Labels

Every student I meet seems to have a label: gifted, good, bad, a problem, smart, shy, an “ADD kid, “on the spectrum.” Labels, like a diagnosis, help us understand, treat and organize how we help students. Unfortunately, these labels are often thrown around in front of the students, as if they can’t be heard. Remember Jane Elliot’s brown eye, blue eye experiment? Children look to their teachers and parents to help them understand their place in the world.

It may be expeditious to use labels, but there is a cost.

People tend to live up to their labels and diagnoses, good or bad. When I meet with students, they describe themselves with the labels they’ve been given. It is incredibly hard to correct that way of thinking and some may never overcome it. Think of a label you received in school. Does it still resonate?

The result of labeling is a “fixed” mindset, meaning the student believes they are that way. This is true of labels we consider complimentary, but can have unintended consequences.

Dr. Carol Dweck gave several hundred adolescent students a 10-question test. After the test, half of the students were praised with “Wow, that’s a really good score. You must be smart.” The other half heard, “Wow, that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.” The two groups did about the same on the test, but after the praise was lavished they began to look very differently. The half who received praise for their smarts adopted a “fixed mindset.”

These mindsets took hold and began to shape children’s identities. In the classroom, students who had been praised for their smarts and talent did the bare minimum required to get by; they were more reluctant to accept challenging extra work or to risk saying anything that might be wrong. They wouldn’t stretch themselves or take any intellectual leaps of faith for fear of not living up to the expectations (label) that had been bestowed on them.

When given a much harder test designed to elicit failure and frustration, the “smart” kids tended to give up. Those who had been praised for effort tried harder and said the hard problems were “more fun.”  Even when given easier problems, the “smart” kids did poorly. They could not bounce back from defeat, and did even worse on the easy problems than they had in the first round.

Finally, the students were asked to write their thoughts about the problems for future students and, while they were at it, write down their scores. Forty percent of the kids who were praised for smarts lied about their scores. As Dweck writes in her book Mindset, “we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.”

The point is that we need to be very careful with labels. They put students in a rut—ruts that can last a lifetime, limit creativity, and stunt a “growth” mindset.

Take aways:

– Students are very aware of their labels and tend to live up to them

– Labels also affect the way others (parents, teachers, students) view and treat them

– Beliefs about those labels are very hard to change and can become self-fulfilling

– Praise for effort, not result

Telling them what they are, really can affect who they could be.

Something to think about.