More videos from Bradley Busch
Video transcript
okay bradley what’s your second tip for us please okay so the second tip i’ve gone for a slightly different area away from kind of retrieval and memory is about how to develop resilient students and how to develop resilience because i think that’s in danger of almost becoming a cliche or another buzzword everyone wants resilience and dependent learners and yet some of the research out there i think is really fascinating uh and this tip is from my favorite research paper on resilience um there’s about to help develop a resilient environment the two factors you need to consider is having high levels of challenge so setting the bar high teach the top high expectations but also combining that with high levels of support so do the students feel included part of the group do they know who to turn to for emotional support and why i quite like that is i think a lot of the resilience focus tends to be on how do i motivate a student and how do i help develop his or her resilience was actually if we talking about it in terms of an environmental or organizational level uh what does that classroom that has high challenge and high support look like because if it only has high challenge and doesn’t have high support you can see stuff like perfectionism feel failure burnout and stress and i think we do a lot of stuff around high expectations and that’s fairly well known and there’s been a big focus on that in the last few years but combining that with high levels of support i think is interesting because again looking back at my early career i was so supportive and i was so inclusive and i wanted to help everyone and i don’t want anyone who’s uncomfortable that i look back and i go as well as being very supportive was i actually just subtly lowering the level of challenge and almost depriving them of that healthy struggle and i think that’s a nice practical starting point for to help develop resilience students who need both high challenge and high support love it love it well okay let’s let’s let’s dive into this a little bit more then but this could be a terrible question bradley so please forgive me on this one but what will be some of the features of a classroom that have this high challenge and high support what are some of the practical things a teacher could could do to get this balance so i think looking at high challenge that access of it first i think having high expectations not necessarily high expectations around outcome but high expectations around attitude and habits and work ethic i think fundamentally believing that all students can improve can learn and can develop and i know i i i don’t know if i’m slightly different to some people on this uh i think people have been a bit too quick to dismiss some of the growth mindset area um because i think there was some really good stuff within there it’s complicated uh but at a fundamental level believing that every child can improve and can learn and i’m gonna work hard with that child to ask some challenging questions to believe they can do more they could do last week that i think is a hallmark of this high expectations this high challenge um and so not necessarily always letting students self-select which level of difficulty uh i i think is kind of pitched with high challenge um i think high support uh includes i think it’s quite close to link to the research on feedbacks um feedback on the task feedback on their processes on their self-regulation as opposed to just feedback on outcome or on them as a person um i think having a really warm but formal relationship i think with students is important um so i don’t know if you found any i haven’t really been able to find any research that find that we learn more from someone that we like i think it’s one of these big kind of myths or misconceptions but i do think the teaching relationship is really important i just don’t think it’s based on likability so i think it’s based on do i trust that you are gonna challenge me and stretch me and help me improve and do also kind of trust that you’re going to support me when i struggle and fail and so i think that reliability and trust is probably linked to this challenge and support as opposed to just necessarily likeability and popularity it’s really really interesting this so just a couple of points um on this one first i agree with you the good i’ve been guilty of this in terms of the growth mindset research like first i was all for it then i started reading research and i thought oh this is a load of nonsense so i dismissed everything and now obviously you think no actually you know it can’t all be nonsense there’s some real good stuff in there one thing that i think to pick up on what you’ve said there that feels really important to me is growth mindset in the sense that the teacher having it of their kids not not just the kids having it of themselves so teacher really believing that this this isn’t a bottom set who have got like you know they’ll never get beyond this level but think you know you know what they could do and having that mindset that feels like it’s got no kind of negative side to it whatsoever as a teacher that feels really important there’s one really cool study that looked at teacher mindset on student performance and what they found is so they told they gave a hypothetical situation where they said to a teacher it’s the first they actually did math uh they said it’s the first math exam of the year why recent does really badly how do you respond to that student what’s your approach and they said teachers with the growth mindset were much more likely to focus on what they call strategy they said it’s too early to tell how good the kid could be sample size one um i will set them more time i’ll send them lots of questions i will talk through the step-by-step process of how to answer them um whereas those were the fixed mindset uh teachers they were more likely to go i’ll go for a comfort approach which is let me make you feel better about your failure you know not everyone can be good at math and what made the study really cool is when they then interviewed students and they said if you did bad in your exam and your teacher said either a or b how would you feel a lot of the students misinterpreted this comfort approach as proof that the teachers didn’t believe they could ever get better right so making me feel better because this is my limit whereas those who have been exposed to the strategy approach had much higher self-expectation and were more motivated and indeed more resilient to apply this sort of stuff and i think that’s a nice indication of growth mindset might not be a straight line from teacher to student but it influences teacher decision making which influences student approach uh and that’s where i think it’s linked to this high challenge of i believe you can all get better and i’m gonna show you how to get better but i think that’s key to it it’s really interesting really interesting and the the other thing i was gonna sound like is just you mentioned struggle and my kind of working theory with the struggle is well first i used to think struggle is always a good thing like get the kids struggling they’re going to learn and so on and then where i’m at at the moment is that certainly you you don’t want kids to give up in the first sign of struggle because that’s almost kind of the opposite of resilience but i think one thing that you’ve got to bear in mind is students kind of past experience in in my domain in mathematics kind of students past experience of their kind of relationship with maths or how much success they’ve had with maths because if you take two students one of whom has had a lot of experience of success in maths over the past if they’re struggling on a problem that they’re likely to have the belief that if i keep struggling i’ll probably get there in the end or even if i don’t get there in the end it’s okay because it’s just one small problem and i’ve got loads of other things that i do understand versus another kid who’s struggling who thinks this is yet another thing i don’t understand i’m going to waste my time going through this and so on and so forth so there’s kind of kids prior experience in terms of their resilience feels really important and something important for teachers to know because you can’t just go in with this kind of blanket strategy that i’m going to going to do the same thing with all kids or with all different classes because for me anyway that prior experience feels like a critical variable in this if that makes sense yeah no totally i mean if you look up from the research on self-efficacy which is basically domain specific confidence like how confident do i feel at mass previous performance is the biggest predictor of someone’s self-esteem so that would make sense um yeah the way you’re out with struggle is kind of where i’m at with mistakes uh i won’t know you know mistakes are good and can help you learn and now i kind of think mistakes could be good and they can help you learn but only if there’s good feedback only in the environment right or else you’re just doomed to repeat the mistake and that’s not good and i think with stuff like resilience it’s easy to almost fetish or like sensationalize mistakes and struggle whereas like i don’t want my students failing i do want them learning and succeeding and doing well but it’s just how we manage that process to get there i guess really