The pressure to perform in schools

My neighbour’s eight-year-old daughter, my little friend, has a packed schedule than her dad. The reason: competition. Now kids are presented and motivated with a variety of competitive avenues ranging from class tests to olympiads, talent search events and games — of course, with good intentions. But researchers, thinkers and recent evidence tell a different story.

Competition does not always mean going up against others. In theory, we encourage healthy competition among kids. It is a convenient term ignoring what constitutes to being healthy in a school set-up. Beyond the visible impacts on kids, there are subtle but serious problems driven by competition. Creating a competitive environment in classrooms is based on good intentions but on faulty presumptions.

Breaking the assumptions
We prepare them to face a competitive world, we don’t want them to lose, says a school principal. Many share this Darwinian principle which creates few winners and many losers. To be excellent, one needs to compete with others. Competition will enhance performance. Thus goes the logic of competition. Thinkers, who have worked on excellence and talent, conclude that excellence is not for the few. Being excellent is linked with practice and not with talent. What drives practice is joyful engagement, not competition. There is no evidence in top educational journals to prove that students who compete against other become better in the long term.

John Shindler, in his book Transformative Classroom Management, writes, “Educators collectively create a more or less competitive future by the way we encourage our students to think and treat one another. If we create a more cooperative environment in our schools we create the likelihood of a more cooperative future”. It is worth trying. Or else, we may face a fall in true learning.

An approval-driven society silently demands our kids to score and prove early itself in life. Enthusiastic parents, teachers and schools rarely realise the unintended consequences of academic competition. Curriculum crumbles to texts and tests.

Teachers fit lessons to exams. Learning activities get mutated to scoring exercises caked with some games. By better grades and pass percentage, we assume they are competitive. Failure to compete or win unfurls another set of problems in kids.

They feel dejected and tempted to use short-cuts. Students are naturally disinterested in deep learning as success has shortened to exam performance. In effect, competition activates a downward spiral in motion. Worst affected by this retarding spiral are kids who may exhibit their real potential only at a later stage of life — late bloomers. In a highly competitive classroom climate,  we neither identify a potential late bloomer nor do we allow him or her to bloom. 

Alfie Kohn, the most heard voice worldwide against competition in education, says, the problem is not that too many students are getting A Grade, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A Grade is the point of going to school. The natural interest in subjects decreases immediately when achievement is outlined as the single greatest goal, he warns. He reviewed more than 2,000
studies and found that competition has never produced higher levels of benefits than cooperation.

With the hyper focus on achievement, most parents seek more than what is capable of from a kid. Counselling becomes a patch-up attempt for conforming and compliance, which again accelerates the downward spiral. Our toddlers and tweens miss quality learning and its joyful quests. They become good exam scorers, no more kids, and learners. Collective shifts in learning environment, learning activities and assessment practice in everyday school life can reverse this effect. 

If we want to find alternative approaches to a competition-based classroom, firstly we may reflect our own approach to competition. What value the idea of competing against others has added to our own lives. A creative teacher can build a competitive classroom without letting the students know that they are heading to excellence. The teacher can combine cooperation and competition with deliberate everyday acts of sharing and collaboration.

The team and individual activities should be seen as challenges to be solved, not
something to win. Evaluate them with alternative methods instead of conventional tests. Recognise efforts and hard work instead of winning, advices Carol Dweck, professor of Psychology at Stanford University, USA, who did pioneering work in this area. This means, say “Great! You did an excellent preparation,” instead of “Wow, you are smart, you got the prize.”

Instead of comparisons, promoting the idea of personal best, competing with oneself, giving in their full effort are other doables. Praise and provide feedback for contributing and participating, not for winning or losing. Matching the academic works with the inclinations of students can engage them well. You may find that ungraded assignments tailored to the temperament of each student will connect better with kids because they are not evaluated based on the outcome.  

Technology enables personalised learning in which every student can develop by practice to the desired level. Schools can design such competency pathways. Still, if you are conditioned to compete, use it to learn and teach values like fair play, integrity, failing gracefully and handling setbacks. Never elevate it to the culture of lottery where everyone runs for a few high-end prizes.

The joy of learning
Our kids should learn not because they have to, but they love to. The belief of real world as innately competitive is questionable. To claim that we prepare our kids for a competitive world by simulating similar environment in education is to enforce our children a prejudiced world view. We need our students to be victorious over challenges and problems, not over others.

Back to my little friend; she loves Maths but is among the last ones who finish a Maths problem in the classroom. She is sitting with me in tears as she could never raise her hand when the teacher asks who’ll solve it first. We encourage speed over thoughtfulness. Can I convince her that she is a marvellous being to blossom, not to compete? Can she celebrate the delight of learning instead of cracking up? I know she is amazing. Would you please just look at her.

An alternative to unhealthy competitions
Each cell in the matrix can be further advanced to step-by-step concrete learning
elements. Such elaborations can be integrated with scheduled daily interactions  in the classrooms.

Learning Environment
AVOID: Comparisons and relative evaluations
PROMOTE: The concept of becoming one’s best self
VALUE: Self-directed learning  
ENCOURAGE: The culture of sharing and collaboration in daily activities
SUPPORT: Find the joy of learning through self-selected modes

Learning Activity
FOCUS ON: Educational experience, not on score-focused outcome
PRAISE: Effort, not results
INCLUDE: More non-competitive activities
TRY: Alternative learning activities, largely used outside the conventional classes
SHIFT: From a curriculum-driven teacher to a creative teacher

Assessment
PACE: The difficulty level with capability. Use competency pathways
ENGAGE: With differential assignments and personalised learning
CONSTRUCT: New forms of grading
USE: Free international depositories on new evaluation approaches
TRACK: The process, not ranking