The real world doesn't care nearly as much about effort as it does about the end result, except as a mitigation for failure. Why effort and not .2 x effort + .8 x accomplishment?
You can control your effort directly. You can only control your accomplishment indirectly, through the effort you put in.
Yeah, but the accomplishment is by far the most important part. It's very easy to expend a lot of effort doing things that don't actually increase one's chance of success on something, and I don't think that should be praised.
These things seem to go in waves. In the 1990s, I remember the opposite worry, that a bunch of new educational theories had put too much emphasis on praising effort rather than results, the whole A-for-effort thing. It's interesting that the politics have shifted a bit, though. I remember the emphasize-effort view being associated with clearly "liberal", almost hippie approaches, that what's important is encouraging…
Emphasize effort doesn't mean emphasize effort that lead to bad results. That is, it's not "as long as you put in effort" (which is the approach you're talking about), it's that when there is success the thing that should be praised is the effort to reach that success.
Sometimes you need to learn from your mistakes, regroup, change strategy, and try again. It's a balance between avoiding failure and learning from it, but not fearing failure of something that is just beyond your reach. Otherwise, we risk making the bar so low that we're praising effortless success.
Praising kids for effort is a mistake. That leads to adults who excel in giving the impression of expending great effort without properly planning for success. Praise kids for what you want - achievement.
Praising kids for effort is a mistake. That leads to adults who excel in giving the impression of expending great effort without properly planning for success. Praise kids for what you want - achievement.
Like most things in life, there's a middle-ground and a balance between the extremes that isn't easy to figure out. There's no easy answer for such things.
You can control your effort directly. You can only control your accomplishment indirectly, through the effort you put in.
Yeah, but the accomplishment is by far the most important part. It's very easy to expend a lot of effort doing things that don't actually increase one's chance of success on something, and I don't think that should be praised.
The reason to expend lots of effort on useless things is so that you're mentally conditioned to succeed when the important things come along.
Truly life-changing opportunities are fairly rare, and they usually pop up when you don't expect them. To capitalize on them, you have to be prepared. If you've been sitting around slacking off for the previous several years, you're probably not going to be in a position to pounce when the opportunity arises.
When my Daughter was born (now three) my wife insisted that I and everyone who has regular contact with her focus on her hard work and not simply say "you're soo smart!". It's tough to make that association but I think I've seen actual results from it. My daughter is about three weeks into ISR swim classes and I can see her shift into her "hard working" face even when she's a little upset or crying. She knows that sh…
The fact that your three year old daughter loves watching Futurama already says a lot about her mental aptitude/attitude.
I'm sure she doesn't "get" a lot of it at this stage, but I bet she will learn a surprising amount from sticking with it.
Praising kids for effort is a mistake. That leads to adults who excel in giving the impression of expending great effort without properly planning for success. Praise kids for what you want - achievement.
Like most things in life, there's a middle-ground and a balance between the extremes that isn't easy to figure out. There's no easy answer for such things.
There's a good bookm that reiterates the point in the article. Brain Rules. Worth a read.
It also depends on how strong your kids are. There is no silver bullet
To be honest your kids can usually figure out if they are smart or not pretty quickly once they enter the school system. The thing is there are lots of smart people out there. As you progress through the education system you usually meet people smarter than you and hopefully realise that you need to work to keep with them.
It's like thinking you are the king of code in your job and then discovering HN - you quickly realise there is always someone smarter so you need to work to get their level.