CHARACTER
My frustrations:

Teachers seem to be working harder
Spoon feeding students
Not allowing students to fail
Not preparing students for life after Broughton Hall

Not developing independent



learners
Me – Aged 5???
11 Plus
St Malachy’s College
Belfast
O Levels
4 Grade B’s
 4 Grade C’s

Aberdeen University
First Class Honours
Me and my Brothers
The importance of Character


Why did I not achieve my full potential before
university? Family reasons; lack of confidence;
lack of self-control
Why did I do better at university? Developed
confidence; my own space; grit; self-control;
persistence
WHAT SORT OF BISCUIT
ARE YOU?
Always ducking and diving
Always has an excuse why work isn’t done
A plain biscuit!
Doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary – wont go
the extra mile
Crumbles under the slightest bit of pressure
Needs to manage time better!
Poor attendance and punctuality
Attendance is affecting progress!
Not much in the middle
No drive, passion or hunger
The king of biscuits!
Doesn’t break when you dunk it!
Solid, determined, reliable, hardworking
“I don’t divide the world into the
weak and the strong, or the
successes and the failures... I divide
the world into the learners and nonlearners.”
Benjamin Barber, Sociologist
Why would any of us want
to be a non-learner?
We are all born with an
intense drive to learn……..
Babies don’t worry about making mistakes or humiliating
themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge
forward. What could put an end to this exuberant learning? The
fixed mindset...
A person with a fixed mindset views their talents
and abilities as fixed – unchangeable and go
through life avoiding failure and challenge
“I just can’t do it”
“It’s too hard”
“I don’t have the talent”
“I’m not clever enough”
“What’s the point, I’m not as clever as others in the
class”
People with a growth mindset see themselves as
a work in progress.
“If I keep trying I know I will get better”
“Failure is merely an opportunity to learn and
grow”
“I’m going to keep seeking new challenges even
if it makes me look less than perfect”
Carol Dweck’s theory of motivation
Fixed Mindset
15% are undecided
Growth Mindset
Ability comes from talent
“It’s in my genes”
Ability comes from time and
effort spent learning
In the face of difficulty the
student gives up, declines
learning support, guesses
etc.
In the face of difficulty, the
student tries harder, asks for
help etc.
• Research shows that there is no correlation between success at school and the
theory the student holds (especially at GCSE level)
• Differences in performance only show when the student is challenged or is
facing difficulty, for example, when they move from GCSEs to A Levels. As one
might expect, research shows that the untapped potential theorists perform much
better at A Level.
THE IMPORTANCE OF
CHARACTER
Basic idea of Book
What determines success in life?
Not IQ....
instead.....Character
David Levin – KIPP
Leader of a US Charter School –
Knowledge is Power Programme
(KIPP) – based in South Bronx.
Class of 2003 was the fifth
highest performing class in NYC,
but, only 8 students completed a
four year college degree.
“As the dropout rates rolled in, not just
from the first KIPP class but from the
second and third too, Levin noticed
something curious. The students who
persisted in college were not necessarily
the ones who had excelled academically
at KIPP. Instead, they seemed to be the
ones who possessed certain other gifts,
skills like optimism and resilience and
social agility. They were the ones who
were able to recover from bad grades
and resolve to do better next time.”
Tough, page 52.
Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism
A professor of Psychology from the
University of Pennsylvania, he
explained that optimism is a
learnable skill, not an inborn trait.
Pessimistic adults and children can
train themselves to be more hopeful,
Seligman says, and if they do, they
will likely become happier, healthier
and more successful.
Dominic Randolph – Headmaster of
Riverdale Country School
“Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga
wagon or someone coming here in the
1920s from southern Italy, there was
always this idea in America that if you
worked hard and you showed real grit, that
you could be successful” he said.
“Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that.
People who have an easy time of things,
who get eight hundreds on their SATs, I
worry that those people get feedback that
everything they’re doing is great. And I
think as a result, we are actually setting
them up for long-term failure. When that
person suddenly has to face up to a
difficult moment, then I think they’re
screwed, to be honest.” Tough, page 56-7.
These two people,
together with Angela
Duckworth, began to
work together to
uncover the
mysteries of
Character
Research by Angela Duckworth, Assistant
Professor at the University of Pennsylvania,
showed that self-discipline scores were a
better measure of academic performance
than IQ tests. She began working with
Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at
Columbia University, who is famous in socialscience circles for a study known informally
as the marshmallow test.
The Marshmallow Test
After Mischel’s initial
experiment, he tracked
down the students
involved in it. He
discovered a strong link
between the children’s
marshmallow wait time
and their academic
success.
How does this experiment link to
education?




