Building self-esteem through accomplishment

In the past two decades, a healthy sense of self-esteem has been emphasized to support the well-rounded development of young people. While self-esteem was mistakenly seen as its own reward during the 90s, it is now understood by many educators and counselors as a desired effect of a child’s efforts rather than their cause.

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Self-esteem, it has been found, must be founded on concrete achievements. Students are supposed to feel good about their accomplishments. While a degree of confidence is needed to coax students into trying new things, praise should only be reserved for accomplishments; the more (and the better) they accomplish, the greater their rewards. The Washington Post even reports that too much unwarranted praise may make young people more dependent on outside feedback than self-started initiatives.

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Today, more educators would rather encourage students to work for their praise and recognition and have them build self-esteem from there. The satisfaction gained from a job well done (and the drive to improve from a less than satisfactory one) is seen as a better contributor than a positive self-image to academic performance and mental and emotional development.

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A combination of hard work, determination, a keen eye for mistakes and correcting them, and the ensuing satisfaction and praise of a job well done is one of the keys to holistic development, according to current pedagogical standards.

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The truth about learning styles

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The tenets of learning styles continue to be widely accepted by the educational system. Learning style proponents assert that individuals differ in regard to their modes of learning, such that people are separated into distinct types of intelligences identified by psychologist Howard Gardner.

However, a 2008 study discloses that the concept of learning styles is a myth. The researchers found no particular type of interaction between learning style and mode of instruction which is a precondition for corroborating the uses of learning styles in the general educational practice.

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Psychology professors Cedar Riener and Daniel Willingham also found that the concept is obscure, debunking in their article the common notion that students can be categorized into auditory, kinesthetic, and visual learners as previously proposed by Gardner. The authors contend that students’ preferences about how to learn make no difference when tested under controlled conditions. They affirm that “learning is equivalent whether students learn in the preferred mode or not.”

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These contradictions provoke educators to rethink their instructional practices and urge them to investigate the potential of educational programs focused on the “universal learning style of the human mind” which, perhaps, forms the basis for the residential treatment programs of therapeutic boarding schools, such as Turn-About Ranch. Under the schema, students process information from a variety of methods instead of learning from a limited type of module. The specialized structure supports experiential learning which could be a good supplement to conventional instructional methods.


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