Speaking of Goals
Jan. 13th, 2019 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunkellesToday's Snowflake Challenge got me thinking about goals and how I've been shifting mine recently in a healthier direction. First, a little background: I am an education major. I'm going to be a teacher soon-ish. In one of my education classes we've been learning about different sources of motivation, particularly, different types of goals.
Performance goals are goals that we have primarily in order to impress others or beat them. I memorized this information for my tests by associating them with Bakugo from bnha. They're Baku-goals. Be the Number One Hero, get straight As, crush the competition. They're not bad, per se, but they don't generally lead to the greatest amount of learning. They're the goals that lead to walking into a test without studying or learning the material so that you can brag about getting an A without studying (I say this from experience. Even of college finals.).
Failure Avoidant Goals are the flip side of performance goals. These lead to behaviors that keep us from taking risks and embarrassing ourselves in front of others. For example, not sending in an application for that job you want because you don't want to not get it and have to talk to people about how that happened or not taking a risk in your writing that you really want to because you're afraid it won't go well and it will blow up in your face.
Neither of these alignments are totally bad. Performance goals keep us ambitious and failure avoidant goals keep us safe, but neither of them lead to a whole lot of deep, meaningful learning. I've been trying to shift my focus more and more onto mastery goals instead of the failure avoidant and performance goals that I've had for years.
Mastery goals are where learning the material and/or improving at a skill is the goal in and of itself. They involve accepting that in order to improve at something that we want to learn we will have to take risks and probably be embarrassed during the learning process. It also involves accepting that small progress is still progress and that making mistakes is part of the learning process.
I gave up a lot on learning a lot of things that I regret giving up on when I was younger because I was naturally gifted at some things and had always been able to coast by on those things. I think that a lot of gifted kids have that same problem where they've been praised for being naturally amazing at something to the point where having people see us struggle is terrifying. Having to work hard at stuff and not be an immediate prodigy right there in public? Where people could see me not being perfect? Terrifying. Not an option. I'd just give up on those hard things and coast by on the stuff I was gifted at instead. "Those who don't try never look foolish" was a pretty good life motto.
Sometime after switching into education I realized how much I'd been holding myself back with my own learning for fear of looking stupid. I didn't put enough effort into learning to play the piano because I hated being not perfect at it in public when I was a naturally fantastic vocalist. I hated being not perfect at Spanish in public because I grew up being praised for how well-spoken I was in English, so I just didn't actually put in the work that I would need to learn it, even though I wanted to. I was so scared of trying and failing that I decided that not trying was a better option.
After studying my own motivations and what was holding ME back, I decided that I actually wanted to be good at those things for myself, not just to brag about being good at them. I wanted to be good at them enough to stop avoiding them to avoid failure and embarrassment.
So. I'm back to working on things that I'm not naturally "gifted" at. I've been working on Spanish again on DuoLingo and looking for other ways to improve. I've been sitting back down at the piano and trying to play for fun and playing through pieces from where I left off, but this time with the goal of learning how to play in order to play and not to impress people. I've been drawing even though I'm not good at it just because it's fun.
Life is too short not to learn just for learning's sake. It's too short to be too scared of not being amazing at something to be willing to put myself out there and do the work to learn something that I want to. I want to try to master things just for the sake of mastering them. How can I help students develop a love of learning and get over their fear of failure if I can't do that myself?
Performance goals are goals that we have primarily in order to impress others or beat them. I memorized this information for my tests by associating them with Bakugo from bnha. They're Baku-goals. Be the Number One Hero, get straight As, crush the competition. They're not bad, per se, but they don't generally lead to the greatest amount of learning. They're the goals that lead to walking into a test without studying or learning the material so that you can brag about getting an A without studying (I say this from experience. Even of college finals.).
Failure Avoidant Goals are the flip side of performance goals. These lead to behaviors that keep us from taking risks and embarrassing ourselves in front of others. For example, not sending in an application for that job you want because you don't want to not get it and have to talk to people about how that happened or not taking a risk in your writing that you really want to because you're afraid it won't go well and it will blow up in your face.
Neither of these alignments are totally bad. Performance goals keep us ambitious and failure avoidant goals keep us safe, but neither of them lead to a whole lot of deep, meaningful learning. I've been trying to shift my focus more and more onto mastery goals instead of the failure avoidant and performance goals that I've had for years.
Mastery goals are where learning the material and/or improving at a skill is the goal in and of itself. They involve accepting that in order to improve at something that we want to learn we will have to take risks and probably be embarrassed during the learning process. It also involves accepting that small progress is still progress and that making mistakes is part of the learning process.
I gave up a lot on learning a lot of things that I regret giving up on when I was younger because I was naturally gifted at some things and had always been able to coast by on those things. I think that a lot of gifted kids have that same problem where they've been praised for being naturally amazing at something to the point where having people see us struggle is terrifying. Having to work hard at stuff and not be an immediate prodigy right there in public? Where people could see me not being perfect? Terrifying. Not an option. I'd just give up on those hard things and coast by on the stuff I was gifted at instead. "Those who don't try never look foolish" was a pretty good life motto.
Sometime after switching into education I realized how much I'd been holding myself back with my own learning for fear of looking stupid. I didn't put enough effort into learning to play the piano because I hated being not perfect at it in public when I was a naturally fantastic vocalist. I hated being not perfect at Spanish in public because I grew up being praised for how well-spoken I was in English, so I just didn't actually put in the work that I would need to learn it, even though I wanted to. I was so scared of trying and failing that I decided that not trying was a better option.
After studying my own motivations and what was holding ME back, I decided that I actually wanted to be good at those things for myself, not just to brag about being good at them. I wanted to be good at them enough to stop avoiding them to avoid failure and embarrassment.
So. I'm back to working on things that I'm not naturally "gifted" at. I've been working on Spanish again on DuoLingo and looking for other ways to improve. I've been sitting back down at the piano and trying to play for fun and playing through pieces from where I left off, but this time with the goal of learning how to play in order to play and not to impress people. I've been drawing even though I'm not good at it just because it's fun.
Life is too short not to learn just for learning's sake. It's too short to be too scared of not being amazing at something to be willing to put myself out there and do the work to learn something that I want to. I want to try to master things just for the sake of mastering them. How can I help students develop a love of learning and get over their fear of failure if I can't do that myself?
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Date: 2019-01-16 07:35 pm (UTC)I'm currently dabbling in *PIE because it's cool as eff and nobody can stop me.
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