(You are reading the eighth post in a series about cognitive science in your homeschool, click here for the introductory post and links to the other posts in this series.)
“Children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work.” – Willingham
I believe very strongly in the malleability of intelligence. The old idea that intelligence was fixed mostly by genetics has been largely disproven. This doesn’t mean genes have no role to play, it just means their role is much more insignificant than scientists originally thought. It has been shown over and over again that hard work, and the belief that you can learn, are the only ingredients needed to shatter your own previous barriers of intelligence.
The name of my blog arose from these ideas. I think of genius as just a pool of knowledge that we can jump into whenever we decide we want it enough. It is not predestined, fixed, or relegated to a few lucky people.
Improving a child’s intelligence in large part is convincing them they want to be smart, that smartness can be attained through effort, and the effort is worth the acquired smartness.
Well, it is easier to convince some kids than others. Also, I will say, some kids do seem to learn more easily than others. Some kids just don’t need much repetition. The science on why this is true is still being worked out. Possible theories are: the speed and capacity of working memory could vary between people or perhaps people have different neuron firing speeds. We don’t know.
Regardless, we do know that intelligence is not fixed. Perhaps one of the reasons I believe so strongly that intelligence can be changed is that I have lived through the frustration of teaching a Slow learner. The hours and hours needed to acquire reading skills and math facts that another child seemed to grasp and memorize in the blink of an eye. Not only that, but I am on the other side. The slow child is smart, considered highly intelligent by his peers, and actually learns faster than he did years ago. He is no longer a slow learner.
I saw first hand that slow learners are not only smart, but we can actually change their brain, so they will not be slow learners forever. The main point of this idea in Willingham’s book is to convince everyone that slow learners are not dumb, they are not incapable of learning, and we should not put them into dumbed down classes. They actually need sped up classes, because we need to start where they are, but keep teaching at a rapid pace until they are caught up with their peers. In the homeschool world, we don’t have to worry so much about whether or not our child is behind or ahead of their peers. But we do need to worry about whether we are sending the right messages about intelligence.
Research has shown the danger of certain forms of praise that are seemingly benign and widely used in our society. Telling your kids they are smart actually limits how they think about intelligence. We need to praise hard work and effort. Don’t praise a kid for doing well on an assignment if you know he put in little effort, even if it was done perfectly. Praise the effort, the reach into unknown territory, the courageous spirit it takes to tackle things so hard for your student that they know from the start they might very well fail.
Slow learners need more hours of structured learning and they need to work hard and care and believe. This is just done with sheer grit. More hours of math facts, more time spent reading, more background knowledge that may need to be presented more frequently before it makes it into long-term memory. And their brain will change. Because brains do.
How do we get our kids to believe they can change their brain? That learning will get easier? Just by believing yourself. Believe so hard your kid can’t get around it. Eventually, your deep, stubborn, unbreakable belief will rub off on them, because you never let them quit. And sometime after you refuse to let them quit trying they will improve so much that they will notice. (This could take years, so be patient and don’t despair.) They will remember their old struggle, they will see their new found ease, and their own belief in their ability to learn will never waver. Sure, they may meet frustration again, but they will thrive on it, seek it out because they seek the high that came the last time they got to the end of frustration and conquered it.
This is why sometimes my previously slow learner picks the hardest thing to learn. He knows it would be easy to study Spanish or French because he spent two years learning Latin. But where is the fun in that? On the contrary, he has chosen to study Chinese, because it will be hard. He wants the challenge because he knows he will win and it will feel great.
When it comes to this kind of growth mindset, it is actually easier to teach a slow learner how to have this mindset than a kid who is a born fast learner. Sure there were hair pulling moments, both for the mom, and the child, when learning came so difficultly. But when the conquering was done, the belief was there and is unshakable.
For my fast learners, it is much more difficult to instill this belief. They are used to ease, want to remain in the safe zone of learning, where they know they will get every problem right. They fall much more easily into the trap of thinking they are dumb if they don’t understand something on the first glance. These kids are a whole different jungle to wade through. One that will be easy if you let it, ’cause you certainly can just let them coast. But if all they do as kids is coast, when they hit a wall in learning later, they will most likely let it stop them. This is not okay. I make these kids work hard, which means well above grade level, in at least one subject. Because they need to learn how to struggle, how to overcome, and that failure just means you aren’t done yet.
It is time to take another lesson from The Tortoise and the Hare, it doesn’t matter how fast you learn if you just keep going.
And also, if you are a hare, don’t be so confident that you take a nap.
This is just a short explanation of the concept covered by Willingham. There is so much more in his book, and I strongly recommend reading it. One thing Willingham does in his book is take you through many more examples, persuading you as he introduces each idea. If I had a top ten books home educators should read, this would be on it.
