All of the United States military service academies are rigorous institutions, with students required to engage in challenging academic, physical, and military curricula. The United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland (USNA) is no different. New students arrive early one summer morning, and spend seven weeks going through the arduous onboarding process known as plebe summer. Most students at the Naval Academy are referred to as midshipmen, but students in their first year are addressed as plebes, to emphasize their low status. After Induction, plebes spend the summer doing thousands of pushups and sit-ups, running hundreds of miles, learning military knowledge and drill, and completing teamwork activities. The experience is essential for preparing new students for the rigors of the USNA, but new plebes find it mentally and physically exhausting. Many want to quit.
Jason was an athletic administrator for a network of charter schools when I met him. But earlier in his career, he was an assistant baseball coach and an instructor at the USNA. Among his duties was to help facilitate plebe summer. Jason stressed that the transition challenges plebes as much mentally as it does physically. The summer training phase not only includes all the PT, but tests of Navy knowledge and terminology, and hours of standing at attention, yelling at a wall (or a bulkhead, at the Naval Academy), all while trying to maintain your military “bearing” under great stress.
Part of leading this process is setting and holding the plebes to high standards of performance, discipline, dress, and execution of tasks. This is intended to prepare them to be students at the academy which, in turn, is intended to prepare them for leadership roles in the Navy. Students are challenged and harassed daily, held to high standards now so they can be prepared to meet even higher standards later in their roles as commissioned leaders.
But one of the most important factors, Jason told me, is that “You have to believe they can do it.”
The idea of simultaneously having high expectations for students while also showing them support is called being a “warm-demander.” There is a 40-year body of research on this idea in education. The concept goes back to work published in 1975 by University of Alaska researcher Judith Kleinfeld, who was describing those who were effective teachers of Inuit children in Alaska1. Zaretta Hammond summarized a lot of this research in her 2014 book on helping teachers think about teaching all kinds of students2.
Essentially, the idea is this: The best teachers, these warm demanders, are those who try both to build a personal rapport with students–showing them they care about them and believe in them– and have high expectations for their performance. All love and no drive dumbs things down and allows students to fail. All high standards and no support is cold, and mostly shows you know what you are doing, but also conveys you don’t much care if the learners learn or achieve similar success.
In a study conducted by eight researchers from seven universities led by David Yeager of the University of Texas3, researchers compared approaches to providing feedback to randomly assigned groups of middle and high school students. The experiments explored what the researchers call the “mentor’s dilemma,” or how to provide growth-producing feedback—which includes criticism—without undermining self-confidence. What they ultimately tested was the impact of a method called “wise feedback,” which includes three components: high standards, a belief in the students’ potential to meet those standards, and substantive feedback to help students reach those high standards.
They conducted a series of random assignment studies designed to see how this wise feedback impacted student performance and trust between teachers and students, especially those of different races. In the first two studies, groups of middle school students received comments on essays they had written, and then were randomly assigned to receive one of two notes: one conveying high expectations and the teacher’s belief that students could reach those expectations, or a neutral note saying the teacher was only offering feedback. Across the two studies, students who received a message of both high standards and teacher’s belief in their ability were more likely to revise their essays in the first study, and earned higher scores on their revised essays in the second. Measures of trust between teachers and students of different races also increased.
Being a warm-demander is, in itself, an important idea in both teaching and mentoring. It also illustrates one of the balances that great mentors strike in their mentorship. In a previous post, I introduced the idea of a Mean, taken from Aristotle’s reference to an average in mathematics. Being a warm-demander illustrates one of the Means of Mentoring.
That is, mentoring is not a series of either-or choices. Great mentors have broad toolkits. They adjust their approaches to suit different mentees or the varied needs of a single mentee over time. They do two things at once, such as offering support and making demands, or taking an interest in the personal and the professional.
The mentors I interviewed were neither coddlers nor drill sergeants. They were, at times, both. Great mentors use their broad toolkit to support mentees in different situations over time, or to approach a variety of mentees in the ways that suit them best.
Great mentors understand that mentorship is most impactful when it doesn’t fall into the trap of extremes or paint themselves into a philosophical corner. Mentors who do that have only an intellectual hammer, and every mentee need starts to look like a nail.
Kleinfeld, J. (1975). Effective Teachers of Eskimo and Indian Students. The School Review, 83(2), 301–344. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1084645
Hammond, Z. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin Press.
Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., Hessert, W. T., Williams, M. E., & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 804–824. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033906