{"id":14140,"date":"2013-04-24t13:31:46","date_gmt":"2013-04-24t18:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/?p=14140"},"modified":"2013-09-24t10:51:04","modified_gmt":"2013-09-24t15:51:04","slug":"ask-professor-pedagogy-handling-overachievers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/2013\/04\/ask-professor-pedagogy-handling-overachievers\/","title":{"rendered":"ask professor pedagogy: handling overachievers"},"content":{"rendered":"

by adam wilsman
\n<\/em>(professor p. is outside flying a kite)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>\"\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

ask professor pedagogy<\/strong> is a twice monthly advice column written by 2022年世界杯中国小组赛积分 staff. one aspect of our mission is to cultivate dialogue about teaching and learning, so we welcome questions and concerns that arise in the classroom; particularly those from vanderbilt faculty, students, and staff. if you have a question that you’d like professor p to address, please send it to us<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

dear professor p.,<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

this is my first year teaching history at vanderbilt, and i feel i have learned a lot about the students already.\u00a0 generally, they are excellent: intelligent, focused, and motivated.\u00a0 however, i have noticed another common theme: many of them are perfectionists who do not react well to the struggle of learning a difficult topic.\u00a0 i appreciate that my students are driven, but i have seen their perfectionism manifest itself in negative ways.\u00a0 they are terrified of failure, and in some cases, they are paralyzed by their desire to do everything just right.\u00a0 i try to be encouraging, but wonder if there\u2019s more than i can do for these students.\u00a0 what do you think?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

overwhelmed by overachievers<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

dear overwhelmed,<\/p>\n

this is indeed a common issue at vanderbilt.\u00a0 and as you note, this kind of perfectionism can be debilitating.\u00a0 such students who are afraid to mess up are frequently afraid to even try when things get tough.\u00a0 this is problematic because the vast majority of students who become experts of a given topic need to struggle through those topics over many years to attain that expertise. that messy part, the struggle of getting to know a topic well, can be especially challenging for these kinds of perfectionists.<\/p>\n

in his book, \u201cwhat the best college students do,\u201d dr. ken bain dedicates a chapter to the importance of embracing failure.\u00a0 \u201cpeople who become highly creative and productive learn to acknowledge their failures, even to embrace them, and to explore and learn from them,\u201d bain explains (p. 100).\u00a0bain even cites some famous examples of people who failed in significant ways.\u00a0 neil degrasse tyson, for example, flunked out of graduate school at the university of texas before becoming a world-renowned astronomer.<\/p>\n

so what can you do as the instructor?\u00a0 i believe that you can go beyond simply encouraging and assuring your students that struggling is part of the process of learning.\u00a0 you can cultivate a healthy attitude toward failure and promote an environment that allows for risk-taking in every element of your class.\u00a0 here are some ideas:<\/p>\n

discussion: <\/strong> there is much you can do to promote a healthy atmosphere for discussion, a space where students feel comfortable taking risks.<\/p>\n

set clear expectations for class discussions.<\/strong> express the importance of getting involved in class discussions, whether you\u2019re an expert on a topic or a novice.\u00a0 in fact, that disparity can be valuable in giving the class a variety of perspectives. <\/span><\/p>\n

promote an environment of trust and mutual respect <\/strong>by fostering a sense of personal connection through activities that allow students to become acquainted.\u00a0 pair or group activities are especially valuable for this.<\/p>\n

bolster student confidence <\/strong>by using names, being affirmative with students, and balancing student voices by protecting them from interruption by classmates (or the instructor!)<\/p>\n

be mindful of your own authority<\/strong>.\u00a0 many students may look to you as an authority figure that has all the answers.\u00a0 be sure to underscore the degree to which you too struggle through many of the difficult questions of your discipline.\u00a0 furthermore, let students grapple with those complicated questions in class discussions rather than swooping in at every turn to tell them the \u201cright answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

