that?
What setbacks did you encounter on the path to that success? How did you overcome them?
How did it feel when you first succeeded at that? Who did you tell?

As with the previous methods, this method gets students thinking and talking about what specific outcomes they are seeing and what specific actions of theirs cause these outcomes to come to pass.

This student says they tried, but they didn’t.

Are you sure they didn’t try? How do you know? If you don’t have strong, evidence-based answers to those two questions, it’s best to dissuade yourself from assumptions like this. They’ll only embitter you.

If you indeed know that a student didn’t try at something, however, the next thing is to examine the problem via the Five Key Beliefs.

Credibility: Does the student believe you’re good at your job? Do they believe you care? Do they believe you know what you’re doing? If not, seek to remedy this problem via the Credibility strategies. After all, when was the last time you felt motivated to try hard for a non-credible boss?
Value: Does the student give any indication they find this kind of work valuable? If not, seek to remedy this via things like mini-sermons and Valued Within exercises. Keep in mind, however, that these strategies are long-term plays. Value moves more slowly than we’d like, but it does move if we endure in signaling the Value of what we’re doing.
Effort and Efficacy: Does the student know what smart, effective Effort looks like? Have you gone out of your way to be explicit? If not, see Strategy 7 in The Will to Learn or this guide on Woodenization. Does the student have a reasonable definition of success for your class? If not, see Strategy 8 in The Will to Learn or this guide.
Belonging: Does the student indicate that they believe they don’t belong in your class or that they are uniquely bad at the work you’re asking them to do? If so, see Strategy 10 in The Will to Learn or this guide.

When students don’t try, our conclusions must be wiser and more nuanced than, “Well, this student is just lazy.” We must focus on what we control — our cultivation of the Five Key Beliefs — and refrain from making character-based assumptions about what a student is or is not.

I have a student who suffers from severe test anxiety. What can I do to help them?

I’ll always remember the lunch period when Grace came to me to unpack how she had been doing on tests. Before I could ask her anything, she shared a bit breathlessly how anxious she was becoming about tests in my class.

She had actually been doing all right on tests at the start of the year, but then at the end of our third unit, she had an outcome that, to her, was shockingly bad. By the time Unit 4’s test came around, she was nervous the whole day of the test, and even while the test was happening, she was noticing herself being worried about it. She ended up doing poorly again on that test. And now here she was, talking to me about test anxiety.

She reminded me a lot of me during the first seven or so years of my speaking career. During those days, whenever I would see a speaking engagement coming up on the calendar — a PD or a keynote for teachers, typically — I would start feeling a fluttery-queasy kind of nervousness. This would continue all the way up to the moment that I was introduced at the event. I bet I experienced this hundreds of times.

In other words, I could relate to Grace’s struggle. And I could even recall times when the nervousness became debilitating — exactly like Grace was experiencing it. So I shared with Grace a simple trick: When you’re feeling nervous before a test, literally say out loud to yourself (or write in all caps at the top of the test), “I am excited.” This sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually vetted in the research (Brooks, 2014). But since it sounds ridiculous, I wanted to share with Grace how it works.

The gist is this: When you’re nervous, that’s a heightened state of psychological arousal, and heightened states of psychological arousal are tough to shoehorn down into calmness. This is why the most common advice given to folks who are nervous before a test or a performance — “Oh, don’t worry! You’ve got this. It’s going to be fine. Relax.” — is actually super unhelpful. It’s really hard to simply will yourself from a high state of arousal to a low one. So instead, when you feel those nerves kicking in, you tell yourself that you’re excited: “I’m not nervous — I’m excited.”

“So, Grace,” I said, “Think of it like this: Tell yourself, ‘I’m jacked. I’ve been preparing for this test all month. I get to see some novel test questions today. I get to see where I’m at as a learner. Sweet. Awesome. Yes.’”

It sounds super dumb, actually. But the crazy thing is, Grace found that it worked. On her final exam that year, Grace did the “I’m excited” self-talk and had her best ever performance on the test.

What’s even more important to me is that, as she was taking the test, I caught her smiling.

Still got questions?

If you ask a question in the comments section below, I'll answer it and incorporate your question into this article. In other words, you'll get a double whammy: You get your question answered, and you help make this article better for future readers.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR