Insights from Psychology

All of the same cautions and considerations offered about the application of neuroscience to our work applies here as well, perhaps even more so, given the much longer history of the psychology discipline, its preoccupation with questions about learning, and the even greater tendency to overhype its findings applied to education. The specific branches of psychology focused on learning – behavioral, developmental, cognitive, educational – constitutes a very deep well from which Learning Strategy work draws insight. Indeed, it is from the field of psychology that we get our actual definitions of learning, complex and varied though they may be.  And, naturally, as the winds shift in the field of psychology, so too do they shift in our work. Behavioral psychology and its focus on behavior-change as the relevant feature of learning, and conditioning as the mechanism for it, for example, has gone much out of vogue as the attention has shifted to developmental and cognitive psychology. Notions about learning moved away from the strict boundaries of behaviorism and its focus on observable phenomena, and towards questions having to do with emotion, and non-observable internal cognitive states as entangled in the idea of learning. Learning strategy work has absorbed and moved with these shifts. We are rooted still in the idea of “behavior”, as invoked by the language of our craft –  we are in the business of “changing habits”, “developing skills”, facilitating strategies” etc. But we are also rooted in the idea of learning as being something more than simply behavior, that there is something important about the mental and emotional states that accompany, affect, and are affected by learning and behavior change, that there is learning AND there is a relationship with learning. Again, while acknowledging the depth of the well here, I’ll briefly touch upon a few of the concepts emerging from the field of psychology that have, especially in recent years, had a significant influence. And, again, it is important to regard these as scholarly ideas, compelling, relevant, and significant, but also subject to rightful critique, and we should avoid the uncritical embrace that so often accompanies them.

Growth mindset:

Few concepts have had more influence on the learning support professions than the idea of growth mindset. Introduced in the work of Carol Dweck at Stanford University in the early 2000’s, it has become a veritable mantra in educational circles and corporate boardrooms alike. The original work was related to the developing research on neuroplasticity, that ability of our brains to form, change, and grow new neural networks. Carol Dweck’s and others’ findings are simple but profound. Rather than surrendering to a fixed belief in one’s talents and non-talents (“I am not a math person”), we can adopt a more hopeful approach that acknowledges the findings of neuroplasticity, that through work, and practice, and persistence, we can change the structures of our brains to become more skilled. This centers effort not just talent in the calculus of learning. And, crucially, it’s not just effort that matters, it’s the belief in the value of effort. It was found that students who adopted a belief that persistent effort would lead to improved abilities are more likely to persist through learning challenges and have improved achievement outcomes. Students with no such belief (ie. have a “fixed” mindset) are less likely to persist in that same way. This simple (and common-sensical) finding had widespread appeal –through effort, one can become smarter. There is now two decades worth of pretty good data to back up this conclusion, but it is not at all without complications, and confounding variables, and downright refutations, things that the natural slow, and deliberate pace of scientific research could tease out over time. But the world of education often does not wait for that. It sees only the punchline and the idea works its way prematurely into the marrow of educational practice.  The result has been a grossly over-simplified application of Dweck’s research and a reduction of its findings to catch-phrases (“praise the effort not the outcome”), or misguided mantras of advice (“you can do anything you set your mind to”). Things in human learning are never quite so easy, regardless of our desire for it to be so. The word-cloud entanglements of effort, and praise, and work, and achievement, and talent, learning, and intelligence, and self-esteem and on and on, is exceedingly complex and concepts like “growth mindset” should not be wielded as cudgels to that complexity. Still, there is something good and valuable in the growth mindset idea that is now an essential bit of Learning Strategist kit, since we are positioned to intervene in students’ lives at precisely the place where it applies – in their attitudes towards learning, their relationship with learning, their disposition to learning. While avoiding the over-hype, or the superficiality of platitudes, we can offer the wisdom of growth mindset research applied to the student struggling with an unhealthy stance towards learning.

