Dear colleague,
Another thing my students often do when setting goals earlier on in the semester is say that their goal (or Wish in WOOP parlance) is to improve their grades and their Plan is to work harder.
“Working harder,” I tell them, “is a terrific recipe for being anxious and getting down on yourself. I'm not sharing this with you as my opinion. I'm sharing this with you as someone who has seen hundreds and hundreds of students decide that what they'll do to improve themselves is ‘work harder.' I've seen what it leads to: increased anxiety and decreased levels of self-satisfaction and confidence. Why do you think that is?”
What I'm trying to get them to — and sometimes I have to just tell them after they offer a few off-the-mark guesses — is that “work harder” is a vague and subjective plan.
If I set my goal to “improve my grades” by the end of the month by “working harder,” how am I going to measure, in the midst of working toward that goal, whether or not I am on the path?
It reminds me of the whole lead/lag indicator idea from The Four Disciplines of Execution I learned about some years ago.
- A lag indicator is a final measurement of success. Student achievement scores are a perfect (and terrible) example. Students flourishing long-term would be a perfect (and great) example. They are lag indicators because you get these measurements once the work is done, once the verdict is in. Once you get them, it's too late to do anything, but they do let you know if you've been successful.
- A lead indicator is a measurement of the kinds of things that lead to the lag indicator results you're after. For you and me in our classrooms, counting the number of articles our students read, the number of provisional writing pieces they produce, the number of times we've led them through effective retrieval practice exercises — these are lead indicators of the in-semester lag indicators we're after (more knowledgeable readers, more proficient writers, better results on summative assessments).
So “working harder” has the makings of a lead indicator, except it's horribly vague.
Much better, then, to guide students toward specific things that “working harder” looks like, such as:
- 2x per week, I'm going to quiz myself with the study guide for 25 minutes.
- 5x per week, I'm going to check my class progress on PowerSchool and see whether I'm turning my assignments in; when I've missed one, I'm going to figure out how to make that right.
These are very basic examples, but they are massive improvements on the ever-onerous expectation that my success depends on me “working harder.” Though many of my students could very well benefit from working harder, they'll benefit much more from being clear on what hard work looks like and finding ways to measure and keep track of that.
Teaching right besides you,
DSJR
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