Anyway, all we can do is wait. Until then, we keep telling each other not to lose heart. I get along pretty well with all my teachers.
– The Diary of Anne Frank
Students who receive discouraging or unforgiving responses from friends, teachers, and family when they make mistakes may feel more vulnerable about making mistakes in front of others (and learning from them). This would decrease trust and give rise to insecurity about one’s abilities …
– Beyond Academic Learning
In The Diary of Anne Frank, she describes how Mr Keesing, her Math teacher was mad at her for talking too much in class. On her third attempt at writing an essay to explain her behaviour, she achieved a breakthrough with Mr Keesing with a poem about ducklings and Mr Keesing never stopped her from talking since.
Though Mr Keesing had been uncompromising about his expectations of her, she did not feel any fear or discomfort in her class and in fact trusted him so much that she used every essay she wrote to convince him that she had to talk in class.
Her first two essays on the matter were based on logic and rhetoric and these did not seem to sway Mr Keesing. When she was punished the third time, she decided to be more creative and submitted a poem which was in essence still an argument but one couched in metaphor.
She begins this same account by recounting how her class was “quaking in its boots” while awaiting the results of their test and shares that she got along with all her teachers.
The statement, “I got along well with most of my teachers” appeared in The Survey of Social and Emotional Skills administered by OECD in partnership with an international consortium led by The Australian Council for Educational Research and Ohio State University, to 60,000 students in 10 cities, aged 10 and 15.
The survey aimed to measure how students in participating cities felt about their social and emotional skills and study the connection of their self-perception to other outcomes such as academic performance, career success, health and psychological well-being.
Apart from student responses to questionnaires, which could be unreliable for several reasons, the organisers also got input from the parents, teachers and school principals of participants to get a more accurate picture.
One of its findings is that students who reported getting along well with their teachers reported lower test anxiety along with higher curiosity and creativity. Students who reported themselves as having high curiosity also saw themselves as more creative.
Curiosity was described as, “an emotional disposition towards learning” and as one of two most important factors which determined how well participants fared in their exams. Creativity was described as crucial for the labour market.
The survey also found that for adolescents across cities, levels of curiosity and creativity dropped along with most other social – emotional skills such as agreeableness (how well they got along with others) and conscientiousness (how responsible they were and how well they were able to exercise self-control). The only qualities 15-year-olds reported they had more of compared to 10-year-olds were assertiveness and tolerance. All qualities recovered as teenagers became young adults.
The report on these findings, published in 2021, underscores the relevance and importance of social and emotional skills for desired life outcomes. As evidence of this, among other examples, the experience of the General Educational Development (GED) programme in the US is highlighted. The GED allows high-school dropouts to obtain a high-school diploma by passing a test. It was found that those who were in the GED were just as able to perform academically as those who remained in the school system but suffered bad life outcomes anyway because of “poorer social and emotional skills”. Throughout the report, many examples are given of how, social and emotional skills must be given at least as much attention as cognitive skills when developing students.
By social and emotional skills, the survey refers to Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability otherwise known as the Big Five.
Open-minded students (Openness to experience) are curious, tolerant and creative. To perform well on tasks (Conscientiousness), students need to develop responsibility, self-control and persistence. To engage well with others (Extraversion), students need to learn to be sociable, have high-energy levels in interactions and learn to assert themselves. To collaborate well (Agreeableness), students need empathy, trust and to know how to cooperate. Finally, emotional regulation (Emotional Stability) requires, optimism, resistance to stress and the ability to feel intense emotions without acting on them.
The report emphasises that the above are not pre-determined or fixed qualities but skills which can be strengthened over time. To strengthen these qualities, the environment which includes, parents, peers and teachers, matter.
Many of these qualities have to do with trust and the interactions between Anne Frank and Mr Keesing are instructive. The report notes that the character traits of children and adolescents are malleable to experience.
The report notes that when children get different responses to the same behaviour, they lose trust. Children and adolescents lose trust in their peers and other relevant adults when they receive only negative feedback when they make mistakes. They would also lose trust in their own abilities. It was found that students who worked independently and knew what to do to feel more relaxed when the stakes were high, felt less anxious before tests. Students who liked engaging a lot with peers felt more anxious before tests. The more independent types may have to worry less about the opinions of peers if they do not meet expectations.
It is not difficult to see how this loss of trust can lead to a loss of pro-social and other adaptive social-emotional skills. It will be difficult for fear (which results from a lack of trust) and curiosity to co-exist. A student who has been harshly reprimanded because of having communicated, would find it difficult to be assertive or have high-energy levels in interactions and may well lose out on opportunities. Interestingly when OECD compared the social-emotional competencies curricula of the participating countries, it appears like only the Chinese curriculum has stated assertiveness as an explicit curricular objective for its students.
The report states that test anxiety would result when students feel it is not safe to make mistakes. Test anxiety would affect performance. To be creative means to try things not tried before. Someone who does not trust that it is safe to do so, will probably not do so.
Anne Frank could not understand why she was not allowed to do what came naturally to her. She wanted to assert herself and was allowed to do so, in productive and beneficial ways. She could get along with Mr Keesing because she trusted that he was a reasonable person who understood the spirit behind the letter matters more and someone who was not uncomfortable with loosening the reins in service of the larger, long-term goal. When she responded with creativity, he laughed along with the class and affirmed her effort.
Deer are not always skittish.
The Brain Dojo
