Teaching Hope

In this intriguing Kappan article, Shane Lopez (Gallup Organization) reports that only half of American children are hopeful – that is, believe their future will be better than their present and think they have the power to shape a better future. It seems that we’re not doing a very good job teaching young people how to hope.

“Hopeful thinking combines future thinking with a sense of agency or efficacy,” says Lopez. Studies have shown that a person’s positive expectations for the future are tightly correlated with academic and life success. After controlling for other variables (previous grades, IQ, psychological status), researchers have found that hope boosts a student’s school achievement by 12 percent. 

But some educators have fuzzy notions about hope, including these three common misconceptions:

• Misconception #1: Daydreaming is bad for students. When teachers see students with that dreamy gaze, they usually assume the student is off task and needs to be brought back to reality. But students’ daydreaming is often about how what’s going on in class relates to the future, says Lopez: “Daydreaming gives a child a chance to take a future for a test drive. It is where imagination sparks creativity and where plans and designs for the future are developed.”

• Misconception #2: All goals are created equal. Not so, says Lopez. Students’ daydreams may wander all over the place, but two fundamental life goals are the most powerful: having a good job and a happy family. “These expectations, the foundation of a good life, are what draw students forward,” says Lopez. 

• Misconception #3: Wishing is the same as hoping. “Wishes are mental fast food,” says Lopez. “They are mind candy that satisfies the moment, but do nothing to nourish us for the long haul… Wishing is future thinking that sparks no action.” How can we tell the difference between a wish and a hope? “Only hope starts an individual thinking about ways to make life better and gets them moving.”

Drawing on research from around the world, Lopez has found that students who are hopeful about the future have three characteristics that set them apart from students who are not:

• They are excited about something in the future. “That one thing can be big or small, novel or run-of-the-mill, close at hand or far in the future,” says Lopez, “as long as it teaches them to look forward with positive expectations.” It can be a weekly visit to the park, a family trip, a sporting event, a school dance. This is part of a hopeful mindset that gets these young people excited about the future and their future selves. “They become more animated and this display of positive emotions attracts attention and support from people who can help them along the way.”

• Hopeful students have good school attendance. Lopez and colleagues at Gallup studied student absenteeism in a Nebraska high school and found a close correlation between excellent attendance and hope. 

• Hopeful students are engaged. They are psychologically invested in what is happening around them and eager to get something out of classes and other activities. 

Can adults develop hope in young people? Yes, says Lopez. He starts by describing an experiment done on 295 seventh graders in Detroit. Students were divided into two groups and a researcher posing as an academic recruiter from the University of Michigan presented a slide show about the campus and possible college majors. One group saw a graph showing the amount of money people at different levels of education made – high-school dropout, high-school graduate, some college, college graduate, etc. The second group saw a graph of the income of famous actors, athletes, and musicians on the 2008 Forbes Celebrity 100 list. 

Afterward, the students’ regular science teachers (who had not attended the presentations) handed out an extra-credit homework assignment on their classwork. The students in the group that was told about the income earned after various levels of education were eight times more likely than the second group to complete the assignment. “It’s as if they suddenly saw education as a real path to the good future they wanted,” says Lopez. “Knowing the way to a solid job that paid $50,000 a year gave these 12- and 13-year-olds more energy and guidance for current effort than all the fantasy fortunes of Jay-Z, LeBron James, and other icons they followed on TV.” 

Lopez goes on to describe three specific strategies to increase students’ level of hope (there are more in his book, Making Hope Happen (Atria Books, 2013)):

• Give students goals that really matter to them. Nobody washes a rental car. For the same reason, students don’t work hard on assignments they don’t own or find meaningful. Students won’t get fired up about schools’ institutional goals like raising reading scores or graduation rates. But goals directly linked to having a good job and a happy family can be highly motivational. 

• Teach students to put hope into action. According to a 2003 OECD study, U.S. students are more confident that they’ll graduate from high school and college than students in any of the other countries studied. But only 60 percent of U.S. students strongly believe they can implement strategies that will get them good grades, according to the Gallup Student Poll. Lopez describes the Hope Camera Project as an example of how to fill in the missing ingredients. Fifth and sixth graders are given disposable cameras and over several months they photograph and write about something that documents hope in their lives, with the goal of presenting their best photograph and their edited essay in a gala evening event. Students in the project overcame family strife, academic struggles, and health problems to finish their work; it taught them to match their will with their ways, think flexibly, and create alternative strategies to reach their goals. 

• Show students how to make when/where plans. Studies have shown that students who decide when and where they will work on and complete a project are three to four times more likely to follow through than students whose action plans are vague. Setting action triggers is straightforward, says Lopez. “Each time, give a student an assignment or set a goal, help them choose the day and time they’ll start working on it, and the place where they’ll work.”

“Making Hope Happen in the Classroom” by Shane Lopez in Phi Delta Kappan, October 2013 (Vol. 95, #2, p. 19-22), www.kappanmagazine.org

From the Marshall Memo #507