Grit:

Achieving both fame and infamy in the field of education, Angela Duckworth’s research on grit struck an oddly resonant chord. The idea is simple on its face and very much resonant with Growth Mindset. Grit refers to the capacity for passion and perseverance to achieve long-term goals. This had a kind of intuitive appeal as a counter to the preoccupations of the self-esteem movement. Effort really matters, and over and over in the research it is found that people who score highly on traits of perseverance, interest, the capacity to engage continuously with work, to practice, are more successful in their respective domains than the simply smart or capable. To put it crudely, the person to be chosen for the team is not the one who is most talented but the one who works the hardest. The most accomplished people in their respective fields are often found to have traits of “grittiness” – they have hope and confidence in their ability to achieve long-term goals, they work hard, practice relentlessly, have a deep interest in their field of work, and a sense of purpose pursuing it. And, importantly, while these traits are natural but unevenly distributed characteristics, they are also able to be developed through explicit intervention.  So, the connection to “academic success” here is obvious. But “grit” is also a troublesome, and problematic idea. Firstly, there are practical concerns.  The premise of the grit concept is that it is a quality that can be developed, that it is not simply a stable characteristic. This remains a debatable subject, but even if it were true, there is scant or questionable research on how grit can be taught, calling into question whether it is a useful variable subject to intervention. Secondly, while grit, so defined, has positive correlations to successful endeavour, it is also true that relentless perseverance with work that is of questionable value or purpose to the individual can lead to obvious harm and diminished psychological well-being. Grit narratives often ignore this interplay between learning and motivation, and emotion.  And, perhaps most problematic of all, are the philosophical implications of the concept, and, importantly, the way in which the grit narratives get misapplied. A note about that, as it relates to other concepts follows ahead.

Resilience:

This is perhaps the most over-used, ubiquitous, variably defined, controversial, misapplied concept of them all. Given that, there is no intention here to capture anything near the scope and breadth of the topic. Rather, I offer a simple overview of its primary tenets most relevant to our work. The idea of resilience is quite simple when considered literally. It’s a concept from materials science and describes the ability of a material to spring back into its original shape after being contorted, closely synonymous with elasticity. Applied to human experience as a metaphor, then, resilience has come to mean the capacity to “bounce back” or recover from challenge or setback. Researchers interested in the question why some people seem to fare better than others after similar levels of adversity found that, among other things, a capacity for “resilience” acted as a relevant variable here and, notably, that it is both a skill and trait – something both inborn and learned. These ideas exploded onto the scene – researchers, psychologists, sociologists, educators, therapists, parents, all climbed all over this concept for its tantalizing power and convenient ability to explain differential outcomes across populations. And it fit neatly into certain “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” agendas. Soon a veritable resilience industry emerged, and it wove its way deeply into the minds of educators everywhere. Resilience, the ability to recover from setback, correlates significantly with academic success and it is a skill that can be taught. That’s a compelling logic. And then, amidst all the breathless embrace of the resilience panacea, came the critiques and important questions necessary for a recalibration. What is the relationship between resilience as an individual trait and the communities of support that enable that? What happens to people’s sense of self-worth and well-being when we over-emphasize individual resilience as the thing that explains their ability to persevere? What happens when we ignore communal responsibilities to provide the necessary apparatus for trait resilience to emerge? And, if resilience is a skill to be learned, how do we actually teach it? This, like other concepts described in this section, can bear on our work as Learning Strategists in all sorts of relevant ways as we try to help students manage adversity in healthy ways, approach their inevitable academic setbacks with strength, and properly regard the educational benefits of “failure”. But it is a complex weave, and as we acknowledge that complexity, our definitions of “resilience” become more fulsome. Michael Ungar and his team at Dalhousie University offer an evolved definition that can be especially useful for us:

In the context of exposure to significant adversity, resilience is both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain their well-being, and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided in culturally meaningful ways.

