Follow the Fear
It is a rare opportunity when educators get to experience firsthand the same challenges their students face during the learning process. Ironically, this opportunity was given me as a winner of the Center Theater Group Theater Education Fellowship. I chose to use the financial reward to research my theory that incorporating humor into the writing process would motivate reluctant Twice-exceptional (2e) writers to persevere through this area of weakness. I enrolled myself in a 3-week, intensive comedy writing workshop in New York City. I am funny; I can write; Success was imminent.
A funny thing happened on the way...
Stretching across the back of the theater where the writing workshop took place, was a banner stating “FOLLOW THE FEAR.” I wasn’t sure what it meant in terms of sketch writing. What scary monsters could possibly arise out of comedy writing? It wasn’t long before the meaning of the directive became all too clear. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t seem to produce a comedy sketch that met the expectations of the teacher, was equal to many of my peers’ sketches, and defined me as “able.” Where I began as an eager, motivated learner, I ended in rationalizing task avoidance as a means of saving face and assuaging my fears of failure.
Each morning, I had to brace myself to enter a classroom where I did not shine. Once a strong contributor to class discussions, my class participation began to diminish. I was reluctant to offer constructive criticisms to my peers...If I couldn’t write a perfect sketch myself, why in the world would they trust my opinions about their sketches? Though I didn’t seem to be honing my sketch writing skills as expected, I did learn something very valuable as an educator: You cannot separate the emotional self from the process of learning.
Their own high expectations and those put on 2e learners by parents and teachers can result in “...paralyzing anxiety, self-criticism and fear of failure.” (Parenting for High Potential, National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) March 2006). No matter how often I told my students, “Mistakes are opportunities for learning,” they weren’t buying it. They are too smart to fall for neatly packaged aphorisms. After my own emotional roller coaster ride in sketch writing, I can see the importance of teaching all learners, most especially, 2e learners, the specific emotional pitfalls that will probably occur when beginning and learning any new task, and explicitly identify the emotional strengths necessary to navigate this challenging road between “I can’t now” and “Now, I can.”
So, how do we encourage sensitive, 2e perfectionists to “Follow the fear” and allow for the probability of missteps as a matter of course in skill mastery? How do we convince our learners, our children, that the ability to follow their fears is the one-way forward to meeting their potential? The answers to these questions are actually quite simple and follow the same 2e instructional approaches and strategies for teaching cognitive and social skills development.
Since language has the ability to trigger powerful emotions, I would remove the word “mistake” (which sounds so final) from our students’ performance vocabulary and introduce “misstep,” a word that minimizes error and is invocative of recovery. To boldly say, “FOLLOW THE FEAR” tells the learner that fear exists within everyone trying to learn a new task. So, let’s do that...let’s present following our fear as the only possible choice.
The performance rubric of each classroom assignment or piece of work is a wonderfully visual way to explicitly identify the emotional pitfalls and skills necessary to push through them. The rubric would help students preview and identify emotional challenges that could surface during the performance process. Preparing students for the levels of potential missteps should be as explicitly identified as the levels of potential achievement. From an emotional perspective there are five points of breakdown in learning task mastery: Expectation, task initiation, task commitment, recovery and followthrough.
Expectations, our own and those of others, can bring any opportunity for learning to a halt before it even begins. Well, what if teachers present missteps as part of the learning process? In my research to find ways to encourage learners to “follow the fear,” I found the article, “Making Mistakes on Purpose,” a strategy used for strengthening the skills of...wait for it... table tennis players, who, as a part of their training, make mistakes on purpose in order to practice recovering from those errors. We, as educators, so focused on helping learners find success, just might see there is an advantage to helping them focus on error. We can help them develop the emotional mindset that effort is not over because a mistake, excuse me, misstep has been made.
“Because the player is expecting the mistake, he can decide in advance what to do next, allowing him to test out several different methods of recovering from the mistake, in order to find which work best for him.”
Asking learners to think about and create their own steps for recovery during challenging skill development, may help grow the self-acceptance vital to dealing with missteps that would otherwise send them reeling into task avoidance and feelings of failure. It would promote the positive coping strategies necessary for task commitment and followthrough. An explicit breakdown of expectations, task initiation, recovery and followthrough as part of the performance rubric can use the same point system that represents skill achievement. They can see the rewards earned for their perseverence, rewards for following the fear
