What Our Praise is Quietly Teaching

"You're so smart." I gushed. I was talking to a 4 year old at a math center. It just rolled off my tongue.

Then I caught myself.

I mean it as encouragement every time, but I have come to realize that my words become what they believe. When I praise the trait, I’m teaching them that success comes from something fixed, something you either have or you don't.

The “smart’ praise works until they struggle with something. Then they think, “If being smart is why I succeeded, then struggling must mean I'm not so smart after all.”

So the safest move is to melt down, act out, or avoid the hard part. However, the hard part is exactly where the learning lives.

I heard this message from teachers growing up. I was also a student that, if it looked like I might not “get’ something right away, I didn’t even try. Excelling confirmed I was “smart,” so I only did things that I was good at.

The research on this is old and it has held up. Mueller and Dweck (1998) found that kids praised for intelligence after success went on to choose easier tasks, gave up faster, and enjoyed the work less once it got hard. Kids praised for their effort did the opposite. Same kids, different praise.

So I'm trying to move my praise from the person to the process. Not "you're a great reader," but "you stuck with sounding out that tricky section." I name the strategy, the persistence, the revision, whatever they actually did. It's a small move, and I can make it across a whole class, every day.

Changing how I praise isn't going to suddenly make a kid love hard work. What it does is quieter than that. When I name the effort, the hard part stops feeling like a verdict on how smart they are. It just feels like the work. And a kid who can sit in the hard part without it threatening who they are is a kid who keeps going.

Think about how that might work with your students too.