When Children Fail in School: Understanding Learned Helplessness

by Carmen Y. Reyes

Learned helplessness is the belief that our own behavior does not influence what happens next; that is, behavior does not control outcomes or results. For example, when a student believes that she is in charge of the outcome, she may think, “If I study hard for this test, I’ll get a good grade.” On the contrary, a learned helpless student thinks, “No matter how hard I study for this test, I’ll always get a bad grade.” In school, learned helplessness relates to poor grades and underachievement, and to behavior difficulties. Students who experience repeated school failure are particularly prone to develop a learned helpless response style. Because of repeated academic failure, these students begin to doubt their own abilities, leading them to doubt that they can do anything to overcome their school difficulties. Consequently, they decrease their achievement efforts, particularly when faced with difficult materials, which leads to more school failure. This pattern of giving up when facing difficult tasks reinforces the child’s belief that he or she cannot overcome his or her academic difficulties.

Learned helplessness seems to contribute to the school failure experienced by many students with a learning disability. In a never-ending cycle, children with a learning disability frequently experience school difficulties over an extended period, and across a variety of tasks, school settings, and teachers, which in turn reinforces the child’s feeling of being helpless.

Characteristics of Learned Helpless Students

Some characteristics of learned helpless children are:               

1.      Low motivation to learn, and diminished aspirations to succeed in school.

2.      Low outcome expectations; that is, they believe that, no matter what they do in school, the outcome will always be negative (e.g. bad grades). In addition, they believe that they are powerless to prevent or overcome a negative outcome.

3.      Lack of perceived control over their own behavior and the environmental events; one’s own actions cannot lead to success.

4.      Lack of confidence in their skills and abilities (low self-efficacy expectations). These children believe that their school difficulties are caused by their own lack of ability and low intelligence, even when they have adequate ability and normal intelligence. They are convinced that they are unable to perform the required actions to achieve a positive outcome.

5.      They underestimate their performance when they do well in school, attributing success to luck or chance, e.g., “I was lucky that this test was easy.”

6.      They generalize from one failure situation or experience to other situations where control is possible. Because they expect failure all the time, regardless of their real skills and abilities, they underperform all the time.

7.      They focus on what they cannot do, rather than focusing on their strengths and skills.

8.      Because they feel incapable of implementing the necessary courses of action, they develop passivity and their school performance deteriorates.

The Pessimistic Explanatory Style

Learned helpless students, perceive school failure as something that they will never overcome, and academic events, positive or negative, as something out of their control. This expectation of failure and perceived lack of control is central in the development of a learned helpless style. The way in which children perceive and interpret their experiences in the classroom helps us understand why some children develop an optimistic explanatory style, and believe that they are capable of achieving in school and others develop a pessimistic explanatory style, believing that they are not capable of succeeding in school (Seligman, Reivich, Jaycox, and Gilham, 1995).

Children with an optimistic explanatory style attribute school failure to momentary and specific circumstances; for example, “I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Children with a pessimistic explanatory style explain negative events as something stable (the cause of the negative event will always be present), global(the cause of the negative event affects all areas of their lives), and internal (they conclude that they are responsible for the outcome or consequence of the negative event). A typical pessimistic explanatory style is, “I always fail no matter what I do.” On the contrary, when the outcome of the event is positive, a pessimistic child attributes the outcome to unstable (the cause of the event is transitory), specific (the cause of the event is situation specific), and external (other people or circumstances are responsible for the outcome) causes.

Learned Helpless Students Need Learning Strategies

Due to this perceived lack of control of the negative event, a learned helpless child is reluctant to seek assistance or help when he is having difficulty performing an academic task. These children are ineffective in using learning strategies, and they do not know how to engage in strategic task behavior to solve academic problems. For example, learned helpless children are unaware that if they create a plan, use a checklist, and/or make drawings, it will be easier for them to solve a multistep math word problem. With learned helpless children, success alone (e.g. solving accurately the multistep problem), is not going to ease the helpless perception or boost their self-confidence; remember that these children attribute their specific successes to luck or chance. According to Eccles, Wigfield, and Schiefele (1998), trying to persuade a learned helpless child that she can succeed, and asking her just to try hard, will be ineffective if we do not teach the child specific learning and compensatory strategies that she can apply to improve her performance when facing a difficult task. The authors state that the key in helping a learned helpless child overcome this dysfunctional explanatory pattern is to provide strategy retraining (teaching her strategies to use, and teaching explicitly when she can use those strategies), so that we give the child specific ways to remedy achievement problems; coupled with attribution retraining, or creating and maintaining a success expectation. When we teach a learned helpless child to use learning strategies, we are giving her the tools she needs to develop and maintain the perception that she has the resources to reverse failure. Ames (1990) recommends that, in combination with the learning strategies, we help the learned helpless child develop individualized short-term goals, e.g., “I will make drawings to accurately solve a two-steps math word problem.” When the child knows and implements learning strategies, she will be able to experience progress toward her individualized goals.

