Designing an ecosystem for academic excellence: 7 elements to consider

As a teacher, you want your students to achieve great things. Our responsibility as educators is to create an academic ecosystem—a community of “just-right” conditions—where students are able to thrive.

If we could create the perfect ecosystem for learning, what would it look like? In working through the research of many current and foundational educational experts and authors—including Brian Cambourne, Eric Jensen, Carol Dweck, and others—I’ve highlighted seven key elements that are instrumental in building an ideal environment for student success.

Conditions of learning

During his time as a classroom teacher, literacy and learning expert Brian Cambourne was puzzled. Several students in his class struggled academically, yet didn’t have issues with learning outside of the classroom. Through research he conducted by studying babies learning to speak, he determined that there were eight ideal conditions of learning. When these conditions were present, the young children developed language and literacy in ways that were enjoyable and meaningful:

• Immersion: the need to be in an environment that is rich in spoken and written language
• Demonstration: the opportunity to observe models of written and spoken language in daily life
• Engagement: to understand the purpose of learning and see themselves as capable of success
• Expectation: the need to be in an environment where there is the expectation of proficiency
• Responsibility: the need to take ownership of their own learning
• Use: the time and opportunity to use the skills being acquired
• Approximation: the opportunity to explore concepts through trial and error, knowing that productive struggle and mistakes are essential for learning to occur
• Response: the need for timely, constructive feedback from knowledgeable people

Focusing on engagement

Of all the conditions Cambourne found, engagement was the most critical. He created what he calls the Principles of Engagement. Learners must believe that they are capable, see purpose and value in what they’re learning, and be free from anxiety. Learners must also like, respect, trust, and want to emulate the teacher.

Author Eric Jensen takes engagement a step further in his book Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind. Jensen outlines seven factors that correlate with student engagement and are strongly tied to socioeconomic status: health and nutrition, vocabulary, effort and energy, mindset, cognitive capacity, stress level, and relationships. Focusing on these factors holistically can help educators gain a better understanding of what will engage and motivate all students.

Dedicating time for deliberate practice

Those who are successful at a particular subject are thought to have an intelligence and natural aptitude for it—at least, this is the impression Malcolm Gladwell was under when he started researching his book, Outliers. Hoping to understand why some people succeed while others fail to realize their potential, Gladwell spoke to many of the world’s most successful people. He found proficiency is directly related to mastery, and mastery is gained through deliberate practice. Roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, to be exact.

Similarly, Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated insists that natural talent is a myth and deliberate practice is the catalyst for great performance. Deliberate practice is designed to improve performance through highly-demanding repetition and continuous feedback. There are many ways deliberate practice can be modeled in the classroom—one of those ways is to challenge students to stretch beyond their comfort zone into what Colvin describes as the “learning zone.”

Modeling a growth mindset

When students possess a growth mindset, they believe they can achieve anything through hard work and perseverance. This is the opposite of a fixed mindset, in which students believe they’re either good at something or they aren’t.

In her book Mindset, author and researcher Carol Dweck outlines an experiment she and her assistants performed with two groups of elementary school students. The students were asked to solve a series of puzzles. With one group, Dweck’s assistants praised the students’ intelligence (“You must be very smart!”), and in the other, they praised the students’ effort (“You must have worked really hard on that.”). Through the life cycle of the experiment, the students who were praised for effort (growth mindset) performed 30% better, while the ones praised for intelligence (fixed mindset) performed 20% worse. By shifting to the process of learning over the product, these students had a positive attitude about their own learning capacity, which increased their engagement.

Targeting the learning zone

Deliberate practice and growth mindset can be combined to push students past their limit—to stretch into what Geoff Colvin describes as the “learning zone.” This zone is a place where a student is continuously improving skill sets, and is located in the middle of the comfort zone—where one feels safe or at ease—and the panic zone, where making a mistake might cause a student to shy away from new challenges.

Master coaching

Teachers are master coaches—they observe how a student works through a particular task, and then design practice for specific areas of need. They also take what they’ve learned about the student to design expert feedback and teach metacognition strategies. Just as doctors practice medicine, teachers need to see themselves as people who practice teaching. Colvin says it best:

“Decades or centuries of study have produced a body of knowledge about how performance is developed and improved, and full-time teachers generally possess that knowledge…it’s almost always a necessity for a teacher to design the activity best-suited to improve an individual’s performance. Anyone who thinks they’ve outgrown the benefits of a teacher’s help should at least question that view.” (Colvin, 2010.)

Collaborating with data

Data is an important piece of an academic ecosystem—it’s essential for understanding student achievement. Educators don’t look at that data in a vacuum—they get together and collaborate to understand the data and decide on courses of action for students.
Utilizing data isn’t just an indicator of student success—it’s a way to understand if teaching practices are successful.

Those are the seven elements, but there’s another critical part of this ecosystem to consider—ignition.

As educators, you play a critical role in showing students what the future version of themselves looks like. If you tap into a student’s ignition, you’ll be able to fuel your academic ecosystem for life.