My colleague Paul shared this Mastodon post by Cat Hicks about contest culture that I read months ago but still had open in a tab today. On rediscovery, I still love its meaningful message.
Contest cultures (“constantly prove you belong! Prove you’re smart! Everything here is a dog eat dog competition!”) tear people down under the guise of “toughness” and “identifying brilliance.” … One of the things we “get” from toxic contest culture beliefs is short-term reassurance that WE are smart/technical/brilliant (until we fail). Groups (& orgs) can float on this and close their eyes to a million damages if they’re desperate to be elite. … People don’t achieve because of this. People achieve DESPITE this. People eke out creativity and focus and joy and building in moments when they can get AWAY from this.
People love what they build so much sometimes that they will endure this. But what could they do if they didn’t have to.
Contest culture reminds of the term “rigor”, which the Grading for Growth blog discusses here. This all makes me think about something that came up at Lindsey Masland’s Grading Conference keynote in 2023. In revisiting my notes on her talk, I’m seeing that she brings up core ideas from The Courage to Teach. The thing I remembered from her talk that made me draw a connection to contest culture and rigor was her question: do we really need to care about mastery? Do we really need to ensure that knowledge is inside students’ heads? After all, can we even do that? These questions resonated with me because for the longest time I have wondered can we measure short-term learning accurately? That’s what we’re trying to do with homework, exams. But we absolutely are not sure if we’re measuring long-term learning or understanding if students value ideas.
In classrooms where there is an implicit and/or explicit focus on mastery, are we building up a contest culture? Are students achieving in spite of this? And what do we even mean by “achieving”? I’m going to start a success in learning note to record my evolving thoughts on this.