How Do You Define Success - and Student Success?

Let's first consider how you define success for yourself.

Not the definition you’d put on your resume or the answer you’d give to a college counselor. Your real definition of success.

What does it mean for you to be successful?

Now I want you to consider how you define success for your children.

And if you’re a teacher or educator, what does success look like for the students you work with?

Is it good grades? Getting into a good college?

Getting a scholarship? Being the captain of the team?

Having a successful career? Being financially secure?

Being happy? Being confident?

Being a "good kid"? Maybe it's some combination of all of those things.

Now that you've defined those parameters of success, I want you to ask yourself one more question: Can anyone actually achieve that level of success?

Not everyone.

Not just the kids who already have the advantages.

Not just the students who happen to be good at the things our schools measure.

Anyone.

And if your answer is no—or even maybe—I want you to think about the impact of that definition. Because the narrower we make our definition of success, the fewer people who can actually experience it. And the more people we create who see themselves as failures.

We've made failure part of the system.

This is about more than perfectionism. Perfectionism certainly plays a role. But I think there's something bigger happening. We've created systems where success is often defined by how closely you can match a predetermined answer. Think about the way we grade students. A student answers a question incorrectly, and we take points away. They don't know something, and we mark it wrong. They make a mistake, and their grade goes down. But what if we looked at that differently?

What if we celebrated the gap in knowledge?

Because if we celebrate the gap, there is something for everyone to work toward. There is room to grow. There is something to discover. There is a next step. The student who doesn't know the answer isn't a failure.

They have simply found something they don't know yet.

That's a very different message. But when we penalize that gap, we turn not knowing into something negative. And eventually, that negative message can become something much bigger than a grade.

It's bigger than a fixed mindset - It's an identity.

I'm bad at math. I'm not a good student.

I'm not a leader. I'm not smart.

I'm just not good at this.

And once "failure" becomes part of the way someone defines who they are, something really dangerous happens. They stop believing success is available to them. Why keep trying if you've already decided you're not the kind of person who succeeds?

Student Success isn't supposed to be a finish line.

Maybe that's the piece we need to rethink. We've turned success into a destination.

You get the A. You make the team.

You get into college. You get the job.

You get the promotion. You "make it."

But what happens when success is a finish line? Someone is always going to be behind it. Someone is always going to be ahead of you. And someone is always going to feel like they aren't measuring up.

What if instead, success was about growth?

What if success meant knowing something today that you didn't know yesterday? Having a conversation you were too afraid to have six months ago? Trying something you might fail at? Asking for help? Recovering from a mistake?

Taking responsibility? Listening to someone whose perspective is different from your own? Finding a solution to a problem?

Those things may not show up neatly on a report card.

But they matter. A lot.

And this is where belonging comes in.

We talk a lot about building community in schools. We want students to feel connected. We want them to feel like they belong. We create programs around kindness, inclusion, school spirit, and relationships. And those things matter.

But I don't think we can build genuine community while failure is baked into the definition of who belongs.

Because if I believe that success belongs to the smart kids, the athletic kids, the popular kids, the confident kids, or the kids who always seem to have it together...

Where does that leave me? If I repeatedly experience myself as someone who doesn't measure up, eventually I'm going to stop seeing myself as part of the community you're asking me to belong to.

That's the paradox.

We tell kids they belong while simultaneously creating systems that teach them they aren't successful. And those messages don't always coexist very well.

So maybe we need to ask a different question.

Instead of asking: What if we asked:

"Is this student successful?" "Is this student growing?"

"Did they get the right answer?" "What did they learn from getting it wrong?"

"Why isn't this student achieving?" "What is getting in the way—and

what can we do about it?"

Those questions don't lower the bar. They change what we're measuring. Because I don't believe that creating a world where everyone succeeds means telling everyone they're doing a great job all the time. That's not success. That's participation trophies with better branding. Real growth is hard. It requires struggle. It requires mistakes. It requires accountability. It requires being willing to hear, "You don't know this yet." But "you don't know this yet" is very different from "you failed." One closes a door. The other opens one. And maybe that's what our kids need from us. Not a narrower definition of success that only a few can achieve. But a definition that gives every young person a place to start, something to work toward, and a reason to believe they belong while they're figuring it out. Because every kid should be able to look at their own life and see a path forward. Not because we've guaranteed them success.

But because we've stopped convincing them that failure is who they are.