Growth mindset — гибкий развивающийся образ мышления

Growth mindset — гибкий развивающийся образ мышления

by Евгений Волков -
Number of replies: 2

08 Декабрь 2010 @ 23:40

Growth mindset

http://oli-ka.livejournal.com/104189.html

Это самый важный и самый личный для меня книжный пост.

Я обо всём остальном и начала писать, чтобы разогреться.

Летом, по совету Яны __pinky_ (Яна, вечное тебе спасибо) познакомилась с книгой Mindset: the Psychology of Success by K. Dweck.

Автор пишет, что все люди делятся на два типа: те, кто считает, что мы рождаемся с определёнными талантами и умениями, и те, кто верит, что всему можно научиться и в себе развить. Первый тип получил название — fixed mindset, или фиксированный взгляд/тип мышления; второй — growth mindset, или гибкий/развивающийся взгляд.

Фиксированный взгляд заставляет нас верить, что мы родились с ограниченным списком возможностей — то есть мы классно рисуем, но вот считаем не очень; или у нас получаются гуманитарные науки, а физика — ну совсем не дана. Мы говорим себе и нам вторят учителя и родители, что выше головы не прыгнешь, нечего заниматься, чем тебе не положено, или вот ты такой аккуратный и внимательный, увлекайся тем, что получается, а что не получается, то и ладно.

Выходит, что мы беремся лишь за то, что нам природой дано и у нас хорошо выходит, а на остальное либо даже не смотрим, либо делаем спустя рукава — вроде как все равно не моя сильная сторона.

Все бы ничего, но проблемы возникают, когда что-то не получается. При фиксированном взгляде неудача автоматически означает отсутствие таланта. То есть не можешь поступить в институт с первого раза — значит, родился без способностей к данному предмету. Не получается на англ-м говорить легко и свободно — нет таланта к языкам. Не умеешь рисовать — ну не Микеланджело, что ж теперь. То есть "не умеешь" приравнивается к "никогда не сможешь".

Речь не только о недостатках способностей, но и об успешности. Взгляд на себя, как на "я такой в этом талантливый", "мне просто дано писать", "теннис — это мое врожденное", "я могу все, что захочу" — может привести к тому, что первая серьезная неудача полностью пошатывает веру в себя и стремление идти дальше. Потолок и все.

Или вот тоже стандартный вариант — найти свою зону комфорта, где все нормально получается (в работе занять позицию, найти область, индустрию, где разбираешься, в спорте остановиться, в личном на компромисс пойти — все из одной серии), и никуда не продвигаться дальше. На подобную остановку может быть много причин, и частая из них — боязнь ошибок, страх не справиться.

Развивающийся взгляд, напротив, говорит, что все можно освоить и любая неудача — это просто повод научиться и пойти дальше. Это не значит, что неудачи легко даются, нет. Но это означает, что после них не останавливается развитие.

Самое тяжелое и нервное время в моей жизни был переезд в Швецию. До этого меня воспитывали по принципу: ты сможешь все, что захочешь; если у тебя не получится, то ни у кого не получится. Я писала уже немного здесь про свою семью — и я осознаю, что у меня несколько другое и воспитание, и образование было, чем у большинства ребят. Мне буквально каждый день внушали заряд уверенности, что мне доступно все. При этом подразумевалось, что надо просто начать, подготовка не обязательна.

В итоге в 20 лет я переехала в Швецию учить финансы в магистратуре, и уже через месяц поняла, что у меня не получается ничего. То есть совсем ничего. Не могу свободно говорить на англ, не могу шутить, не чувствую окружающих, а главное — не могу сдавать тесты. Все было ожидаемо, но последнее случилось со мной в первый раз, до этого все учебное было как с горы скатиться. А тут занимаешься вроде как обычно, а результат на 4 с минусом, а то и на 3.

Следующие 7 месяцев я провела в библиотеке 7 дней в неделю. Меня до сих пор трясет от одной мысли, ненавидела каждый день и минуту в этом городе. Буквально, просыпалась утром и сразу думала, как я ненавижу происходящее и что надо просто перетерпеть, даже плохое когда-то заканчивается, и шла дальше. Каждый учебник конспектировала три раза от руки (один раз, потом выкидывала тетрадку, второй раз, выкидывала тетрадку и тд), прорешивала все задачи по теме, шла на экзамен, сдавала процентов на 80, расстроенная уходила домой. До сих пор руки трясутся, как вспомню. Адский ад. Единственное, что успокаивало, что вроде всем не просто, и не одна я за лампой сижу, глаза порчу. К концу года барьер сломался, и с языком и я учебниками, стало полегче, в итоге даже красный диплом и все прочее, на радость родителям. Второй год вообще веселый был.

