Process Thinking

Emphasizing the process…not the outcome.

An easy trap to fall into when mentoring and working with children and young adults is to focus on the behavior and consequences that we need from them. Make good grades. Have a clean room. Act respectfully to adults. Our goal as caring adults, however, is to help youth develop the character and habits that lead to desired results. In other words, we teach them to be good kids rather than to do good things. This task requires us to prioritize the intentional process rather than the outcomes. And we must encourage youth to do the same.

The values of both process and results can be illustrated in Aesop’s Fable of the Goose and the Golden Egg. This story begins with a country farmer and his wife who, tending to the nest of their Goose, found a golden, glittering egg. They couldn’t believe it! The farmer assumed that it must be a trick. But upon closer inspection, he discovered to his utter delight that the egg was, in fact, made of pure gold. Each morning, the Goose would lay another golden egg. The farmer soon became rich by selling the eggs. With his wealth, however, came greed. In order to gain the entirety of precious metal all at once, he slaughtered the goose and cut it open. But her womb was empty, and his Goose was now dead.

Youth are the geese in the story, and positive outcomes are the golden eggs. Egg laying is then the process. Our role in youth-adult partnerships requires us to develop the processes for the positive outcomes we seek. Consider, for example, the outcome of academic achievement. We want youth to do well in school and have good grades. But if we focus exclusively on golden eggs (their grades), we risk the well-being of the goose.

Emphasis on grades alone make students feel pressured to cheat. Recent surveys between 2002 and 2015 have found that 74 % of U.S. high school students reported copying their friends’ homework, more than half (58%) had plagiarized papers, and a surprising 95% of high school students surveyed admitted to cheating in some capacity. Rutgers University Professor Donald McCable, a leading researcher on youth and cheating, explains that the worsening in cheating over the past few decades is due to students having “become more competitive, under more pressure” and, as a result, excusing cheating behavior from themselves and their peers. In other words, students take a shortcut that gives them the golden egg at the expense of learning and integrity.

But students are also at risk of burning out. Research has shown that the relentless pressure of academic success and high grades can “contribute to students being sleep-deprived, anxious, and even engaging in self-harm.” A 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 61% of teens report feeling “a lot of pressure to get good grades.” This pressure has been a major contributor to what clinicians describe as an epidemic of “overwhelming anxiety” among teens that has resulted in their increased hospitalization for anxiety, depression, attempted suicide, and other mental-health problems. Thus, even without taking a short cut, the exclusive focus on grades by students comes at the expense of both their mental and their physical health.

One question worth asking is: Why do grades matter? Ultimately, we want kids to do well in school because of its association with healthy outcomes — such as a lowered risk early sexual initiation, drug abuse, and mental illness. And academic achievement can lead to better opportunity and socioeconomic outcomes. And there’s the rub. What we actually want is for youth to develop the kind of study habits and effort that make them receptive to learning and prime them for academic achievement.

I often tell my students when they get frustrated: You’re not learning if there’s no struggle. Difficulty and failure are part of the learning process. Recent neurological studies have verified this pedagogical fact. MRI studies have shown, for example, that struggling and making mistakes allow for the production and strengthening of neural pathways. Whenever someone works at the very edge of their understanding they struggle, correct, and learn. This process produces myelin, which acts as a “form of insulation” around neurons and other nerve fibers of our brains, “increasing their strength, speed, accuracy”. In other words, we need the process and the struggle in order to learn. World renown experts in art, sports, and science have mastered this focus on struggle.

But the general point applies to more than just learning. Exercise leads to muscle fatigue before the recovery period and eventual growth of new muscle. Making of art is not the result of a spontaneous event but rather requires great cognitive effort, and that creative process actually changes our brains and makes us more creative.

The processes in everything that we do change us, and in doing so they prove that well-known cliché: It’s not the destination. It’s the journey. Ultimately, the building of processes empower youth with the requisite tools to become healthy and socially engaged citizens. How, then, do we teach kids to value the process rather than focusing merely on outcomes? Below are two activities to help generate discussion on this topic.

Check the activities out here!

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