Everybody is a genius

This was written by James Gutteridge who is an educator in Australia. You can find his blog here.

by James Gutteridge

Few things sadden me more than when I hear my students declare that they will never be successful, that they don’t have a dream, and that they don’t know what makes them happy. This is such a pessimistic outlook that one really has to wonder where it originated. And it’s not something they’ve been told.

It’s something they have learned. It is interesting that we hold up those who have university degrees to be the pinnacle of society. Perhaps the quality of society could be measured by community cohesion and the happiness of its members than by the number of people with university degrees?

As a result of this academic pursuit of knowledge, schools do their best to educate people to enter university. We therefore value those disciplines that are most closely aligned with academia. The arts aren’t as valued, and we commonly hear the phrase – “you can’t do that, you won’t get a job!” Yet who do we pay most to be entertained by? Actors, chefs, dancers, musicians, sports women and men, and authors.

It is a mistake to make students feel stupid for not fitting in with the academic demands of school. There are, of course, those who thrive academically, and their best contribution to society may require that particular pathway to expertise. There are also those whose contribution to society will be aspiring to the likes of Jamie Oliver, Johnny Depp, Michael Schumacher or J.K Rowling. Whatever makes us happy, providing of course that it does not involve harming others, should be our pursuit.

A.S. Neill, founder of the world-renowned Summerhill School, famously stated that he would rather educate a happy street sweeper than a neurotic prime minister.

Albert Einstein also famously stated that “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Optimism, as Martin Seligman writes, is the key to success. But when many students feel as stupid as a fish feels that cannot climb a tree no matter how hard it tries, society will continue to be filled with pessimistic people.

Despite this, I’m optimistic it can change! People just need to realize their inner genius.

Grading Inequalities

Some time ago, I blogged about the unintended consequences that occur when teachers grade student effort. Essentially I made the case that a student who receives a high grade for their effort but a low grade on their learning may come to think that they are still really dumb even when they try really hard, and that a student who receives a low grade on their effort but a high grade on their learning may come to believe that they can succeed without any effort at all.

Essentially, I am concerned that kids will come to devalue the role their effort plays in achieving excellence. I fear that they may attribute their success on external sources such as luck, difficulty or natural ability.

I want to talk about a comment Anonymous left today on my Grading Effort: Unintended Consequences post:

If Johnny is not a smart child, and Carol is...

Johnny's crappy project gets an A because he's not that smart?

Carol get's an A because it's a good project?

Carol looks at Johnny's crappy project with an A, and says "Hey what the?"

Next time she doesn't put that much effort in because why? Crappy gets an A if your "just not that smart"

If I was Carol....I would be PISSED

Anonymous is right...

...but not the way they would like to believe. If school is really just an exercise in collecting A's, and the point of it all is to compete against one another - then kids are right to focus on the grading inequities. If this is the case, then Carol is right to be pissed off when others succeed... she's right to be pissed off when she has to work with someone less intelligent than herself... she's right to be pissed off when doing the right thing doesn't reap the rewards she deserves.

After all, why would anyone ever willingly learn something if the promise of an A isn't waiting for you?

But is this really the kind of learning environment we wish provide for children? Would you want to learn under such tension?

A classroom that focuses on grading is not a classroom about real learning; in other words, rather than compete for grades, kids should collaborate over their learning.

The tone of the comment above from Anonymous leads me to believe they have fallen victim to a classic distraction inherent to traditional education - that is, they still believe that grades are meaningful and objective. Unfortunately, many people don't understand what Paul Dressel meant when he said:

A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material.

And Alfie Kohn puts it this way:

What grades offer is spurious precision, a subjective rating masquerading as an objective assessment.

I am also bothered by how Anonymous condones Carol's anger. 

With grades, Carol and other students are encouraged to focus on the wrong inequalities in school - grades force kids to see the credit inequality rather than the learning inequality. If we want to make kids into little narcissists who only look out for their own skin - their own grades - then I can think of no better way of doing so than implementing a rigorous grading system; however, if we truly understand how collaboration trumps competition, we would never pit students against each other. 

Remove grades altogether, and we improve the chances that students like Carol will see students like Johnny as human beings they can help rather than someone to hate because they are garnishing undeserved credit.

I think Harry S. Truman summed up much of this discussion when he said:

It's amazing what you can get done when you don't care who gets the credit.

Maybe, just maybe, we could stop wasting our time being pissed at each other and spend our time learning. After all, it's hard to be serious about striving for excellence, inspiring learning and nurturing hope for all when we distract students from real learning with something as arbitrary and contrived as grading.

Maybe it's my fault

Natural talent is not only a myth, but it is also insulting. It's insulting to Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, Wayne Gretzky, Stephen Hawking, Christopher Reeves... and little Johnny who's in my afternoon science class. It's insulting to all successful people who worked so very hard to reach their accomplishments.

We could blame successful people for duping us, but in the end, we are only fooling ourselves.

There is no magic bullet.

There is no long lost treasure map to success.

Too often we are distracted by the flash to notice the fire.

Too often we are distracted by ability to notice the effort.

Too often we are distracted by the championships to notice practices.

Talent is overrated, and natural ability is a myth.

Geoff Colvin explains:

All we can say for the moment is that no specific genes identifying particular talents have been found. It's possible that they will be; scientists could yet find the piano-playing gene or investing gene or accounting gene. But they haven't so far, and doing so could be a long shot. The most one could say is that if genes exert any influence, it would seem to be much less than the whole explanation for achieving the highest levels of performance.

In his book The Genius in All of Us, David Shenk writes:

Most underachievers are very likely not prisoners of their own DNA, but rather have so far been unable to tap into their true potential.

