Identifying Strengths

I have found it to be the case in teaching, and in life in general, that many people struggle to identify their own strengths.

If learners are to benefit from self-assessment, they need to be confident in identifying their own strengths and in justifying the judgements underpinning these.

Two psychological issues are worth mentioning.

First are the difficulties inherent in reflecting on your own thoughts and actions, as well as the work you produce.

This is particularly the case when we are younger.

As time rolls on and experience accrues, introspection tends to become easier.

Experience grants us wisdom and we can look at ourselves and our work with a more objective eye.

(Only more objective mind, subjectivity is still inevitable.)

Our experience of the world is total – it is everything that we encounter; nothing more and nothing less.

Yet this experience is at the same time partial, for it is what we encounter, not what anyone else encounters.

For proof of this we need only look at how two separate individuals might interpret the same rule in completely different ways.

I am not contending that there is no objective reality, just that we all have a separate experience of it.

In terms of identifying strengths, this can make it difficult for learners to analyse those things that make up a part of who they are – the things they do, say and create.

It is not easy to look disinterestedly at that which composes a significant part of our experience.

Particularly if you are ten.

Or five.

Or eighteen.

(It’s still hard when you’re older!)

How Learners Think About Themselves Influences Their Attitude to Self-Assessment

The second issue to mention is closely related.

It is the identification of what we do, how we act and what we produce with our conceptualisation of our selves.

David Hume noted that when we look inside ourselves there is not a single thing that we can fix upon and say: ‘Yes – that is I’.

Instead, he suggests there are many separate things that in conjunction we label as ourselves.

These are things like experiences, memories, thoughts, and ideas.

We do not need to go any further into this here.

The point I want to make is that we consider ourselves to be made up of, or at least partly constituted by, many different things.

Take this blog as an example.

I have written it and you are reading it.

For you, it is an external object; something that you are assimilating but which is being filtered through your own mind.

I imagine (though do not know) that you are reading it with a view to developing your understanding of assessment for learning and that, as you go about reading it, you are picking out what you agree with or what you are prepared to accept and rejecting or questioning other things.

For me, the blog is an internal and an external object.

It is internal in as much as it is a representation of things I have thought (and that I continue to think); it is a product of my mind.

It is external because it represents a realisation of my thoughts in a physical (digital) form – one that is transferable and can be shared by other people.

In the context of my notion of myself, this blog is something that I identify with my own self – it is one of the many things that go to make up my self. Albeit a tiny element of the whole.

For you, the experience of reading and using it is less significant.

Transfer this argument to the classroom and we can see that a learner’s relationship to their own work, thoughts, and actions is qualitatively different to the relationship we have to them.

It is important to help learners put emotional reactions to one side.

Those automatic responses they might have when asked to assess their own work.

(Like the learner who runs an eye over their story and says it’s perfect. Or the learner who shrinks back from identifying anything good about their work because of low self-esteem.)

The stress must be on learning as a developmental process in which everyone is engaged.

Self-assessment must be seen as a way to coach oneself.

It is not about the rightness and wrongness of your work, thoughts or actions, but about why it is good and how it can be made better.

Let’s take it back to classroom practicalities.

Here are four strategies you can use to help your learners identify strengths.

All of which are simple.

All of which you can use in the context of self-assessment.

And all of which seek to put emotional reactions to one side.

Create a Strengths Bank 1

Divide the class into groups.

Explain that the purpose of the activity is to identify as many strengths as possible connected to what you are teaching.

These can be general or specific. 

Ask groups to come up with as big a list as possible.

Alternatively, divide the work up by giving each group a different area on which to focus.

When sufficient time has passed, ask groups to share their ideas.

Collate the strengths and either display these prominently in your room or give each learner a copy to keep in their books.

Learners can then use this strengths bank as a scaffold whenever they are completing self-assessments in your lessons.

Create a Strengths Bank 2

Set learners a peer-assessment task.

Ask them to review their partner’s work and to identify three strengths and a meaningful target.

At the end of the activity, charge two or three learners with the task of going round the room and recording every class member’s strengths.

You can then collate these into a single document.

Voila!

You have a strengths bank.

One you can share with you learners and that they can use as a tool in subsequent self-assessments.

(And peer-assessments as well.)

Exemplar Work

Put learners in groups of two or three.

Give each group a piece of exemplar work and ask them to identify ten (or fifteen, or twenty) strengths.

Explain that the activity is a race and the first team to come up with their list of strengths should shout out ‘Finished!’ as soon as they are done.

They must then read their list to the class.

Learners listen carefully and are allowed to challenge any strength with which they do not agree.

The group who are reading out their strengths must justify any example that is challenged.

Later on in the same lesson (or in the following lesson), ask learners to do a self-assessment.

Encourage them to use the strengths lists they came up with as a helpful tool.

A scaffold that makes the process of identifying strengths in your own work easier.

Model Self-Assessment

Produce a piece of work yourself and then do a model self-assessment in front of the whole class.

Talk through how you make judgements.

Narrate the process by which you identify strengths, and how you come up with targets for improvement.

Give learners access to your expertise.

They can then use this.

Copy it. Borrow from it.

So it becomes easier for them to identify strengths in their own work.

For example, a dance teacher could record themselves doing a routine.

They would then play this to learners and self-assess it in front of them.

As part of this, they would talk through how they know certain things they did during the routine are good and, therefore, why they are strengths.

Not only does this approach help learners better identify strengths themselves.

It also opens up success criteria because they are exposed to your modelling.

On a final note, in my Assessment for Learning Knowledge Base, you’ll find 200 exemplar strengths I’ve written, designed to help teachers speed up their marking.

You can also use these to develop ready-made strengths banks for your learners.

Simply copy and paste to create something bespoke to you.