It’s natural for us to say ‘Just do your best’, to someone. It can provide some much-needed comfort to a person who’s worrying about an upcoming exam or other event. It also communicates our unequivocal support for them – which is of course the main point in saying it. But when it comes to young people’s school work, telling them ‘Just do your best’ can be problematic.
Why? First, because who really knows what their ‘best’ is? Who knows what anyone’s best is? You can measure ‘personal best’ in fields like sport – your time to run a hundred metres or how high you can jump or throw the javelin etc… but that only tells us what our best is at that specific point in time; it doesn’t tell us what we might achieve, with more practice, feedback and fine-tuning – it doesn’t really tell us, then, what our best might be. In schools, and maybe more widely, how can we really have the foggiest idea of what someone’s best is? Think about it.
Second, and perhaps worse than not knowing what our best looks like, is not caring; we may be happy, or resigned, to settle for performance that is below par. If Gia hates Maths, usually does badly in it, and feels demotivated, we can exhort her all day to do her best and it won’t make a blind bit of difference. Same with Carlo, who switched off French a long time ago, for a variety of reasons; he’s really not up for doing his ‘best’. Thank you anyway.
In common with many children and young people, my daughter Anna had a pandemic-affected Year 12 at Sixth Form college: the timetable was dramatically modified, with online lessons that lasted two hours at a time, and interaction with teachers and peers that was minimal to non-existent. Anna didn’t make good enough use of her non-lesson time either, of which there is a lot at college – I think she only had 12 hours of lessons per week; self-discipline is expected and it’s crucial for doing well. In the run up to the Year 12 exams, I’m bound to have advised her to just do her best – I can’t recall now, it was two years ago. She got grades C, D, E in her exams. No doubt Anna heeded my sage advice as she approached the exams and did her ‘best’ in them! We were all convinced, when she got her results, that CDE was categorically not her ‘best’.
Maybe we can offer something better, or at last something more, to students in school and to children at home. How? By getting into the specifics – specific, timely suggestions are likely to be far more useful to someone than telling them to do their best.
Say that Mel has been set this essay by her History teacher: ‘What were the main causes of the French Revolution of 1789?’ We don’t need to know anything at all about the subject to talk to Mel about: following the department’s advice on doing history essays (different subjects can have their own methodology for doing an essay in the subject); reading/using the resources provided by the teacher on the topic; doing some additional reading from another source (very easy to find these days); making an essay plan; doing a draft essay; getting the draft checked by someone, if possible, and taking account of their feedback; redrafting and doing a final check; handing it in; and acting on any feedback provided once the essay has been marked. That would probably be Mel doing her ‘best’. Or, of course we could say none of those things to Mel and just invite her to do her best.
It’s easy to think of examples of this get-into-specifics approach to doing our best: the specifics of homework routines; what great behaviour looks like in class; how to revise effectively; how to improve our knowledge of a specific topic… Going back to a point already made: how can we be sure of what our best looks like? We probably can’t, but at least this approach gives us a clear picture to use to improve from where we are, to hopefully get to a better place.
My daughter Anna turned it around in Year 13. It helped a lot that she got back to in-person one-hour-long lessons, but she also: used her ‘free’ time during the day in Year 13 to study; applied herself fully to not just her homework but also to her independent study; did a bit extra several times a week for each A level subject, using study/revision guides. And she did that for the whole of Year 13 – same person, entirely different work ethic and daily routines. Anna got A*, A, B in her final exams. Was that her ‘best’? Who knows, but it was a damn sight better than she had done at the end of Year 12. And it’s easy to see how she managed to improve.
Okay, I hear you say, but going back to Mel, what if it’s the morning of an exam and she is a bundle of nerves and it’s too late for all of that specific hard-work-over-time stuff? True. In that specific case, there may still be 10 minutes of revision on the topic that Mel is least confident about that she could do? Who knows, something she learns in those 10 minutes may come up in the exam. Of course, there’s no harm in also saying to her, ‘Do your best! You’ve got this!’
For all of us, time spent in self-reflection about the specifics of what our ‘best’ might look like in the activities in which we are involved must be a good thing, especially if we have input from someone else who knows something about the topic/area/issue – moving from vagueness to specifics, through thoughtful attention to detail, is likely to pay dividends.
What might my best look like in practice? Is a great question for us all to ask ourselves regularly.
