Moving Towards Excellence (Learner)

Not only is excellence not a factor within state education it is often thwarted. It has benefits on its own just being excellent and even working towards excellence have powerful wider effects. A long term goal like excellence in any one thing includes a journey of discovery, perhaps if organised with lots of short term goals along the way. If you have an aim to be the best at something then there is plenty of information and guidance, alas outside of education to meeting this aim. This information is pretty old. Organising to facilitate progress to advanced levels of performance is quite well known. Not done, but known none the less. The simple source of this information is to see what successful or 'the best' have done. The similarities of hard work, perseverance (grit), reflection, focus and other factors are sometimes even obvious. Doing things that successful people do not do or the opposite is unlikely to lead to success. Charles Duhigg book covers these ideas.

I would argue that room for excellence within education is needed. A common situation with timetabling in schools, happens most days. A positive experience of learning and development is stopped when the bell goes to all move to a perhaps negative experience of stagnancy and reverse learning in another subject. This is the opposite to focus, it stops hard work and it slows or stops achievement braking the momentum. This will effect some learners more than others, but if school is seen as irrelevant the demotivation may have a pronounced effect especially when repeated.

I put forward the idea (someone else’s of course) that you should feed success and starve failure. You have to work with a students strengths and develop them and when they have some realised ability then you can look at their weaknesses. Development of weak areas often involves slower progress and more failure. This is demotivating. The balance of development is difficult to provide. Of course in the education system this is ignored entirely and a curriculum enforced almost attacking intrinsic motivation.

So what does excellence entail, well as has been studied in many areas where the best at different things have been analysed. They do a lot of their area whether that is a sport or art or whatever. The 10,000 hours idea where no one has reached the top of anything without 10,000 hours of practice. They also have a goal in mind and focus on that goal. There is sacrifice and less compromise to their goal. There is trial and error as part of constant improvement (at irregular paces) and grit, the determination to get through, hard work and difficulties. The Bloom taxonomy of skill lists stages from remembering through understanding, apply, analyse, evaluate and to create. When people can apply skills they will gain confidence generally as well as specifically, and when they can analyse and evaluate they will have these skills in specific areas. They can then with help and guidance use these skills in other areas. It is important that just because team sports have the word team in them and it is put on a CV to suggest the ability to work in a team. In actuality the teaching and practice of team work needs also to done not just hoped for. The bigger lad just ploughs through smaller lads, it is only when they meet another big (or bigger) lad that they may realise that teamwork is better than one person play and the pain of being easy to beat on their own. Many 'good players' are actually non-team players and are not any good when they meet better opposition having not actually practised teamwork..

An individual example is a Black Belt in a martial art, which in genuine cases means an accumulation of practice, leading to physical, mental and spiritual progress and development. The old suggestion was 5 years practice give or take. The even older method was to start as a white belt and when you have practiced a lot. Your belt will have turned black. As there is a link from martial techniques to tactics and strategies and lessons learned. Connections to further life is probably more common from martial arts than the classroom. To meet challenges, to develop, to compete all accumulate to life lessons about themselves, other people and nature.

When you have progressed beyond most people in something you will have leaned skills and gained knowledge that can be applied in other areas, so even if you change goals you can re-focus and you have an idea how to reach goals (not necessarily consciously). The disadvantage is of course as you know and can do more than most, they cannot understand you. They have not gone through what you have. Advanced skills cannot be taught by many people and actually the role is more of consultant and guide rather than sit down and explain.

So when someone has reached higher levels in their favored area. First they have achieved something that could lead to a career depending what they have excelled at. They have also learned about how to excel at anything (e.g. hard work and what to work at) as the general ideas (principles/concepts) are the same for excelling at anything. At some point it would be good to widen their base of knowledge in case of change in it's many forms. Some people excel outside of education and work and it's mainly discounted in work and education, given a footnote or being supporting information on a CV, but often they have learned and have higher abilities than their boss, who may not even understand or even cannot (or will not) recognise. It is like the Arthur C Clarke statement that 'if an undeveloped people saw modern technology it would be indistinguishable from magic'.

Better to help children to progress in their strong areas and then re-balance (consolidate) after progress has been made. Use skills, knowledge from progressed areas to help development in weaker areas. When you have a degree level then GCSE level qualifications are mostly irrelevant. Motivation (and confidence) is key for many learners who reap little from education as they don't fit the system, and the system does not adapt.

Freakonomics has done a few podcasts in May 2016 on the elements of excellence these are the ingredients that are needed to pass on to learners.