In Pursuit of Success—Overcoming Underachievement: A Book Especially for Teachers, Parents and Students

By Dr. Len Restall

This book is written with the express purpose of showing how to improve your success and achievement by giving principles and strategies that lead to success. The cliché that ‘it will not happen overnight but will happen’ can be applied with these principles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris NZ
• Release date: Aug 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781499098488

Dr. Len Restall

Dr. Leonard Restall has been a teacher of science, mathematics, and physical fitness for more than forty years and has gained a BEd, Med (Hons.), a PhD degree, and a TTC from three universities in England, New Zealand, and Australia. He has taught seminars within secondary schools and churches.

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In Pursuit of Success

Overcoming Underachievement

A Book Especially for Teachers,

Parents and Students

Dr. Len Restall

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Len Restall.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/18/2016

Xlibris

NZ TFN: 0800 008 756 (Toll Free inside the NZ)

NZ Local: 9-801 1905 ([phone] from outside New Zealand)

www.Xlibris.co.nz

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Contents

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Chapter 1: In Pursuit of Success - Overcoming Underachievement

Chapter 2: Success - possible for you or not?

Chapter 3: Underachievement - a present dilemma?

Chapter 4: Issues Relating to Underachievement

Chapter 5: Individuality - ‘your uniqueness’

Chapter 6: Motivation - ‘the starting point to success’

Chapter 7: The 5 Steps to Achievement - ‘Success’

Chapter 8: The Way Ahead is Now Open to You In Your ‘Pursuit towards Success’

Notes: Characteristics of Individual Types

Occupations – Choices

References

Figure:

1. Figure 1. Factors affecting underachievement

2. Figure 2. Summary of the Four MBTI Scales of Individual Type.

3. Figure 3 Components of a Motivation Model

4. Figure 4 Location of reasons for success or failure

5. Figure 5 Example of a Goal Strategy

6. Figure 6 Example of a Mind-map

Acknowledgements

The completion of this book has been made possible by the encouragement of many people including my wife, Rita, and from research done by others, which has been widely acknowledged throughout this book. Thanks are given for the tireless editorial assistance by my daughter, Susan Andersen. It is dedicated to all those who want to achieve and help others to succeed and reach towards their potential. I acknowledge the inspiration and knowledge gained from Professor John Malone, from Curtin University, Perth, WA and from Professors Alan Webster, James Chapman, and Don Mc Alpine from Massey University, New Zealand.

I thank all students who may have endured my efforts to cause them to learn, often they may not have seen the purpose in it, but achieved much beyond their expectations, and provided to me the value in pursuing the means of overcoming underachievement.

I am grateful in being able to help all teachers, parents, and students to strive to reach their goals, and fulfill their dreams in pursuit of success. I hope your efforts will be not wasted, but will be successful and give you reward.

About the Author - ‘his road to success’

The author having gained three University degrees, including a Ph.D seems to have had it made for him, or is brilliant, lucky, or having lived in a time or place where achievements were easy to obtain. This is far from the truth, and the following account of his life up to the present time should be an encouragement for you particularly if you do not have a record of success.

I was born in London, having good and loving parents and lived most of my childhood in Essex, an eastern part of London. My schooling, or lack of it, during World War II was completed under conditions in which very little learning was accomplished, and most of us wondered and were more concerned as to whether we would be alive at the end of the day. My experience was like this - on most days, no sooner had I arrived at school, the air raid sirens would sound and we were hounded into makeshift shelters, often without any books or learning material, and sit it out with our hearts in our mouths. I cannot remember anything that was taught during those times. Our teachers who would read to us and take our minds off the bombs that were falling around and us encouraged us, but the normal school lessons were not given.

My school was in a part of Essex in which could be aptly called the enemy ‘fly-over’, for the enemy aircraft flew over this part of eastern England on their way to London. Understandably - this was the area where the Battle of Britain was fought. All enemy aircraft would fly over our part of Essex on the way to London, so we received many of the bombs, often jettisoned from enemy aircraft wanting to get back home to Germany, before having reached their targets. Later in the War, flying bombs (VI) and rockets (V2) fell frequently in our area. I can recall a number of occasions where some of our friends would be missing from school - later to learn they had been killed in an air raid. Nevertheless, I looked forward to leaving school at 14 years of age, the school leaving age at that time, to go into the workforce.

At seventeen years and six months, in 1946, I joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a trainee to become a Physical Training Instructor, eventually to be retained as a staff instructor on the training school. I suppose it was from this time on that my learning desire was stimulated and it is still with me at this time of writing - nearly 60 years later. Some would say that it was because I was the type, which was made for learning, and that the ability laid dormant in me just waiting to get out. ‘Second chance must not mean second best’¹; is a truth that means much to me and can also be for anyone that believes it and acts upon it. What could be the reason for this change, and how was I to catch up with the many years lost during my schooling?

I later transferred into the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) in New Zealand, employed in a similar role training other instructors for the Combined Services: Army, Navy and Air Force in Physical Fitness. My pursuit or passion for learning was intense - I attended education classes and eventually passed a Higher Educational Test, similar to a School Certificate examination and gained an associateship by examination with the New Zealand Association of Health, Physical Education and Recreation (NZAHPER), the first of several professional examinations I was to pass.

