How to teach kids

How to teach kids? The question sounds simple enough, but ask 10 hubbers and you are likely to get more than 10 answers.

My simple answer is: encourage them to learn. Encourage them to develop a growth mindset allowing them to live up to challenges and to develop their strengths.

Of course this sounds much simpler than it is.

Two ways of looking at children’s learning

1. The child is naturally curious and will explore and learn by herself, as long as she is given the space to learn.
2. The child needs guidance to make the right choices, and we need to teach a curriculum, which prepares our children for the future.

Both of these routes happen and are necessary. Children learn to walk and talk without much doing from our side. Usually we do tend to encourage our child in this process, happy about each little activity and progress and confident he will learn it sooner or later.

In school our children are being taught according to a curriculum that was designed according to the age and development stage of the children. Unfortunately this is the moment where some children stop to enjoy learning, because “learning” gets in the way of “playing”, is “hard to do” and “I am not good at this”. In the worst case this will not only result in not having fun but also in losing confidence in one’s own abilities. And this is the moment to ask “how to teach kids?

In her years of research Carol Dweck (see sources to the right) found that student’s mindset was related to their long-term performance. She discriminated two mindsets: a fixed mindset based on the attitude that success is based on ability and intelligence, and a growth mindset fostered by the belief that achievement of goals depends on effort. Dweck found, that students with a growth mindset develop a better performance, better relationships and take more risks.

A fixed mindset limits your potential. You believe you have so only much intelligence which is not enough for the math course, and therefore you will fail the class. People with a fixed mindset fear failure, because failure shows they are not smart. A bad test score is forever. If you think you are intelligent, as a consequence you can’t afford to fail. As a consequence you try to avoid situation where you could potentially fail and rather opt for those where you can be successful. You don’t give it an extra effort, you don’t learn from mistakes. People with a fixed mindset opt for success over growth.

A growth mindset on the other hand does not ask “how intelligent am I?” but rather “what do I need to do to pass this math class?” So, children with a growth mindset will not necessarily like the class but they will sit down and study. And if they fail a test, they think “I have not studied enough or not in the right way, I need to try again.” They learn from their mistakes and choose situations which are challenging and learn form, because failure is not for life but an opportunity to learn and grow. People with a growth mindset know that success will take time and effort.

How does that relate to teaching? Dweck found that the teacher’s mindset influenced the student’s performance. In one study she divided a class randomly into two groups. Then teachers who did not know the kids, were to teach the class. The teachers were told that one group were good students and the others were not. The actual results of the groups were related to the teachers’ instructions.

Teachers with a fixed mindset don’t motivate kids to take the extra effort and try again. They don’t challenge the “good” students and thus miss to foster their self-esteem. Praising a student’s intelligence builds up pressure on that student to show that they are smart and not to allow for mistakes. A growth mindset teacher would praise the work done and give more challenging tasks to allow the students to make mistakes and learn from them. Similarly telling a kid that it is not talented for math will not encourage him to try again and give it an extra effort. While lowering standards will give students success experiences, it will really deprive them form learning and growing, and make them poorly educated students.

The teacher’s and parent’s mindset as well as their conscious or unconscious, spoken or unspoken feedback can change the meaning of failure and effort. Our mindset can put pressure on children or allow them to feel safe to learn. A growth mindset and its language can encourage children to learn and take efforts, grow their self-esteem while they are learning from their mistakes and encourage them to take challenges and see how they can make progress.

Parents and teachers have the power to change student’s mindsets. They can do so by attributing success and failure to the amount of effort invested rather than by fixed characteristics. They can encourage children to go for it and make it happen rather than blame them and replace praises like “you are so smart” by “you really did a good job here, you must have worked really hard”.

In school teaching sometimes becomes a “fixing of weaknesses” rather than a development of strengths, the former being frustrating and the latter encouraging.

What are strengths and weaknesses, and aren’t they related to a concept of a fixed mindset? They are if you think they are given and there. They are not in the sense that both strengths and weaknesses allow for development and growth. Strengths have to do with nature and with nurture and with motivation, it’s the kind of activity your child does out of own motivation, loves doing and can do it for hours on end forgetting about time. Motivation is an important aspect of it, because the effort you invest into something is much more effective if you enjoy what you are doing. Strengths have more to do with style and preferences than with ability.

How do we find out? Parents can observe their children for activities they enjoy doing, like for example meticulously collecting Pokémons, exploring the worms in the garden, rearranging and redecorating the room once a month or playing school teacher with heart and soul. Also little observations that your child prefers to do one thing over another and asking why can encourage self-reflection and give you and your child clues as to where her strengths lie. Next to the activity strengths the educator Jennifer Fox (see sources below) further identified learning strengths, which can be translated into learning styles and relationship strengths, which reflects the kind of contributions you can make to a relationship, and what others can expect from you. Is your child telling funny stories or does she prefer more intimate conversations with close friends?

What does this have to do with how we should teach children? We should encourage them to become aware of their strengths, of what they enjoy doing, how they do it and why they enjoy it. We should provide the space for them to live and further develop their strengths and chose classes, learning methods and environmental settings according to their strengths. We should encourage them to learn what they are interested in way they enjoy putting effort into further learning, and that accommodates their preferred relationship patterns.

Encourage kids to learn

Encouraging kids to learn means encouraging them to believe that they can attain their goals with persistence and effort, and that they can learn from mistakes and grow from increasing the challenge. Encouraging kids to learn also means to encourage them to explore and use their strengths, and build on what they enjoy doing, how they enjoy learning and how they prefer to contribute to relationships. This is a considerable effort for teachers and parents, and considering class sizes and the amount of other tasks waiting for us, it seems almost impossible to do for all children. Adopting a growth mindset we should give it the effort and learn how to do it using our own strengths.