Learned Helpless Students Need to Believe that Effort Increases Skills

To accomplish this, we need to help learned helpless children recognize and take credit for the skills and abilities that they already have. In addition, we need to develop in children the belief that ability is incremental, not fixed; that is, effort increases ability and skills. Tollefson (2000) recommends that we help children see success asimprovement; that is, we are successful when we acquire or refine knowledge and skills we did not have before. We need to avoid communicating children that, to succeed in school, they need to perform at a particular level, or they need to perform at the same level than other students. When we help children see success as improvement, states Tollefson, we are encouraging them to expend effort to remediate their academic difficulties. In addition, we are training them to focus on strategies and the process of learning, rather than outcomes and achievement.

Concluding Comments

To minimize the negative impact of learned helplessness in children, we need to train them to focus on strategies and processes to reach their academic goals, reinforcing the belief that, through effort, they are in control of their own behavior, and that they are in charge of developing their own academic skills. For example, to help a child focus on the learning process, after failure, we can tell the child, “Maybe you can think of another way of doing this.” This way, our feedback stays focused on the child’s effort and the learning strategies he or she is using -within both the child’s control and modifiable. When children themselves learn to focus on effort and strategies, they can start feeling responsible for positive outcomes, and responsible for their own successes in school and in life.

References

Ames, C. A. (1990). Motivation: What teachers need to know. Teachers College Record. Vol. 91, No. 3, pp. 409-421.

Eccles, S., Wigfield, A., and Schiefele, U. (1998). Motivation to succeed. In Eisenberg, N. (Ed.) Handbook of Child Psychology. Vol. 3 (5th ed., pp. 1017-1095). New York: Wiley.

Seligman, M. E., Reivich, K., Jaycox, L., & Gillham, J. (1995). The optimistic child. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Tollefson, N. (2000). Classroom applications of cognitive theories of motivation. Educational Psychology Review, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 63-83.

8 Important Reasons For Teaching Kindness in Schools

Most people have heard the phrase ‘random acts of kindness’, which refers to a selfless act of giving resulting in the happiness of another person. Terms like this are increasing in popularity around the world, as more people identify a deficiency in their lives that can only be fulfilled by altruism. 

It seems we just can’t get enough of those addictive feel good emotions and with good reason.

Scientific studies have shown that kindness has a great number of physical and emotional benefits, and that children require a healthy dose of the warm and fuzzies in order to flourish as health, happy, well-rounded individuals.

Patty O’Grady, PhD, is an expert in the area of neuroscience, emotional learning, and positive psychology with special attention to the educational arena. She believes that “kindness changes the brain by the experience of kindness. Children and adolescents do not learn kindness by only thinking about it and talking about it. Kindness is best learned by feeling it so that they can reproduce it. Kindness is an emotion that students feel and empathy is a strength that they share.”

A great number of benefits have been reported to support the theory of teaching kindness in schools:

1. Happy Children

Science explains that the good feelings we experience when being kind are produced by endorphins that activate areas of the brain that are associated with pleasure, social connection and trust, and it’s proven that these feelings of joyfulness are contagious, encouraging more kind behaviour by the giver and recipient.

2. Increased Peer Acceptance 

Research on the subject has determined that kindness increases our ability to form meaningful connections with others. Studies show that kind, happy children enjoy greater peer acceptance because they are well-liked and that better than average mental health is reported in classrooms that practice more inclusive behaviour due to an even distribution of popularity.  

3. Improved Health and Less Stress 

It’s widely documented that being kind can trigger a release of the hormone oxytocin which has a number of physical and mental health benefits as it can significantly increase a person’s level of happiness and reduce stress. More recently though, it’s been found it plays a significant role in the cardiovascular system, helping protect the heart by lowering blood pressure and reducing free radicals and inflammation, which incidentally speed up the aging process.

4. Greater Sense of Belonging and Improved Self Esteem

Studies show that people experience a ‘helpers high’ when they do a good deed, a rush of endorphins that creates a lasting sense of pride, wellbeing and an enriched sense of belonging. Even small acts of kindness are reported to heighten our sense of wellbeing, increase energy and give a wonderful feeling of optimism and self worth.

5. Increased Feelings of Gratitude

When children are part of projects that help others less fortunate than themselves, it provides them with a real sense of perspective and helps them appreciate the good things in their own lives.

6. Better Concentration and Improved Results

As it increases serotonin, which plays an important part in learning, memory, mood, sleep, health and digestion, kindness is a key ingredient that helps children feel good. Having a positive outlook allows them greater attentions spans and enables more creative thinking to produce better results at school.