Micheal's right - we make excuses.

Praising Effort vs Ability

Carol Dweck is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading researchers in the fields of personality, social psychology and developmental psychology. Her research has differentiated between two kinds of praise. Praising the child for their intelligence – “You must be smart at this” and praising the child for their effort – “You must have worked really hard”. In a study that Dweck conducted multiple times (because the results were almost unbelievable) two groups of students were given a task. One group was praised for their ability while the other was praised for their effort. Before being given any praise, the two groups were indistinguishable; however, after the praise was applied the two groups began to differ. When given another opportunity, the students who were praised for their ability seemed intimidated by a challenging task and overwhelmingly preferred an easier second task; whereas ninety percent of the students who were praised for their effort wanted the challenging, more difficult second task so they could advance their learning. “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck explained, “we tell them that’s the name of the game: look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.”
When given a third opportunity to perform a challenging task, the two groups showed some similarities and some differences. Both groups performed poorly at the challenging task, but their response to this setback differed greatly. The praised-for-effort group proved to be far more resilient in their attitude towards the challenge. Despite their lack of success and frustration with the task, they proved to be far more willing to try different solutions and give it a go. However, Dweck explained “But the group praised for its intelligence hated the harder test. They took it as proof they weren’t smart.”

As if the results from this experiment weren’t enough to make us question our use of praise, Dweck had both groups do a task similar to the difficulty level of the initial test. The praised-for-effort group showed a 30 percent improvement, while the praised-for-ability group’s score actually plunged 20 percent. When both groups were asked to share their scores with others, “almost 40 percent of the ability-praised students lied about their scores. And always in one direction.” Dweck concluded, “What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.”

Dweck’s book Mindset goes on to show the difference between students who have a growth mindset versus those who are stuck in a fixed mindset. People who have a growth mindset see their intelligence as something that is always growing slowly over time, and mistakes are opportunities to grow one’s intelligence. However, people who have a fixed mindset see their intelligence as a prefixed quantity and if you are smart enough, mistakes and failures just shouldn’t happen.

For an extensive look at this research read Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

This is an excerpt from a larger article I wrote:

Grading Effort: Unintended Consequences

There are so many issues with grading. A teacher's entire slate of professional developlment could be spent discussing and investigating how to properly tinker with their grading practices. Inevitably, teachers end up talking at some point about effort, and whether we should be grading effort, and if so, how do we grade effort (notice the question is never should we be grading at all).

I have some serious issues with grading at all, but if you do feel the need to grade, it is important to remember the unintended consequences of grading a student's effort.

Think about these situations:

Johnny works his tail off on a social studies project, but in the end, his project really wasn't that good. Despite the lack of a final product, Johnny actually ended up learning a lot from his mistakes, but not soon enough, as the due date demanded he turn his project in. The teacher ends up failing Johnny on the content portions of the scoring rubric, but recognizes Johnny's effort and gives him a very high grade for his effort.

The teacher does this because we think it will bode well for the future. We want Johnny to keep working hard because we believe that his perseverance will pay off. However, what if that isn't the message he receives? He might say:

Even when I try really hard, I'm still dumb.

This situation may be more serious than you first comprehend. I've written about Bernard Weiner's research before on how important it is that children value their effort as an important factor in their intelligence. A child who is graded highly for their effort but poorly on their intelligence and skills may ultimately come to see external factors as being more influential on their learning. We don't want this.

Carol lollygags her way through another math assignment, placing little to no effort in her learning. Despite her lack of effort, Carol follows the instructions and produces what the teacher wants. The teacher marks Carol very well on her content and (wrongly) assumes she must have placed a ton of effort into doing so well on this project.

My fear here is that Carol knows far better than her teacher how little effort she truly put into her learning, and that Carol recieves a message that sounds something like this:

I can do really well even when I don't try.

Grading effort is a precarious endeavor that teachers need to think long and hard about before passing judgement on something so intangible. We would be wise to remember that we may have more to lose than we have to gain when it comes to grading effort.

Why am I smart

There is a strong line of research that shows us that how people perceive their intelligence or success may be more important than whether they are intelligent or successful.
Let’s pretend little Sally did a ‘good job’. How might Sally explain her success? Here are a number of reasonable responses Little Sally might give:

•‘I worked my tail off for that project.’
•‘I’m just a natural at this stuff.’
•‘I guessed on like half the questions.’
•‘It was really easy.’

Let’s categorize these responses:

•Which are internal factors and which are external?
•Which are stable and which change over time?
•Which are in Sally’s control?


Attempting to identify how little Sally attributes her success or failure in this manner was developed by Bernard Weiner and it has proven to have some striking implications. Take a look at Sally’s responses again. Which response would you rather her attribute her success to? Sally might attribute her success to factors that are external (luck and difficulty), factors that are stable (ability and difficulty) or factors that are out of her control (luck, difficulty and ability). Most parents and teachers that I know would want Sally to attribute her success to effort because it provides a lot of optimism for future growth. The problem arises when we praise kids in a way that encourages them to focus on how well they are doing.

Alfie Kohn points out “When kids are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.” This means kids are very likely to attribute their successes and failures to factors such as luck, difficulty and ability before effort. That is to say, they are likely to attribute their successes and failures to factors that are external, strictly stable and out of their control. Carol Dweck would describe anyone who attributes their successes and failures in this way as suffering from a fixed mindset.

There is a big difference between focusing on showing how good you are and focusing on showing how bad you’re not. And it might be worth reflecting on how much time we should even spend focusing on showing how good we are, when we could be spending our time learning and improving.