Why elbow grease matters in education
For slightly convoluted reasons (a Kindle subscription was involved) I found myself reading Daniel Kahneman’s doorstop Thinking, Fast and Slow. Among the many (oh so many) fascinating titbits Kahneman doles out is a story about predicting the future performance of young military personnel.
Initially, he and his team did routine interviews with the soldiers. The trained interviewers would then predict the recruits’ likely outcomes. “Unfortunately,” Kahneman notes, “follow-up evaluations had already indicated that this interview procedure was almost useless for predicting the future success of recruits.”
So he designed an interview method that ignored the future but assessed past form on a selected set of traits such as responsibility, sociability, etc. Kahneman writes:
“I composed for each trait… factual questions about the individual’s life before his enlistment, including the number of different jobs he had held, how regular and punctual he had been in his work and studies, the frequency of his interactions with friends, and his interest and participation in sports, among others.”
After conducting hundreds of interviews with the new assessment, performance evaluations found the new questions “predicted soldiers’ performance much more accurately than the global evaluations of the previous interviewing method… we had progressed from ‘completely useless’ to ‘moderately useful.’”
This may seem an intuitive finding to anyone who’s heard, much less repeated, the much bandied quote from the philosopher Will Durant: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
But how many of us — especially teachers — are guilty of acting contrary to common sense and relying on subjective judgments instead of factual evidence?
Every educator has encountered students who have potential. We see flashes of brilliance and judge what a student might do. This is probably most widespread when it comes to writing recommendations: most ask teachers to predict the student’s future performance.
If we trust Kahneman’s research even a little bit, we should be more circumspect about prognostication and base our predictions, if we must make them, on students’ habitual behaviors.
Intellectual capacity, even if it is extraordinary, only yields positive outcomes when applied. A genius who spends class time scrolling or staring into space is unlikely to outperform a hard-working counterpart, regardless of intellectual capacity.
Take as an example my real-life genius brother. He dropped out of high school, then skated through a BS in Economics without buying textbooks. But he had a track record of deep, almost obsessive, dives into topics that fascinated him.
His laser focus and intellectual capacity meant he could become an expert on anything, once he applied himself. When he put his mind to programming, he swiftly developed a robust, well-remunerated career.
It wasn’t sheer brainpower, although he has that in abundance; it was his capacity for work and focus that transformed talent into expertise.
Smarts are nothing without elbow grease.
It is a pleasure to encounter gifted students. But it is an educator’s business proclaim talent is not enough. Habits of work are more important to eventual success than the ability to easily complete a particular academic task. Ease is the enemy of growth.
Didactic and assessment methods that reward superficial ‘mastery’ are likely to encourage poor work habits, hampering students’ chances of excelling as they continue their studies and move toward adulthood.
Teachers need to ensure gifted learners experience authentic difficulties and even (whisper it) the occasional failure. Ultimately, diligence and a growth mind-set are more valuable than a few good grades.