"When you become obsessed with achieving a result quickly, the only thing you think about is how to get to your goal, and you forget to realize that our process for achieving goals is just as important as whether or not you achieve them at all. The desire to achieve results quickly fools you into thinking that the result is the prize." - James Clear from Transform Your Habits

This very simple, free, downloadable guide to understanding how to form new habits has some great insights into how people can create positive habits that last. It's a quick and easy read (only 38 pages) and is a practical tool for making small, positive life changes.

What this quote means in the context of life may be important to you personally, but what it implies about teaching is even more valuable. Obsession with quick results is the government mandate in current educational practice. Students in the younger grades test multiple times per year, and students in the older grades have high stakes for the tests they take.

It's a lot like cramming for a history test. It's not getting an A in history that makes you a more historically knowledgeable person; it's the process of understanding why things happened, what were the causes and effects, what were the unexpected consequences, and how we can learn from the past to make a better future. Cramming for a test is not the process. Ultimately, being obsessed with a test grade is going to hinder our ability to learn from the past.

The result is not the prize; the process-with the experience, confidence, and knowledge that it brings- is the prize. It turns out that when we focus all of our energy on the result of our work, we miss the importance of meaningful work itself. This is not to say that all work is life-changing; productive work by definition is transforming, and every time we work productively we not only produce the goal of our work, but the process that changes- even if only minutely- who we are.

Here's a very practical example. We make goals for students that they need to be able to read and comprehend at a certain level by a particular time in their education. That students can comprehend what they read is the goal; there are test that assess whether students have achieved that goal, but if you think the test is the goal, you are missing the point of education. The ability to read and comprehend is the goal- the result of practice, both guided and independent. The ability to read, however, is not the prize and regardless of how quickly you achieve the result of comprehension, it is not the reason for learning to read. We don't want kids to read so that they are merely able to read; we want kids to read so that they DO read- and continue to read- long after we stop teaching them to read.

There is a huge difference between students who have been taught to read and students who are readers. When the process of learning to read- with the experience, confidence, and knowledge that it brings- is the prize of reading, and students who are readers seek out that prize whenever they can. If the only thing teachers are focusing on is the result- that students can read/ pass a test- they've completely missed the point of being able to read, which is to read for the prize of reading.

Once again, I've got to quote Chuck Jones:

Knowing how to read and not reading books is like owning skis and not skiing, owning a board and never riding a wave, or, well, having your favorite sandwich in your hand and not eating it.

In other words, what's the point? Where's the prize? And are we, as teachers, losing sight of the real goal of teaching students to read? It's certainly not just so that they can say they can; it's so they do...and expand their horizons in the process. And that's the whole point.