Taking the Student’s Perspective

As teachers, we spend a good deal of time thinking about what we want students to learn and ways to teach them.

Our goal is to ensure their learning proves useful and enduring beyond our classrooms.

Our previous session focused on how we make, store, and retrieve memories.

Recall that learning is mostly about changes in long-term memory, so effective teaching is about making that happen.

This is why our focus up to now has largely been on the intellectual and cognitive.

We've discussed how the mind works to make sense of what's happening in school, in order to learn the skills, knowledge, and dispositions we want all students to possess.

How children learn in that cognitive sense is what any successful teacher works to understand and translate into useful teaching strategies, but it's never easy.

We've all taught students whom we've given lots of feedback and encouraged, cared for, worried about, and who still seem to struggle to learn.

These same students frequently work hard, but success remains fleeting, their motivation drops, and then begins that self-amplifying spiral of lowered expectations, diminished confidence, and falling behind.

Now, many factors can cause this kind of negative cycle.

As a teacher, I know all too well the day-to-day challenges kids face.

It can be heartbreaking to watch, and cognitive science in the psychology of learning can't fix every case.

That said, research is now revealing what our most effective teachers have long known, psychological and social considerations, what are frequently called non-cognitive factors, can powerfully influence student motivation, and therefore their learning.

What's more, these non-cognitive factors can disproportionally affect students who are not thriving in some way.

Now, the really exciting thing about this research is that it demonstrates how relatively small strategies we can bring to our classrooms can make significant differences in our students' learning and academic well-being.

So, let's quickly introduce the non-cognitive factors we'll be learning about in the following units.

You can learn more about this subject than we'll cover here in the literature citations in our resources section.

You'll find some really useful articles there.

Here are five statements that represent student mindsets or beliefs that capture the essence of the most important non-cognitive factors affecting learning.

My ability and competence grow with my effective effort.

I belong in this community.

This work has value for me.

I can succeed at this.

Meaningful learning requires struggle, confusion, and even mistakes.

That's a pretty simple set of statements, but it's richly informative in so many ways for our students' learning.

Notice that they don't reflect skills or knowledge in a classic cognitive sense, they are beliefs and values that students develop about themselves and their own intelligence, their feelings about school and what causes success, the quality of their relationships with peers and adults, and their understanding about the very nature of what it means to learn.

These mindsets can be important motivators for students, both to learn and to develop habits that will promote their learning in school.

Our role is to help them develop these mindsets in meaningful ways.

Now the first step in this process is to understand how students are experiencing and approaching their time at school.

In other words, what are they thinking as they sit in our classroom? They might be wondering, am I prepared enough? Will people accept me for who I am? Am I the only one struggling? How will I fit in? Am I smart enough? Different students can experience the same classroom environment in vastly different ways, which in turn can affect their learning.

This is why being mindful of the non-cognitive factors that influence learning is so crucial for us.

Now, taking the student's perspective can go a long way in helping us help them develop the mindsets they need to succeed in school.

As we'll see, mindsets alone don't assure academic success.

Our biggest challenge is to ensure these mindsets and beliefs are translated into positive and real impacts on school performance through the development of effective learning strategies and other self-regulatory skills.