“Only you can control your future.” Dr. Seuss – Self-efficacy

Transcript

Steve Fouts  0:04  

Hey everybody. It’s Steve and Dan Fouts teaching different with the famous Dr. Seuss, with a quote about self-efficacy. “Only you can control your future.”  Depending on how you look at it, it’s an empowering quote. What would you say the claim is? Let’s get right to the claim. This quote is short and to the point. 

Dan Fouts  0:38  – Claim

You are in control of your world.  The choices you make matter. The decisions you make will shape the direction of your life. You want to be happy, and you want to have these things in the future. Based on what you do today, you have control over that. This definitely sounds like Dr. Seuss. It’s a very empowering quote about your capacity as a person to shape your future. 

Steve Fouts  1:14  

There is a behavioral phrase called the locus of control. Do you believe that your choices matter? Another way to ask that is, do you believe that you’re making choices for yourself that are going to have any impact on the world? Some students are not used to feeling like their choices set them on a certain route into the future. They just feel like they’re a ping pong ball. 

Dan Fouts  1:54  

Yeah, that’s the efficacy angle of it. They don’t feel like what they do matters. Is it any wonder that they don’t perform as well in class. They don’t associate their actions with their success, because maybe they haven’t had experiences in their life where there’s been a connection between the two. How would we work a conversation around this? Have the kids talk about a time when they were certain that a choice they made led to something really good in the future. 

Steve Fouts  2:36  

Yeah. A choice was made. They could have chosen to do something differently, and that’s the key to free will. They made a choice, and then voila, it affected the outcome. They saw the connection.  

Dan Fouts  2:56  

You could also have them talk about a time when they made a decision that ended up negative. What was the choice you made that ruined your chances to do something? You didn’t study for a test. You didn’t prepare for an interview for a job. There are plenty of examples they could bring up where they felt like they were in the driver’s seat. 

Steve Fouts  3:27  

Right. Let’s do the counterclaim. Your choices matter. That’s how I simplified the claim. What does the counterclaim look like? 

Dan Fouts  3:48 – Counterclaim

Dr. Seuss is talking about something that’s very deep, but he’s using very simple language. He’s suggesting that our choices matter and that we control our future. I think the way to push against this is to say the world actually controls us. Other people control our future. How we turn out, our destiny, however you want to label that thing that comes later, is not from our choices. We’re helpless in many ways. 

Steve Fouts  4:35  

What’s a prompt that you could use to get students to share an experience that would bring out this idea? We might say that our choices matter, that we should always be trying to do the right thing and making the right decisions, but in reality, we find ourselves… For instance, kids are told to go to school and follow the rules. You can choose to do whatever you want, but in a way people are making it more or less likely that you’re going to make a choice one way or the other. 

Dan Fouts  5:26  

Other people are shaping your choices. You didn’t choose to go to the school that you’re going to. It’s based on where you live, or what your guardian told you to do. You didn’t choose where to live. You didn’t choose the financial situation that your family is currently in. There are a lot of things about your life that were determined for you, and that set the framework for your choices. Someone who grows up in a very wealthy family, with supportive parents is going to make very different choices based on that. They were set up better, and so the world influenced them in that way. Does that make sense? 

Steve Fouts  6:23  

Yeah. We find different circumstances limit our choices for the future. 

Dan Fouts  6:30  

I’m trying to think of some other ones. Yeah, keep going. 

Steve Fouts  6:32  

What if I decide that I want to be the greatest tennis player in the world, but I was born with one arm. My choice matters in the sense that I want to do something, but the world’s not going to let me do that. The world’s going to have input on my future of being a championship tennis player. Maybe you’re not good at a certain subject, and you don’t know why that is, but you’re good with numbers. It’s not like you woke up one day and said, I think I’m going to choose to be really good at math. That’s just your DNA. Another way to maybe approach this is to ask the students if they have a mentor, a big sister, a big brother, a friend, or a peer, who is always looking out for them. Someone who is telling them where they can and can’t go, or giving them advice on what they should do, because it’s in their best interest. Does anyone ask for advice about what they should do from people who are close to them? 

Dan Fouts  8:22  

I just realized the most obvious example. We are recording this in the middle of a 100 year pandemic. Think of the quote in the context of the pandemic. Read the quote again. “You can control your own future.” Tell that to anyone right now, in the middle of a pandemic, and I think they’re going to go with the counterclaim. They’ll say, wait a minute, I had plans nine months ago, and they’ve all changed now. The pandemic has changed what we can predict about the future. 

Steve Fouts  9:09  

Yeah. Our choices matter, but they’re determined by the situation that we’re in. Am I going to wear a mask when I go to the grocery store, or am I just going to risk it? The pandemic is a great example of where the future becomes hazy. We like to think we control our destinies, but sometimes we have to work around something.

Dan Fouts  9:43  

It makes the choices that are left over that much more important. How you choose to think. What’s your attitude towards the pandemic? Are you going to treat it as a challenge to overcome? Are you going to succumb to it? This is one of those conversations where the deeper you get into it, the more complex it’s going to get. The kids are going to share a lot of great things. 

Steve Fouts  10:10 – Essential Question

Yeah. You’re going to have some students who are going to say, what’s the difference whether my choices matter or not? But, I think that going through the conversation will raise their awareness, and make them look at this stuff in a new light. 

Let’s go with this for the essential question, do you control your future? Pretty simple. 

Dan Fouts  10:39  

Yeah, but pretty deep at the same time. 

Steve Fouts  10:44  

It can be answered from many different perspectives. Do you control your future? 

Dan Fouts  10:53  

If I assigned this essential question, I’d have them just talk about the pandemic. There are a lot of things to get into there. 

Steve Fouts  11:08  

It’s a really good question, and it’s a really interesting topic, self efficacy. We expect so much from adolescents and students. We want them to control their own life and to be successful, to make the right choices. But, some of them are going through difficult moments where there are a lot of forces telling them their choices are not being heard. They’re not being acknowledged by people and maybe what they think isn’t going to affect their future. You want to raise their awareness of this as an issue. 

We hope you enjoyed Dr. Seuss this week about self efficacy. Make sure you visit our Conversation Library where we have many conversations like this, each with a different quote, a sample claim, counterclaim, and an essential question to get you started.

Thanks so much for coming. We will see you soon. 

Dan Fouts  12:33  

All right. Take care.