7. Less Bullying

Two Penn State Harrisburg faculty researchers, Shanetia Clark and Barbara Marinak say, “unlike previous generations, today’s adolescents are victimizing each other at alarming rates.” They argue adolescent bullying and youth violence can be confronted through in-school programs that integrate “kindness -- the antithesis of victimization.”
 

Many traditional anti-bullying programs focus on the negative actions that cause children anxiety and often with little impact. Teaching kindness and compassion in schools, not only fosters the positive behaviour that creates warm and inclusive school environments, but helps children feel that they belong. It’s documented that the effects of bullying can be significantly reduced by integrating kindness based programs in schools.

 8. Reduced Depression

Dr. Wayne Dyer, internationally renowned author and speaker, says research has discovered that an act of kindness increases levels of serotonin (a natural chemical responsible for improving mood) in the brain. It’s also found that serotonin levels are increased in both the giver and receiver of an act of kindness, as well as anyone who witnesses that kindness, making it a wonderful natural antidepressant.

 Maurice Elias, a professor at Rutgers University Psychology Department says that “as a citizen, grandparent, father, and professional, it is clear to me that the mission of schools must include teaching kindness. Without it, communities, families, schools, and classrooms become places of incivility where lasting learning is unlikely to take place.

 We need to be prepared to teach kindness, because it can be delayed due to maltreatment early in life. It can be smothered under the weight of poverty, and it can be derailed by victimization later in life. Yet despite these and other travails, the receipt of kindness and the ability to show kindness through service are both growth enhancing and soul cleansing.

 Kindness can be taught, and it is a defining aspect of civilized human life. It belongs in every home, school, neighborhood, and society.”

 It’s become quite clear that modern education must encompass more than just academics, that in order for children to develop into happy, confident, well-rounded individuals, matters of the heart must be taken seriously and nurtured as a matter of priority.

 References:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/sel-teaching-kindness-maurice-elias

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-r-hamilton-phd/kindness-benefits_b_8...

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positive-psychology-in-the-classroom...

http://phys.org/news191601357.html

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0051380

The War on Teachers

The stats leave no doubt. There is huge dissatisfaction among teachers. The turnover rate is very high. We need to answer the obvious question, why don’t principals and administrators take better care of their teachers? 

The most recent MetLife Survey revealed: “Teacher Dissatisfaction At An All-Time High.” The NEA Today website continues: “Teacher job satisfaction has plummeted to its lowest level in 25 years, from 62 percent in 2008 to 39 percent in 2012 –- a total of 23 points…More than one-half of teachers report feeling under great stress several days per week, as opposed to one-third in 1985.”

 “High Teacher Turnover Rates are a Big Problem for America’s Public Schools….46% of all new teachers in the United States leave the profession within five years…Teachers cite lack of planning time, workload, and lack of influence over school policy among other reasons for their decision to leave…”

Edutopia sums up the situation this way: “Every year, U.S. schools hire more than 200,000 new teachers for that first day of class. By the time summer rolls around, at least 22,000 have quit.” 

Interestingly, less than 20% of teachers cite salary as their primary complaint. About 70% say the big problem is workplace conditions.

This Edutopia story, written by a failed teacher, concludes: “Many of these reasons are just euphemisms for one of the profession's hardest realities: Teaching can exact a considerable emotional toll. I don't know of any other professionals who have to break up fistfights, as I did…. New teachers, however naive and idealistic, often know before they enter the profession that the salaries are paltry, the class sizes large, and the supplies scant. What they don't know is how little support from parents, school administrators, and colleagues they can expect once the door is closed and the textbooks are opened.”

Let’s consider all this bad news from the point of view of the teacher. You might be only 27 or 28 years old. You’ve dreamed about being a teacher for as long as you can remember. You wanted to make a difference in the world. You thought you could help your kids to build a better life. But now you feel you have to walk away from all that. it’s been a horrible experience and you’re pretty sure you can never go back. Just as bad, you borrowed a lot of money and you still have a huge debt to pay. Dreams and money, all gone.

Now let’s consider this situation from the point of view of the Education Establishment. By losing all these burned-out teachers, they have room for a whole new set of starry-eyed rookies who’ll need classrooms, books, and lots of instruction. Thousands of professors will earn a good living making sure these newcomers have the credentials to be sent into the trenches. What if the public schools filled up with experienced, long-time teachers? That could be the end of the gravy train. Point is, the people at the top don’t have a lot of incentive to protect their teachers. Maybe that’s part of the reason they don’t.

Let’s face it, the common denominator in all K-12 education is that teachers are pushed around or left to fend for themselves. The paradigm story is where a teacher has trouble with students, the teacher goes to the principal for help, and the principal grandly declares: you’re a professional, it’s your classroom, take care of it.

