Welcoming Our Challenges
How many of us welcome challenges? For all of us, there are times when things just don’t go as planned….when our students (or our colleagues) make life difficult… when our family members have “issues” that must be handled before we get to our own quite lengthy list of responsibilities. At times like that, if you’re like me, our first instinct is to have a negative reaction. Do you respond under your breath or right out loud? It depends on the issue and your mood, right?
Suppose instead, you welcomed each challenge. After all, for a tree trunk to become strong, it needs wind. What new challenge could you embrace for you to strengthen your skills as a teacher, a therapist, a parent, a mentor, a transition coordinator, an administrator? Information and skills sets are constantly evolving. If you are not growing, you are falling behind.
Now, take a moment to reflect on your students’ attitudes about challenges. Are they resistant? Do they bluff that they already know it all or do they put on an act like “I don’t like to read” or “I’m not good at math.” What have you taught them about failure?
Accumulating research is clear that students with a growth mindset welcome challenges. With the support of caring adults who believe in them, they risk stepping into uncharted territory. When they are engaged with productive struggle and discover their own resilience, they continue to expand their willingness to risk the next challenge. This isn’t just true for gifted students; it’s true for all of them. For students with disabilities, this resilience is even more critical. If they learn helplessness — that they are too disabled to work through struggle and that enabling adults will step in to “save them” from failure — they will end up being one more statistic in studies of transitioning youth who were unprepared for adult responsibilities.
We could all share stories of students whose hunger for challenge was a joy to watch. I could tell you about the student on my caseload who was labeled with an intellectual disability who earned a high school completion certificate, not a diploma. Three years after graduation, he had achieved the impossible. With the support of a tutoring center that didn’t let labels limit possibilities, he brought his reading level up to the 10th grade needed to be admitted to medic school.
What can you do THIS YEAR to inspire your students to go beyond their comfort zone to learn? What if you let them see you welcoming your own challenges? Who knows how far they could go? Suppose they saw YOU risking, experimenting, and learning from early attempts. After all, Henry Ford said, “Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin anew.” You can do it!
