3 Foundations of School Success
If the main determinant of school success isn't ability, what is it?
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Three Foundations of School Success
Bob Fizzell
In other writings, I have discussed the concepts of Schooling Style and that all youth can learn. Here, I wish to tie these together with one other concept to address the idea of flexibility.
It is often noted that some youth who are of low apparent abilty actually do quite well in school. We call them Overachievers. Furthermore, as individuals are introduced to learning styles or Schooling Style, they frequently se that there style is not in accord with traditional school, yet they did well in traditional school. Finally, many educators will acknowledge the validity of different forms of educational expeerience fitting different personalities, but they wil argue that individuals need to be flexible. Life doesn’t always give us the choice to do things the way we want to.
These ideas are all important to a full understanding of alternative educational opportunities. We can all identify individuals who were successful without having lots of ability or the opportunity to chose a form of schooling that fit them best. Also, it is certainly true that success in life requires most of us to be flexible in performing in situations that are not our best fit. To see how these ideas tie in with advocacy for alternative education opportunities, we must introduce one other variable: Academic Self Concept.
Academic Self Concept was probably first introduced into educational research some 40 or more years ago. I became familiar with it when it was used in an evaluation of Head Start in the ‘60s. As i began my research on alternative schools, I developed an instrument to assess Academic Self Concept (ASC) among middle school and high school students. My first concern was to determine whether ASC increased when students experienced school success. Later, I relaized that it had another role: it assists flexibility.
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The three foundations for school success are Ability, the match of Schooling Style to the program and the student’s Academic Self Concept. Often, strength in two of these areas is sufficient for success. The overachiever is one who fits into the program and has a strong belief that she can succeed, but brings minimal ability to the task.
In my alternative schools, we often had students who had not had success in traditional school. Thus, they frequently came to us with some serious doubts about their chances of being successful in school. As we were a program of choice, they must have at least had some hope that this would be a better opportunity for them. If they were of lower ability, they might have only one strength going for them: the match of schooling style and program. It might take a lot of support on our part to overcome their doubts at first. However, as they realized that their earlier failure was due to the poor match of style and program in the traditional school, and as they experienced some real success, they began to gain confidence. The result was that we saw significant turn-arounds whereby students suddenly became interested in learning, successful and confident.
The next step was to see whether they could also be more flexible. As our program was primarily experiential learning, students frequently found that, as their program progressed, they might want to take a regular class for some subject as it might be easier and faster than learning by experience. They not only took these regular classes in the schools in which they had previously not been successful, but they almost always did very well in the classes.
The final test was after graduation. Ninety percent of the students chose to continue their education beyond high school. In college or a vocational program, they did not generally have the choice to learn through experience, yet they did well in their higher education programs. They would comment that they now knew that they had the ability and could adjust their study habits to fit their style.
Through the recognition of the three foundations of school success, we can better understand the apparent contradictions to our understandings of ability and style, while we also see how students can grow to be flexible in how they learn.
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