Risky Business
Paradoxically, one of the areas in which gifted learners may be at the
greatest risk is in their unwillingness to take risks. We all hear conflicting
clichés such as “Better safe than sorry” and “No pain, no gain.” Yet, when
pursuing excellence or even in living their everyday lives, gifted students
are frequently unwilling to risk even the slightest chance of failure. They
resist attempting any task at which they are not immediately assured of
success. They will take only classes in which they feel assured of an A; they
will not participate in after-school or extra-curricular activities in which
they might not be able to live up to their expectations or to the
expectations of others in their lives. It is often easier for them to avoid
certain challenging situations all together than it is to face the unthinkable
possibility that they may not be able to succeed at that tasks. They reason
that they will not have to face possible inadequacies if they take the way of
least resistance by avoiding challenging activities and uncertain situations.
For most of their school careers, many gifted students have participated in
activities that were easy for them, that they finished on the first try, that
they did with little or no struggle or effort. They have been very satisfied
to “slide” along making good grades with little effort. They are unwilling to
take risks and actually seem to avoid taking a risk at all cost; they are
actually very afraid of stepping into waters when they are not assured of
success ahead of time. They have little tolerance for ambiguity and want to
give teachers exactly what we want. They have no concept of trying
something new in a safe environment; they cannot understand being willing to
weigh the risks of a creative, unusual response against simply spitting back
to the teacher what the teacher gave in notes. They are at the teacher’s
elbow asking 100 questions with every assignment, wanting to know exactly
what the teacher wants them to do.
More damaging than any of these behavioral characteristics is the fact that
many of these students would rather try nothing than to risk failure.
Protecting their image of doing it fast and without effort is more important
than learning and gaining confidence from a challenge. They procrastinate,
don’t try their best, and learn very dependently in order to protect their
image and remove the risk of failure. Many will be the students who take
the easy classes in high school in order to protect their grade point average.
Many will never participate in after-school classes or programs because they
are not assured of success.
Another issue associated with risk taking is perfectionism. Gifted students
are particularly good at managing their images and in minimizing any chance
that their images as smart, capable students might be jeopardized by
products which do not fit these images. The rationale seems to be that they
can minimize the risk of “being found out” if they don’t give it their best try.
They can delay beginning a project and claim that they didn’t have time to do
their best on it. They can set such elaborate goals that they can never
accomplish them as a defense mechanism against perceived failures. They
minimize the risk of exposure as an impostor by avoiding tasks they see as
challenging and perhaps difficult.
Of course, our traditional grading system is one of the greatest deterrents
of all to risk taking. We reward the concrete and the correct. In order to
get an A, the student must be correct 90% of the time. This provides little
incentive for someone to do anything other than whatever is necessary to
insure correctness with little regard for what s/he learns or gains from the
activity. We have taught them for years that we value A’s as evidence of a
person’s competence and worth more than the effort that a B might
represent. We have offered students second chances to make an A when
they turned in a B paper; we put bumper stickers on our cars announcing that
our child made the all A honor roll. Our colleges and universities are often
more concerned with a student’s grade-point average or rank in the class
than with the level of difficulty of the classes taken or with other valuable
experienced gained through extra-curricular activities.
We as parents and educators are to blame for much of these risk avoidance
behaviors. We have allowed our gifted students to sail along with easy, nonchallenging curriculum; we have seldom placed the students in a position
where they have to risk failure in order to accomplish a task. We have
failed to teach them that to accomplish something great is to risk failure;
we have failed to teach them that they have within themselves the ability to
cope with a challenge and to move toward success in a difficult situation. We
have praised the students for their products and their accomplishments
rather than for their effort and bravery at tackling something difficult.
We have allowed them to shy away from difficult tasks and have even
criticized adults who have offered chances to succeed at something
difficult. We have failed to teach them that mistakes are as valuable as
successes—sometime more valuable. We have failed to allow our children
and students to see us take risks and to deal with our failures if they occur;
frequently adults actually cover up and hide our failures from our children.
We as adults often do not model learning from our mistakes or responding to
a challenge in a positive way. We have allowed our children to seek safety
rather than encouraging them to take risks which allow greater
accomplishments.
If we as educators and parents want to encourage students to become risk
takers, we must make it safe for them to do so. We must praise effort
rather than grades or accomplishments. We must accept projects/products
that were produced in unusual, unexpected, creative ways. We must follow
General Patton’s advice to tell someone where to go but not how to get
there; then we will be surprised at the result. The students must know that
they will not be zapped with a low grade or parent disapproval if they risk
something challenging or different.
In addition to making it safe for students to take risks, parents and
teachers must help students see the value and benefits of risk taking. We
must help them see that risk taking is already an integral parts of their daily
lives and that they take many different risks every day; our job is to help
them develop personal strategies for assessing risks and determining what
risks are worth taking. We must also demonstrate that risk taking is
essential for success in life and must help students to develop personal
strategies to enable them to tackle challenging activities with enthusiasm
and gusto. Perhaps, more important than all of these, we must model
learning from our mistakes and positive responses to failure; children must
see adults accepting mistakes as inevitable. Without change, we will
continue to send the message that compliance, safety, and correctness are
traits to be valued much more than risk taking, welcoming challenges, and
pursuing the unknown. And, what is worse, we as a society will never benefit
from the fruits of such productive behaviors.
c. 2002 Eulouise Williams