One of the outstanding principles that I acquired during my Air Force service was the importance of ‘motivation’, which I was first introduced to in 1947 and has stayed with me and increased in intensity since those days. I was determined to find out more about this success factor and how to capitalise upon its influence for learning. I was later to define motivation for myself as, ‘the internal release of energy to accomplish some desired result’. This suggested that the energy needed to cause some desired change had to come from within a person, and could be influenced from without, such as by the influence of teachers, peers, parents, or others.

During my Air Force service, I had a personal desire to become a school teacher, or even become a doctor. Little did I realise that my dreams or desires were to come to pass. My career in school teaching began when I left the Air Force - my passion and vision, which lay dormant, was energized when an opportunity was given to me to enter St. Luke’s College in Exeter to complete a Certificate of Education - a teacher’s certificate. This was the start of a new but complementary career at the age of 40.

I eventually completed a Bachelor of Education degree, which naturally led me on to doing a Master of Education degree. One particular concern for me as a teacher was that many students were not achieving the results that could be expected. In fact I believed at the time that this was normal, because of such theories as, ‘a normal curve of distribution’ and so I carried on until I became aware that many behavior problems were associated with students who were underachieving. Later research was to show me that acute behavior problems, which usually resulted in the suspension or expelling of students from school were highly related to a mismatch between the teaching style and a student’s preferred way of learning. The present day application of learning style theories has become very popular and tends to be shown as the ‘saviour’ for underachievement.

Major parts of my M.Ed degree were in the area of: the education of gifted students, learning difficulties, individuality in education, and metacognition⁰. Therefore, as a result of my studies, I became very interested to see if there was any relationship or pattern between underachievement and with different personalities, or ‘individual type’. More important, if it was possible to reverse trends for underachievement within my own classes. If this was possible, then I could change failure into success. I began to change my attitude towards failure - it was not an event but an attitude, and if I could change the attitude then I could gain success both for my students and me.

⁰Metacognition - consists of all aspects underpinning learning. It refers to one’s knowledge and control of one’s own cognitive processes or actions such as evaluation, motivation and planning of learning.

An opportunity was provided for me to complete a Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD) degree at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, based upon my earlier degree work relating to underachievement. This, I completed in 1999, and continues to be a source of my passion to assist others to reduce, prevent or overcome underachievement and guide people towards success. Success should eventually cause one to serve others.

You may have gathered already that passion and motivation were strong components in my success story. This is true, but success does not need to be just, arriving at a place or time in life, or gaining some particular experience or qualification, but can be a journey of discovery, adventure and excitement throughout life. The pursuit of success can be considered to be proof of the one’s desire. If your desire is strong, then you will pursue that desire strongly. In looking back I can see that I had a strong desire to achieve. Nothing could be more frustrating that to have reached one’s personal goals and then stop - life is a continuing journey with exciting prospects along the way. One success should be the stepping-stone to another one.

Chapter 1

In Pursuit of Success - Overcoming

Underachievement

Introduction

Why is one person successful in all that they do, and others do not succeed? Are there any special talents or abilities that are needed to bring success? Are the circumstances of my life: my background, my race or social class, the cause of my failures? Are some people more destined for success, or prone to failure? What can I do to gain or improve my success? Do I need to stay at the bottom of the pile, when it comes to achievements? Can I do better at school exams? These are some typical questions that you may ask when experiencing failure, or when seeking success. If all the answers to these questions were easy and straight forward, then most people would succeed with very little effort. The truth is, many of our problems relating to success are complex. But there are some principles that can be used by almost all people to reduce the complexity of the problem and bring greater success.

As a teacher for many years, I had assumed that the wide variation in performance was what could be expected from a ‘normal distribution’ of scores, where some students gained above average and others below average, because some students tried harder than others, or some students had a greater measure of the quality called ‘intelligence’. This gave me a reason, and possibly may have been assumed by you for a difference in performance. I had wondered why there was so much variation between the results obtained by students receiving the same teaching, and I tried to justify it by using sociological arguments, saying that all people are different and do not start from the same position of learning or with the same cultural background. Although there is some measure of truth in this argument. If this position is accepted as the only truth, then expectation of success can be seriously affected.

I was later to find that the measure of my expectation was to have a very big influence on the results I was to get. Maybe this could be your problem as well - that you do not expect good results. There has been some research conducted in this area of expectation. In one case, a teacher was given a low ability class and told that they were a high stream class. He proceeded to teach them, as he would have done for a high ability class and gained very good results. His expectation was rewarded. Running together with this study was a contrasting position - the teacher was given a high stream class and informed that they were of low ability. He taught them as a low ability class and had very low expectation of good results - his expectation was not cut off. What made the difference? Mainly it was the level of expectation of the teacher. We shall see later that expectation is a key element in motivation.

A common theory of ‘cultural capital’ was held by many academics such as the sociologist, Bordieu ¹, and was the basis of much of the educational research conducted in the 1960’s. So maybe I was right in assuming that there should be a wide variation in the differences shown in achievement. It certainly appeared as fact to me from the results gained by many of my students. In some ways this was true. But it did not necessarily mean that people were locked into a situation that could not be changed. I was determined to find some answers to this dilemma of underachievement and from personal experience was able to gain many changes in achievement for students who generally were not expected to do well at