reading: <\/strong>when we assign readings, we often make assumptions that not only will students read them, but they will understand them.\u00a0 however, a lot of the texts that we require are challenging for students at any level.\u00a0 what can you do to encourage students to work through those difficult readings and not simply shut down when things become difficult?<\/p>\n

ask that students prepare a \u201cdifficulty paper,\u201d<\/strong> after reading.\u00a0 as explained by mariolina rizzi salvatori and patricia donahue in their work, <\/span>the elements (and pleasures) of difficulty<\/em>, a difficulty paper is a paper in which students \u201cidentify and begin to hypothesize the reasons for any possible difficulty\u201d that students might experience as they do the assigned reading.\u00a0 these papers can guide your class discussions and how you teach particular texts.\u00a0 difficulty papers also encourage students to be reflective about their reading process and push them to understand the degree to which struggling through a reading isn\u2019t a problem, it\u2019s expected!<\/span><\/p>\n

encourage students to create an inventory <\/strong>of difficult questions or concepts that arise as they read.\u00a0 you might even do a \u201cmuddiest point(s)\u201d exercise in which students write down a particularly challenging question or questions on an index card, bring that card to class, and review its contents with classmates or the instructor.\u00a0 whether you ask students to produce an inventory or a muddiest point card, these products can help direct class discussion and can give you a quick sense of the kinds of reading topics with which your students are having the most difficulty.<\/p>\n

writing: <\/strong>writing is an area in which perfectionists are particularly prone to struggle.\u00a0 in high school, our students may be able to get by with writing one final draft of a short essay.\u00a0 in college, good writing seldom looks that way and in graduate school, it almost never does.\u00a0 for most writers, writing is a messy process in which we draft, re-draft, and re-draft again before producing a polished piece of writing.\u00a0 what can we do to encourage good writing habits?<\/p>\n

make the writing process more transparent.<\/strong> too often college writing happens in isolation.\u00a0 the instructor assigns an essay topic and then does not interact with the writing process again until students come to class to hand in their papers.\u00a0 however, what happens in-between is in many ways most critical.\u00a0 in the above model, presumably students go off somewhere and write their essay, often waiting until the last minute to do so.\u00a0 but most instructors don\u2019t know how students get from point a to point b, and that\u2019s an area in which instructors in fields like english and history can be especially valuable.<\/p>\n

what\u2019s the alternative?\u00a0 ask students to come to class prepared to discuss their writing.<\/strong> ask them to bring in their thesis statement and share it with some classmates. set aside a day (or two or three!) for students to bring in a rough draft.\u00a0 you may be thinking, \u201cbut i don\u2019t have time to give all that feedback!\u201d\u00a0 while your feedback is valuable, these kinds of formative writing assignments lend themselves well to peer assessment.\u00a0 have your students discuss their progress with one another, then the next class period choose another partner to receive feedback from a variety of sources.\u00a0 ask some students to share out about their progress.\u00a0 ultimately, make transparent a process that too often happens behind closed doors. \u00a0underscore the degree to which good writing is produced by writing a lot over a long period of time and gradually honing that product!<\/p>\n

as you can see, there are ways to help perfectionist students to see that the messy part of learning \u2013 grappling with complicated issues in class discussion, struggling through difficult readings, and writing through challenging topics \u2013 is a rewarding process.\u00a0 it\u2019s a process that need not be scary, but is in fact a major part of becoming an expert in history, english, math, or well, anything!<\/p>\n

good luck!
\nprofessor p.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by adam wilsman (professor p. is outside flying a kite)   ask professor pedagogy is a twice monthly advice column written by 2022年世界杯中国小组赛积分 staff. one aspect of our mission is to cultivate dialogue about teaching and learning, so we welcome questions and concerns that arise in the classroom; particularly those from vanderbilt faculty,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":452,"featured_media":9660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[215,214],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wp0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/59\/2018\/07\/09154331\/mailbag.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14140"}],"collection":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/452"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14140\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}