**I’ve alluded to it, but it bears repeating a very important nuance to the sometimes-overwrought narratives of growth mindset, grit, and resilience. These are related concepts that are often bundled together and misapplied as armaments against more critical forms of analysis. There is no doubt that effort, persistence, and the ability to overcome and learn from challenges are positive qualities and things we should strive to cultivate in students. But by being overly preoccupied with those ideas, we ignore other factors that affect deeply the ways in which students encounter educational systems. One’s ability to successfully navigate a complicated and flawed educational system requires more than a can-do attitude. And failures to succeed in those flawed systems cannot simply be chalked up to individual character traits. An analysis of how students encounter, experience, and move through educational systems must look beyond the individual as the only relevant variable, and also include the social conditions in which those encounters happen.

Self-efficacy:

Once again, this is a concept, broad and complex, that can be inserted in useful ways into the specific context of our work, another variation on a similar theme.  Self-efficacy is a concept attributed to Albert Bandura who explained it as an individual’s beliefs about their own capacity to achieve goals. The emphasis here is on belief – that is, the person high in self-efficacy will attribute their failures, not to their lack of ability, but to their lack of effort. The person low in self-efficacy, conversely, will attribute their failures to a lack of ability. Hence, a person high in self-efficacy will be more likely to persist towards achievement while the person with low self-efficacy will be more likely to procrastinate or abandon their goals. The relevance to our work with students is obvious here since this trait of self-efficacy is shown to correlate significantly to academic success. Again, at the risk of oversimplifying here, Learning Strategists can help students develop a positive, confident stance towards their own learning, encourage practice, connect them with peer models, facilitate reflective learning practices, help them develop a healthy relationship with instructor feedback, and problem-solve with them to manage barriers to their learning. Being a student is complicated business sometimes, and our relationship to learning and the structures of organized education can be fraught – so it is a banality to suggest “pep talks” as a way to increase self-efficacy, but it becomes an important part of our work to help students believe in the value of their own effort, not with “you can do anything you set your mind to” clichés but with real talk about what it takes to be a successful student, a focus on strengths, and building, through accomplishment, a positive self-regard.

Learned Resourcefulness:

This is another in this list of variables that corelate in some way to academic success, but also have broader implications and influence. Learned resourcefulness refers to the capacity to manage the vicissitudes of everyday life in a way that aligns with one’s best interests and goals. Again, this repertoire of self-regulatory skills is unevenly distributed and can be regarded as both inborn characteristics as well as learned skills, and, again, the relevance to school situations is obvious. Students high in learned resourcefulness are better able to manage and adapt to the challenges of post-secondary education and mitigate the stress that accompanies it. Some of this repertoire includes the ability to delay gratification, recognizing the value of effort, problem solving, positive self-regard, and an optimistic explanatory style. This has a clear relationship to my conception of academic resourcefulness described later, which I define as the capacity to identify, use, and advocate for resources that support an effective approach to study and learning, and what I suggest as a foundational underpinning to our work.  If we accept the idea that these are capacities that can be learned, it provides direction for our work.

The Big 5:

Finally, I will merely touch upon an important, and contentious, idea from the psychology of personality, the so-called Big 5 Personality Traits. It has been proposed that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality, each of which exists as a continuum somewhere along which we all find ourselves. These Big 5 are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. A table can help detail what occupying either the high or low end of these spectrums can indicate:

Efficacy, resourcefulness, explanatory style, resilience, grit, mindset, conscientiousness, character traits, cognition, stress, neuroticism, perseverance, etc. Etc. – it’s all a massive a word cloud of associations and connections and variables all entangled and overlapped. As generalists, the job of the Learning Strategist is not (necessarily) to be an expert in any of these specific domains but, rather, to have a basic grasp of the concepts, their relevance to concerns about successful learning, and the ways in which they relate as proposed variables. Even rudimentary understanding of some of these things can help guide your work in useful ways, affect how you design the curriculum and instruction of your programming, and approach your one-on-one work with students.