I’ve just completed a set of great graffiti workshops with young people in Peckham and Southwark. We had fun, learnt a lot and developed some good relationships.
Spraypainting is very difficult, but for some reason people think they’ll be really good straight away! This gives me a great opportunity to help them work through fears of failure and realise that the only way to get good at difficult things is practice.
I was pleased to read in my feedback that the young people thought that with more practice they would get better.
One of the key workers helping out said “I liked the facilitation and the fact that you let the young people learn from their mistakes. Good relationships built with the young people as well”.
And some comments from the young people: “It was very good I liked everything about it”, “It was fun, good and lots of practice for when I’m older”.
How we give praise to children can have a significant effect on their beliefs about learning, their resilience and their test scores.
Carol Dweck has done a lot of research in this field, and published a series of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1998, Vol. 75, No. 1, 33-52.
128 children (10-12 years old) were given a set of moderately difficult puzzles and were then told they had done very well. A third were praised for their effort (”you must have worked really hard”), a third for their ability (”you must be smart at this”) and a third were given no additional feedback.
The children were then asked if they wanted to take a harder or easier test (performance or learning goal). 67% of children who had been praised for ability chose the easier test. 92% of those who had been praised for effort chose the harder test.
A harder test was given to all children to examine how they responded to failure. Those praised for effort enjoyed the harder task and wanted to persist in the test more than those praised for ability.
Finally all the children took a test equal in difficulty to the first test. Children receiving ability feedback solved 0.92 fewer problems than they did on the first test. Children praised for effort solved 1.21 more.
By being aware of our communication in the classroom, we can encourage children to choose learning goals over performance goals. We can help them to persist longer and to enjoy overcoming challenges. And we can increase their performance in tests.
How can we get these results into our schools? I offer 2 ways:
- a INSET workshop in mindset, read more here.
- one on one coaching with teachers.
I’m using presentation software from prezi.com. Again, if you have any stories/facts/anecdotes you want to share - please email me!
I participated in Music for Change’s excellent course 2 weeks ago. Much thanks and gratitude to Donna and her team’s work!
It was great to meet all the participants, facilitators and creative practitioners - really inspiring! The more people I meet who are directly involved in creative social change the more I’m convinced that this is my path. And it’s great to see proof of it working, to experience it, and to be inspired to create more myself.
The workshops also proved to be a mine of information; finding out about funding, other organisations, networking, games and lots of interesting ideas about creative curriculum.
I’ve since used some of the ideas in a beatboxing songwriting workshop for the teenagers in my youth club - it went down well!