As a pediatrician, I try to stay aware about the way my patients are performing at school. To know how it is going at home and emotionally, I often use school reports as an indicators. However, this is not formally written in peds textbooks. Reading Yeager and Dweck (2012) article made an impression on me in that sense. The authors clearly highlight how transitions (i.e. to high school, namely) can be stressful and filled with negative emotions. This phase can present itself by going from academic difficulties per se, to victimization or exclusion that can also lead to academic difficulties. We learned how negative emotions and stress, when unrelated to the task itself, can lead to an increase in cognitive load and to inhibition of memory formation. In many circumstances, children may develop adversity that can generate useful outcome. Nevertheless, they can also get stuck into a negative interpretation of the situations that can affect systematically their school outcomes. This has to do with the mindset of the child (the learner). As adults (and teacher, to some extent), we can influence that positively.
The way a child can built positively on adversity (instead of being affected by it) lays in her/his interpretation of that adversity. Interestingly, Yeager and Dweck note that school reforms have attempted to address this issue by intervening on environmental factors (i.e. size of the school, length of school day, notably). Nonetheless, according to the authors, we must try to interrupt the child's or adolescent's negative interpretation of a certain situation, changing her/his mindset, to improve outcomes. Intelligence praise (i.e. praising students for being smart) can lead to an affected adversity and a decrease in performance. Also, we should not try to comfort the learner by stating that it is ''okay not being good at this or that'', for example. Best approaches imply helping learners finding better and concrete strategies to overcome difficulty, focusing on process to improve her/himself, more than on their inner abilities. They need to see that a growth mindset, that takes into account the possibility of overcoming challenges, even if it comes with great efforts, is the way to built meaningful resilience.
The relevance of this thought about pediatric follow up and school outcomes rests in the fact that it applies to adult learning. Thus, we should put these principles at the forefront while teaching, providing a favorable learning environment in that sense, while promoting academic outcomes.
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