Unlocking Student Potential

How do I identify and activate student strengths? (ASCD Arias)

Yvette Jackson, Veronica McDermott

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781416621188
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What if your next faculty meeting began with this question: What are the strengths of our underachieving students? When teachers recognize and focus on student strengths, they transform the learning environment into one of positivity and potential. Students begin to believe in themselves as capable, valued, and respected and show more willingness to invest and engage in school. They perform better. They crave and enjoy academic challenge, and they delight in outdoing themselves. Focusing on strengths is a no-cost, highly effective, nontraditional way of addressing persistent underachievement. Drawing on authors Yvette Jackson and Veronica McDermott's experiences supporting the transformations of schools repeatedly labeled as underachieving, this book offers concrete ways to identify student strengths and then build on them in your classroom or school throughout the year. These field-tested strategies will help awaken students' belief in their own potential and put them on the path to lasting success.

Starting from Strengths

Who among us wants to be reminded, yet again, of the negative, of our shortcomings, of long-standing and seemingly intractable failure? Education policy has long asked educators to mine for what is wrong with students, to search for their deficits, to pinpoint where they fall short of arbitrary standards devoid of context, and to find ways to remediate their performance.

Our orientation is totally opposite. We posit that if you (regardless of your role) start with strengths, you have the capacity to unlock the potential of every student—and teacher—in your school. The real achievement gap is not one that highlights the distance between the performance of students of different races and a set of normative achievement levels but between individual performance and individual potential (Jackson, 2011).

As lifelong educators serving students in the public schools of New York State and New York City, we have firsthand experience of the brilliance of our underachieving students and the systems that often fail them. Our work with the National Urban Alliance (NUA) has taken us to U.S. schools of every kind (urban, rural, suburban) where we have met educators like you who are eager to cultivate potential. And they love the idea that you can start with something simple: identifying and activating student strengths. Although many of the examples provided are from middle schools, they can be modified for all grade levels and can be used by teachers; school, department, and district leaders; coaches; and school counselors.

This book draws upon our experiences working in schools repeatedly labeled as underachieving that are transforming themselves through the implementation of the Pedagogy of Confidence® (Jackson, 2011), an approach designed to help all students become self-directed learners rather than school-dependent ones. The foundation of the Pedagogy of Confidence is a set of seven interrelated High Operational Practices™:

• Identifying and activating student strengths
• Building relationships
• Eliciting high intellectual performance
• Providing enrichment
• Integrating prerequisites for academic learning
• Situating learning in the lives of students
• Amplifying student voice (Jackson, 2011, p. 89)

"Identifying and activating student strengths" is deliberately listed first, because it has been neglected for so long as a practice for reversing underachievement and increasing learning (Jackson, 2011). Additionally, starting from strengths kick-starts a new, positive, and powerful way of learning, teaching, and being; a way in which students and teachers are motivated by the affirmation of their strengths and their potential.

Why Shine the Spotlight on Strengths?

Jettisoning the deficit model and replacing it with one that starts from student strengths is a no-cost, highly effective, nontraditional way of addressing persistent underachievement. Sadly, as a 2014 Gallup poll suggests, paying attention to strengths is not something U.S. schools do very well.

What students say. The 20-question Gallup student poll measures three elements—hope, engagement, and well-being—that predict student academic success and future employment. The survey is given to students in grades 5–12 whose buildings have opted to be part of the poll. As such, it is a selective sampling of how students think about hope, engagement, and well-being.

The engagement survey contains three questions that directly address strengths:

• At this school, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
• In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good schoolwork.
• My school is committed to building the strengths of each student.

These three questions received the lowest average score of all the survey questions. Further, the scores declined as students moved up in grade level.

These results suggest that capitalizing on strengths is not part of our pedagogical investment strategy and becomes even less of a focus as students progress through school. If the scores on these questions went up each year, building on what was developed the year before, imagine how different high school classes would look and feel; how involved and enthusiastic high school graduates would be; what would happen to dropout rates; what a rewarding experience teaching high school seniors would be.

What adults say. Adults, too, know when their strengths are being used and when they are not. Its impact on job satisfaction and productivity is huge. Workplace studies indicate that when leadership focuses on an employee’s strengths, the odds that the employee will be engaged, be productive, and feel a sense of well-being increases eightfold compared to when leaders fail to focus on the strengths of their employees (Rath & Conchie, 2008).

The strengths spiral. Early self-awareness of strengths has long-lasting effects. Students who are aware of their strengths and know how to employ them strategically generally meet with success. Success breeds success. Our job as educators is to provide opportunities for all students to benefit from this cumulative advantage.

Standards

Focusing on strengths has the power to unlock student—and teacher—potential. The big question is how do schools transition from deficit thinking to strengths thinking. When it comes to poking holes in the deficit narrative about underperforming students, we have found that the following what if exercise works wonders.

Imagine this: At your next foray into data mining or the next grade level, department, or faculty meeting, you and your colleagues focus on a simple question, one we always use when we meet a faculty for the first time: What are the strengths of our underachieving students?

You may want to try this yourself. What words would you choose? Creative? Resilient? Verbal? Honest? Loyal? Relationship-Oriented? Multilingual? Tenacious? Media Savvy? Do your underachieving students also display the ability to problem solve, meet multiple demands, or take on adult responsibilities? In other words, are they able to judge, analyze, compare, contrast, and synthesize? These abilities represent important cognitive skills, used by anyone in the course of learning new information.

