In his popular TedTalk, Shawn Achor speaks about the need to escape “the cult of the average” through the lens of positive psychology. This is a break from the traditional aim of psychology – to understand and treat mental illness. Rather, positive psychology attempts, in the words of Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the seminal thinkers in the field, to allow humanity to flourish.

According to Achor, our brain’s current definition of happiness, one which pervades everything from parenting to business models, is based on working hard and being successful. One of the main problems with this traditional model is that “every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like… And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there.” 

Achor goes on to talk about how it is happiness that actually increases our chances of being successful:

If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJsdqxnZb0[/youtube]

This idea seems to pair well with Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset vs. fixed mindset. In a nutshell of her own creation, Dweck states that the fixed mindset is a great threat to our innate desire to learn. 

In the fixed mindset it’s not enough just to succeed. It’s not enough just to look smart and talented. You have to be pretty much flawless. And you have to be flawless right away… After all, if you have it you have it, and if you don’t you don’t… Beyond how traumatic a setback can be in the fixed mindset, this mindset gives you no good recipe for overcoming it. If failure means you lack competence or potential—that you are a failure – where do you go from there?

Importantly, a growth mindset can be learned and this has lots of implications for education, including Angela Lee Duckworth’s work on grit. 

However, what I’m wondering about is how we, as teachers, create, or avoid creating, a bar for success. As much as the educational system, at least in Ontario, has moved the emphasis more onto process and away from high numbers of assessments of learning, there is still a very clear bar that is the basis for everything from rubrics to standardized tests for any given grade. 

This is where you should be in grade 10. You are above, at, or below expectations. 

But is there no other way? Before I go any further, let me make it clear that I have no answer to the question. From here on out, I’m musing. 

I remember students being furious in a first-year undergrad English class because the professor told us that, to score 90-100% meant that your work was publishable. This was, he explained, the same way he graded his graduate students. Surely this meant that, as first year students, we had little hope of hitting that bar. But perhaps, this took away the traditional marker for success and forced me to redraw a map with a road that extended well beyond this single essay – a map without a finish line.  And without a finish line, a race becomes a journey.

If happiness must be placed, to borrow Achor’s terminology, on this side of the cognitive horizon – meaning before success – and if growth mindset thinking is about recognizing that traits are not fixed and can be developed, then there is certainly a common ground of emphasis on the pre-success process. 

Where these two ideas don’t seem to talk to each other is about where we should place success, or how that success is defined. For Achor, it lays somewhere beyond happiness; it is not the goal, but the product. For Dweck, it is a bit more complicated. For Dweck, it is important to recognize that a success is not the success. Setting goals, and recognizing a success is surely an important part of seeing growth, but it would seem that hitting success as some kind of a finish line is detrimental to maintaining a growth mindset. 

Just as Achor remarked how students quickly – within 2 weeks –  got over the joy of being accepted into Harvard as they were overwhelmed with the pressures and workload that had become their reality, student success, when measured by a great mark can be a fleeting feeling despite the work it took to get there. 

To tie Achor, Dweck, and my former English professor together, I find myself wondering all sorts of things about expectations and success: 

• Is the assessment language of below, at, or above expectations playing into what Achor describes as “the cult of the average”?
• In what ways can I “raise the bar” in my classroom and show students that it’s ok not to reach that bar yet, but still value their need for marks in competitive post-secondary positioning?
• How can I articulate the difference between those goals that help students mark progress and those that might inadvertently make students feel as if they are “done” with a specific skill?
• What is the best way to create a sense of happiness in the journey that isn’t performance-based? Would this potentially address the fleeting sense of happiness that comes when happiness is the result of success.
• What is the motivation that pushes a growth mindset to set a new goal? Is it happiness? Or success?

From a personal and professional standard I wonder then, where is “the bar”? And is it in the best interest of students (or professionals) to have a bar. If education is an embodiment of philosophy and one of the most oft quoted challenges for teachers is that practice so rarely mirrors theory, then surely there are no “best practices”, only potentially “better practices”. To have reached a “best practice” is to have reached an impressive, yet artificial level of success. If Achor is right, if Dweck is right, then perhaps the process is only hurt by the bar. Or maybe it’s just important that those bars are organized into the rungs of a ladder.