Episode 51: What Schools Can Do About Achievement Culture

We all want our students to excel. In many ways, schools are set up to foster achievement – to help students reach their potential, strive for great things, and move on to successful next steps after graduation. But as Jennifer Wallace shares in her book Never Enough, focusing on achievement can create a culture that quickly becomes toxic to kids. Where do we cross the line, and what can we do about it?

Guests: Jennifer Wallace and Debra Wilson

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Unfortunately, in our modern society, we get a lot of false alarms. You know, we get the threat when our kid doesn't make the team or doesn't get the invite to the Friday night party that there is something, you know, an alarm going off in our head, but it's really just a bagel burning. The whole house isn't going down.” (9:54)
• “When I asked the young students how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement, ‘I feel like I matter for who I am at my core, not by what I achieve’ a surprising 25% of students either agreed a little or not at all, meaning that one in four students thought that it was their performance, not who they were as a person, that mattered most to their parents.” (19:56)
• “I was listening to a speaker at a conference a bit ago…he was actually talking about successful teams, basically, what makes an extraordinary team. And he was talking about competitiveness, but not competitive with each other, but for each other for a common purpose….When you start building in project-based learning, and particularly if you can harness and teach kids how to harness that power of being collectively competitive for a common cause, for a common purpose, and to start mapping that with what we want them to learn, I just think that's an incredibly powerful piece of the equation.” (40:23)

Related Episodes: 48, 43, 40, 35, 29, 22, 13

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