These abilities also closely align with many of the descriptors of college and career readiness found in the Common Core State Standards, as well as state and district goals. A quick look at the desired outcomes of the English and mathematics goals of the Common Core standards proves this point. As defined in the standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010), students who are college and career ready do the following:

In English they

• Demonstrate independence.
• Build strong content knowledge.
• Respond to varying demands of audience, task, purpose, and discipline.
• Comprehend and critique.
• Value evidence.
• Use technology and digital media.
• Understand other perspectives and cultures.

In mathematics they

• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
• Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
• Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
• Model.
• Use appropriate tools strategically.
• Attend to precision.
• Look for and make use of structure.
• Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

An interesting exercise is to make explicit the ways in which your underachieving students demonstrate these goals, often in out-of-school settings. Do they demonstrate independence? Do they have the ability to comprehend deeply? How about their skills in the use of technology and digital media? When and how do they make sense of problems and persevere? Can they construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others? In other words, your underachieving students possess many of the prerequisite cognitive skills demanded by the standards.

The question for educators is how do you tap into these skills that are often demonstrated in out-of-school or nonacademic settings so that students are aware of their strengths, inclined to employ them in school-oriented activities, and strategic in their ability to apply them with competence and confidence for self-directed learning, self-actualization, and making personal contributions?

What Science Says About Identifying and Activating Strengths

Whenever we shepherd a group of educators through strengths-identifying activities, we have the privilege of observing the way the energy in the room changes. Teachers—many of whom work in schools in their district or state deemed to be "low performing"—become animated. They smile. They laugh. Their eyes open, literally and figuratively. They see their students through the powerful lens of potential, capacity, and possibility. Their task as educators seems less daunting, maybe even joyful.

When teachers recognize and activate student strengths, the students themselves are also transformed. They are better prepared to do what they were born to do: learn. Students begin to believe in themselves as capable, valued, and respected. They define themselves as learners. They are willing to invest and engage in school. They perform better. They crave and enjoy academic challenge, and they delight in outdoing themselves.

There is a neurobiological reason for these positive feelings teachers and students experience. When you identify students’ strengths, their innate potential is confirmed for you and for them. This confirmation expands both your belief in their ability and motivation to excel and in your belief in your ability to elicit and nurture their potential and abilities. It also expands your students’ beliefs in their own potential. For both teachers and students, this acknowledgment of strengths activates the "glow" of competence and confidence—the neurological response from the stimulation they begin to experience (Jackson, 2011, p. 9; Jensen, 1998).

Both cognitive science, the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes, and neuroscience, the science of the nervous system which makes up one aspect of cognitive science, have revealed some exciting and useful information about how the brain receives, processes, and retrieves information.

Confidence acquired from competence causes us to become intensely stimulated. This stimulation causes a burning of glucose, which results in our brain "glowing" from the energy of the glucose that is consumed. The stimulation is actually acting like a brain "nutrient," making us feel stronger. For teachers, demonstrations of student learning and success resulting from our teaching serve as feedback to us about our choices. This feedback is a great asset, because it fuels us with both a deep sense of competence and a sense of being valued. This sense of competence and being valued releases neurotransmitters of pleasure—endorphins—which help us enjoy our work more. When feelings of competence are increased, fewer catecholamines (the body’s natural chemical response to stress) are released. (Jackson, 2011, p. 9)

For students, affirmation of their strengths is feedback to them about their learning and potential. When you highlight your underachieving students’ strengths—and you and your students experience the "glow" that accompanies such an exercise—the culture of the school changes. School takes on the sparkle of a place where lives can be transformed and differences are the stuff of celebration. It embodies and cultivates "teaching, learning, and other miracles," not for material success, but as part of what Grace Feuerverger calls "a sacred life journey, a quest toward liberation" (2007, p. 1).

Once you change the way you look at your underachieving students, it becomes impossible to see them through a deficit lens. As one teacher put it, "You cannot un-see what you have seen." The same is true for the students themselves. By highlighting and affirming your students’ strengths and the positive ways in which this knowledge makes you and your students feel, you have taken the first step toward transforming learning outcomes and eradicating what we have termed the crime of squandered potential (Jackson & McDermott, 2012).

If you are interested in flipping the script on student underachievement by shifting the focus from one of mining for deficits to one of identifying and activating student strengths, you have clearly identified your intention. The question, then, is what do you need to pay attention to in order to reap the benefits of a focus on strengths? The rest of this book is designed to provide you with the understandings, strategies, and examples to help you apply a strength-based approach to learning and teaching in your school or classroom.

What Are Strengths and How Do They Work?

Strengths are the outgrowth of interests activated by exposure and practice. Identifying and activating student strengths inspires students’ belief in their thinking and potential. It encourages investment in learning and ownership of the process of self-actualization (Jackson, 2011).

For many students, especially younger students and those conditioned to think of themselves negatively, some priming needs to be done to help them recognize what strengths are. Young students in particular equate strengths with muscle, sinew, and brawn. A little guidance helps them to understand that when you are talking about strengths you mean qualities such as strength of character, mental functions, and habits of mind or dispositions, and not physical strength.

Several years ago the entire 6th grade of a school that had the dubious distinction of hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Starting from Strengths
• Encore Divider
• Encore
• References
• Related Resources
• About the Authors
• Copyright