There are many separate assaults: constant interruptions; loudspeakers making announcements; students drifting in and out; many unnecessary meetings and so-called professional development (PD); and a general tolerance of disorder and violence. Teachers can’t feel safe. They can’t do much teaching.

It almost seems as if the school system is cunningly designed to make sure only the toughest, most desperate people can survive. Sensitive, highly intelligent teachers would probably be the first to crack. There really does seem to be a war against teachers. Does it have to be this way?

Suppose, first of all, that schools of education prepared teachers at a higher level. (According to Rita Kramer’s book “Ed School Follies,” the training is actually very sketchy.) Then suppose that principals aggressively supported their teachers, and made clear to students that there will be no disrespect shown. Suppose the administrators got a bonus when teachers survived past a third or fourth year. Suppose that was a clearly announced social contract between the school and the community: children are expected to behave, or they will be punished appropriately.

Unfortunately, many teachers think they’re being pushed around by parents, the community, or commentators like me. The teachers seem to identify with the Education Establishment. Isn’t this an example of the Stockholm Syndrome? Teachers actually think they are in the trenches with the Education Establishment. No, teachers are alone in the trenches. I think there are three sets of victims in K-12 education: students, parents, and teachers. The situation can’t be improved until teachers have a clearer view of their reality. They are cannon fodder; they are expendables.

Finally, we’re forced to consider the idea that the indifference to teachers is part of a war on education generally. It’s part of the whole deliberate dumbing-down of America that Charlotte Iserbyt described in her book by that name. 

Undercutting teachers and rendering them ineffective will obviously produce the miserable results that the Education Establishment, in Iserbyt's view, deliberately seeks.

To put that over another way, the last thing the Education Establishment would want is a stable corps of highly professional, experienced teachers. So, by hook and by crook, our education commissars give future teachers inadequate training, and then set them loose in a blackboard jungle. Cold, very cold.

You will know that our Education Establishment is serious about improving education when they start to be fiercely protective of their teachers.

The one thing that has to be done in schools is called teaching. Administrators ought to be reassigned to teaching or security. Perhaps then their priorities will change.

 (This article first appeared in American Thinker with the title "Public schools chew up teachers and spit them out.")

Laser Hair Removal - the best method of hair removal?

Everybody wants to look and feel fantastic and to enjoy the confidence that brings. However, excessive body hair is a common problem effecting both men and women and varies from person to person. It can be unsightly, causing embarrassment and loss of confidence but removing it can be just as bad. Hair removal is often seen as a major inconvenience and a chore to say the least. 

There are numerous ways of removing unwanted hair, however the relief is often short lived and just trying to decide on which method to use can be a headache in itself. 

Shaving is probably the most commonly used method and does allow you to achieve something approaching smooth feeling skin. However, the re-growth is fast usually returning a day or two after shaving and shaving sensitive areas is also a problem for many people which can cause irritation, rashes and cuts. This is where the creams, foams and moisturisers come in and the cheap and cheerful way of removing hairs walks out the door. 

Hair removal creams can be used on most areas of the face and body. The creams usually work within 10 minutes by dissolving the hair. Applying cream to large areas of the body can be tricky and messy and can cause irritation and even allergic reactions. The re-growth is also fairly quick and the hair can be back within a week, as like shaving, it removes hair from the surface of the skin and doesn�t tackle the �root� of the problem. 

Waxing the unwanted hair gives a longer lasting result as the hair is basically pulled out whole. It is common not to notice any re-growth for around four weeks. Not long considering the pain waxing causes and the risk of ingrown hairs which can be irritating and cause infection. 

However, there is one hair removal option available to everybody which gives permanent results! 

Soprano XL 

Laser hair removal is safe, quick and easy and with no mess, ingrown hairs or nasty nicks in sight! 

Laser hair removal works by permanently damaging the hair follicle underneath the skin so the hair falls out and it is unable to grow back. Soprano XL can treat unwanted hair on all areas of the face and body. The treatment is both comfortable and painless and has even been likened to a hot stone massage. Who ever guessed that hair removal could be enjoyable? 

Approximately six treatments are recommended for the body and eight for facial areas, usually with a space of six to eight weeks in between treatments. The best thing is that there are no side effects and results are noticeable after the first one to two treatments. After each treatment the hair will be noticeably thinner and finer than before until most of the hair is un-able to grow back. The costs start at approximately �50 per treatment and due to the small number of treatments needed to eliminate unwanted body hair the overall cost compared to a lifetime of shaving or waxing is considerably less. 

LHR is becoming more and more popular by the minute. As the treatments are so comfortable with no mess and minimal effort from yourself, laser hair removal is the new lunch hour treat!