If we coach students to develop self-control will it lead to
improved academic performance?
Angela Duckworth conducted such an experiment, leading
students through self-control exercises and giving them
rewards for completing homework
But when the researchers looked at the students ratings of
self-control, homework completion rates, performance in
standardised achievement tests, they got zero effect. Why?
No long-term goal! Big difference between concentrating
for 20 minutes to get an extra marshmallow compared to
more long-term, abstract goals like graduating from
university.
Expectancy-value theory of motivation
According to the theory, a learner’s motivation is determined by how much they value
the goal(s) you or they are setting and whether they expect to succeed. The motivation
is given by the following theory:
Motivation
= Expectancy
The extent to which the
learner expects success
in their learning
X
Value
The value of the
learning to the learner
How would your students score value and expectations of success?
Can we shift a person’s motivation!
The M&M experiment
shows that in the shortterm, it can be surprisingly
easy!
Researchers from the
University of Florida
conducted an experiment
by selecting a group of
students and getting them
to complete an IQ test.
After this they did the
following:
M&M Experiment
“[T]hey divided the children into three groups according to their scores on the first
test. The high-IQ group had an average IQ score on the first test of about 119.
The medium-IQ group averaged about 101, and the low-IQ group averaged
about 79. On the second test, the researchers offered half the children in each IQ
category an M&M for each right answer.... The others in each group received no
reward. The medium-IQ and high-IQ kids who got candy didn’t improve their
scores at all on the second test. But the low-IQ children who were given M&Ms for
each correct answer raised their IQ scores to about 97, almost erasing the gap
with the medium-IQ group.” Tough, page 65
This experiment challenges conventional wisdom about intelligence,
which held that IQ tests measured something real and permanent –
something that couldn’t be changed dramatically with a few M&Ms.
For the low-IQ students, what was their true measure of intelligence:
79 or 97?
Does this mean that giving students M&Ms will end
low achievement amongst some of our students?



The answer is, clearly,
No!
Instead, it again proves
that trying to motivate
students over the longterm is very difficult.
If a student perseveres,
works hard and gets a
really good job, they
would be able to buy as
many M&Ms as they
want!
The importance of conscientiousness
When trying to motivate people, part of the problem is that different personality types
respond to different motivations. We know this because of a series of experiments carried
out by Carmit Segal in 2006.
Segal wanted to test how personality and incentives interacted and used the coding-speed
test, which provides an evaluation of basic clerical skills.
Participants are given an answer key similar to the one below and then, a little lower down
the page, a multiple choice test that offers five four-digit numbers as the potential correct
answer for each word.
Answer Key:
game
chin
arm
hat
room
2715
3123
4054
5604
5654
Q.1
3458
2348
Game
2715
5642
Segal’s findings:
Segal located two large pools of data that included scores from thousands of young people
on both the coding-speed test and a standard cognitive-skills test:
a) National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY)
b) Data from a group of military recruits who took the coding exam as part of a range of
tests they had to pass in order to be accepted into the US Armed Forces.
For the high-school students who were part of the NLSY, they had no incentive to exert
themselves in the coding-speed test as they had no bearing on their academic records.
For the recruits, it mattered much more! Bad scores could keep them out of the military.
Segal discovered that, on average, the college students did better than the recruits on the
cognitive tests. But on the coding-speed test, it was the recruits that did better. Why?
The recruits had more at stake! As a result, that extra level of exertion was enough for
them to beat their more-educated peers.
The NLSY tracked people’s progress afterward for many years. Segal found that the kids
who did better on the cognitive-skills test were making more money. But so were the kids
who did better on the simple coding test!
Why were those kids who scored high on
the coding test earning more money?
Segal argued that it is because these people try harder. A non-cognitive skill that is vital in
the labour market!
This then links to the low-IQ students from the M&M experiment. Was their IQ 79 or 97?
“You could certainly make the case that his or her true IQ must be 97. You’re supposed to
try harder on IQ tests, and when the low-IQ kids had the M&Ms to motivate them, they tried
hard. It’s not as if the M&Ms magically gave them the intelligence to figure out the answers;
they must have already possessed it. So in fact, they weren’t low-IQ at all. Their IQs were
about average. But what Segal’s experiment suggests is that it was actually their first score,
the 79, that was more relevant to their future prospects. That was their equivalent of the
coding-test score, the low-stakes, low-reward test that predicts how well someone is going to
do in life. They may not have been low in IQ, but they were low in whatever quality it is
that makes a person try hard on an IQ test without any obvious incentive. And what Segal’s
research shows is that that is a very valuable quality to possess.
This quality is called
Conscientiousness
Character
Character

The seven set of
strengths identified by
Randolph, Levin and
Duckworth which,
according to research
are especially likely to
predict life satisfaction
and high achievement
are as follows: