Small Wins and Big Wins: Supporting Neuroplasticity and Changing Perceptions
By: Heather Kretschmer
Some years ago, I worked at a vocational school in Germany, and one of the last groups of students I worked with aspired to be childcare workers. My colleagues didn’t like working with these students. Not one bit. They warned me that these students were lazy, ignorant, and unmanageable. Even worse, my colleagues believed these students would never land actual jobs after graduating; the childcare worker training program was merely an ineffective, state-supported effort designed to keep disaffected young people off the streets.
Not much of an endorsement, right? And when I started working with these students, they most assuredly lived up to their reputation. They didn’t listen to me or even pretend to work on the tasks I set them. They had zero desire to learn English because they didn’t need English for anything, neither for their current lives, nor their future careers. Why bother exerting themselves?
Well, this was a pretty discouraging teaching context, and I had little hope of motivating these students to learn English. While I tried to maintain a positive attitude, the students’ behavior made it challenging for me to keep my irritation at bay. But after some time of trying various English language activities, all of which were flops, I started bringing in children’s materials—stories, songs, and games—and enticed the students to engage with those materials, at least some of the students . . . some of the time . . . to some extent.
Not exactly a resounding success, but over time I noticed small, snail-paced improvements in the students’ behavior. And then one day, a student asked me out of the blue, “Do you have a recipe for American brownies?” And I responded, “Yes. I’d be happy to share it with you.” Her classmates perked right up. So, in the next class, I handed out copies of my family’s brownie recipe, and the students actually made an effort to understand the recipe and translate it into German. (They were also very intrigued by the quaint American baking measurements.) About a week later, we had another conversation after my baker student reported back on how her brownies had turned out. Once again, the students showed genuine interest and requested more recipes. So, I brought in another family recipe.
The brownie recipe marked a definite turning point in our relationship and in the students’ attitude toward learning. These students were never model students, but they were more open to the tasks I set them and more willing to learn. And I was more cheerful, more at ease when interacting with them. We moved toward a positive student-teacher relationship.
As we discover from Kelly Lambert and Lara Boyd, the two neuroscientists in our main video, the brain rewires itself our entire life, since our experiences cause it to form new pathways. This ability is called neuroplasticity, a process that occurs “from the womb to the tomb” as Lambert humorously notes. Boyd adds that lifelong learning is crucial in maintaining the health of our brains. When new neural pathways first form, they are fragile and depend on practice to become stronger. The more often we repeat certain actions, the more skilled and efficient the brain becomes at performing them. In addition, because the brain is adaptable, it has the ability to overcome old, negative habits and create new, positive ones. When I reflect on my experience with my vocational school students, exposing them to new things—stories, books, songs, games, and recipes—and encouraging them to engage with these materials supported their neuroplasticity. And in turn, these students supported my neuroplasticity because I learned so much from them.
Most importantly, I learned not to stuff students into little boxes . . . the Lazy Student box . . . the Ignorant Student box . . . the Unmanageable Student box. But also not to push them into the High-Achieving Student box . . . the Polite Student box . . . the Diligent Student box, or any other box. In our more video, neuroscientist Nicole Vignola says that our own perceptions of ourselves have been influenced by our observations of other people. Furthermore, our perceptions are shaped by how other people, like our parents or friends, view us. Their perceptions can lead us to confine ourselves to perception boxes and reinforce certain narratives about ourselves in our minds.
Our negativity bias—perceiving negative information more strongly than positive information—can strengthen the negative stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. On top of that, our confirmation bias causes us to look for proof of these negative perceptions of ourselves, making it very hard for us to see beyond the negative narratives. But we also have the ability to focus on positive narratives of ourselves, and we can help other people do so, too. Vignola does this with people she knows by asking them, “What are the small wins and big wins of your week?” She then guides her conversation partners toward different outcomes—more positive ones—than the negative ones they had been telling themselves about. Only by bringing conscious attention to positive outcomes can we change our perceptions of ourselves. Drawing on the metaphor of making a new road, Vignola helps us visualize our brain’s hard work to change the negative perceptions of ourselves:
So if you have a pathway that has been ingrained and it’s a beautiful tarmac highway, and now you want to change it, you’re gonna have to step onto a dirt road. And then you have to pave that dirt road. And then you have to put in some streetlights. And eventually, this path will be a tarmac highway.
Focusing conscious attention on something is part of our metacognition, which takes place in the medial frontal precortex. Metacognition allows us to rely less on automatized reactions in the brain, which tend to reinforce the negative narratives we have about ourselves. Vignola continues:
When we break those automatic patterns, we take control of that steering wheel and we start to say, “Hey, this is how things have usually been. This is the box that I put myself in, that parents put me in, but I want to change that.” And you start to essentially rewire and reshape your Perception Box and how you conduct yourself in the world.
I think we can apply Vignola’s insights to teaching. First, I feel teachers need to avoid labeling students and squishing them into little boxes. Even if we never directly tell students how we view them, our students will notice our opinions of them through our facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice, especially if they’ve already heard negative comments about themselves from other teachers or important people in their lives. Even the smallest indication from us will confirm their negative biases of themselves because they are looking for that confirmation. That said, it’s really hard to not put people into little boxes, and when I catch myself doing that to students, I make a conscious effort to remind myself that students are so much more than my very limited perception of them.
Second, we need to look for the small and big wins our students experience and point them out to them. We can ask students, “What are the small wins and big wins in today’s class / in this project / this semester?” This useful metacognitive question nudges learners to look for the wins in their learning and helps them shift their perceptions of their learning and of themselves as language learners.
Third, we can look for the small and big wins in our own teaching and learning experiences. The authors in this issue draw our attention to the small wins and big wins they’ve experienced in different learning situations by:
- Reflecting on an uncomfortable conversation with a student (Leah Goldberg)
- Integrating advising techniques into her teaching (Jun Kato)
- Developing French skills as a busy professional (Maha Bali)
- Adapting to new language teaching requirements as primary school teachers (Yuki Otsuki and Tomoko Hashimoto)
- Getting students to investigate and think about ways of addressing real-world problems in the target language (Aleksandra Sudhershan)
- Coping with a sudden health challenge (Becky Alp)
Even though teaching stories like the one I shared in this article don’t always have happy endings, we can keep an open mind towards our students and interact with them in positive ways. But I admit this can be extremely challenging when students don’t change their behavior despite our best efforts. In such cases, it’s important to not give up but also to not martyr ourselves or burn out. However, when students are willing to change and give learning a go, you and your students will enjoy the small wins, and you may even experience unexpected big wins. In the last class session with my vocational school students, we celebrated our year together with homemade treats (including brownies!), English songs, and pleasant conversation. And I was so surprised and touched when they gave me a lovely handmade thank-you card. On the first horrible day of working with these students, I never ever would have imagined such a big win in our final class session.
Heather Kretschmer has been teaching English for over 20 years, primarily in Germany. She earned degrees in German (BA & MA) and TESL (MA) from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Currently, she teaches Business English and Intermediate English courses at the University of Göttingen in Germany.