I’m a bit of a sport’s nut and I regularly listen to a sports radio station called SEN while driving.
We all have our guilty pleasures, eh? It’s hardly highbrow listening, but it helps me switch off at the end of a busy day and calm the brain a bit with some mindless footy talk.
I’ve been noting something that sports commentators default to when they speak about teams at the bottom of any league ladder. They talk about this “loser’s mentality” that these teams need to break in order to ascend the pecking order.
It goes a bit like this. “They’ve got all the talent they need, but they blow the big moments. They just don’t know how to win. It’s like it’s part of their DNA.”
This is effectively what ranking systems do to people and teams. The stigma of being on the bottom rung becomes identity when endured for long enough. It doesn’t matter what you’re building, improving or working towards – you’re just not good enough. It’s in your DNA.
And folks, this happens to kids and classes in your school.
If there are winners rewarded for being the best at learning and conduct in your school, then there are also losers being painted with that loser’s mentality.
Once that mentality becomes identity, they live up to it and find breaking out of it not worth the effort. After all, nobody is noticing the improvement – just the failings.
If there are rankings on display – such as class dojo ladders, house tables/points or class reward systems – then you’re effectively trading off a social media winner’s moment for the reinforcement in plenty of others that they suck.
I wouldn’t do that to yourselves.
Your school is harder to work in when a whole bunch of your players think they’re straight-up losers because your system implied and then reinforced that identity in them.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. If the idea of the “loser’s mentality” becoming identity hit a nerve, that is exactly what we’ll unpack in The Shame Responsive School Online Workshop on 12 May.
Because underneath a lot of that behaviour isn’t defiance – it’s shame doing its thing. In this live online session, I’ll show you how to spot it, and how to respond in ways that actually shift it.
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