О чем я? Результат ок, послевкусие отвратительное. Год в красивой, интересной стране прошел в стрессе, нервозности и за закрытыми дверьми. Я упорно что-то делала не потому, что верю в трудолюбие, люблю учиться, вижу ценность образования, а исключительно потому, что была убеждена, что если это не получится, значит, ничего больше у меня не получится. Самый зафиксированный взгляд на свете. Такой страх неудачи в степени.

Самое интересное в этой теории — то, что будь у меня гибкое мышление, я бы скорее всего делала то же самое — учила бы себе язык ночами и решала задачки, но ощущения были бы другие. Вместо "я должна, должна, должна" было бы "надо постараться и все получится; вот уже то-то выходит, класс, скоро и остальное подойдет". Меня бы радовал прогресс. а не бесконечно расстраивал изначальный провал.

Не то чтобы мне сто лет уже, но и в 26 понимаешь, что в памяти остается не результат, а процесс. И если от флешбеков скулы сводит (у меня до сих пор руки трясутся, как вспомню — ничего позже и конечно не Harvard даже рядом на стояли по стрессу и гадостности), то и смысл всего действия теряется.

При фиксированном взгляде успех как замкнутый круг: если среда требует развития навыков и новых достижений, то все делается с целью не себя развить, а этот статус успешности не потерять. А это автоматически добавленный стресс и отсутствие удовольствия.

В общем, фиксированное мышление утопично в любом случае — веришь ли ты во врожденный талант или не веришь.

Интересно, как советуют с детьми разговаривать. Понятно, что ругать и называть бездарем нельзя. Если человеку 20 раз сказать, что он идиот, он на 21й поверит. Но и захваливать "ты самый умный, ты самая талантливая, умница и разумница" тоже нельзя, потому что у ребенка пропадает ассоциация стараний с похвалой. То есть ему хочется услышать, какой он хороший, но он понимает, что он это не услышит, если у него не получится что-то успешно сделать, то есть не получится результат. Поэтому проще либо не делать, либо загнать себя в угол и сделать не в радость, а для похвалы.

Рекомендуемое решение — всегда хвалить работу, а не итог. Ты много старался, работал, вот видишь, у тебя получилось. Ты молодец, что приложил столько сил. У тебя сегодня не получилось лучше всех, но это потому что другие больше и дольше работали. В следующий раз, если ты будешь стараться и готовиться, у тебя получится лучше, чем сегодня.

Не менее любопытно про семью и отношения в паре — там такие же взгляды, можно верить, что пара преодолевает трудности, учится на ошибках и развивается, а можно сразу на ссоре ставить крест и считать, что ничего не получится, между нами стена, мы разные, меня никогда не поймут и пр.

Буду закругляться. Только добавлю, что не доказано, насколько необходим врожденный талант, чтобы достичь гениальности в искусстве — понятно, что труд необходим, но насколько достаточен, не ясно. И в каждом может сидеть как фиксированый, так и гибкий взгляды. Например, в бизнесе я считаю, что можно всему научиться, руку набить и пр. А вот рисование не дано, так не дано. То есть не все черно-белое, как я выше описываю.

И да, последнее — масса тестов проведено про взгляд у детей, студентов, взрослых и пр. Наверное, половина на половину. И гибкий взгляд ВСЕГДА сопровождается в среднем лучшими результатами по успеваемости, по сатисфакции и по всем основным признакам успеха и счастливой жизни. Ну и понятно, что не важно, с каким взглядом рождаются, всегда можно в гибкому мышлению прийти.

В общем, у меня к вам две просьбы. Первая — не спешите не соглашаться. Я тоже ругалась первую половину книги — мол, все здесь упрощено, жизнь сложнее, это не про меня вовсе и тд. Поспорьте с собой на эту тему про себя, потом понаблюдайте за окружающими: удивительно, насколько в поведении и разговорах проскальзывает, кто к какому типу более склонен. Послушайте себя. И когда след. раз появится возможность выйти из зоны комфорта или что-то новое попробовать, последите за собой, и если откажетесь, то спросите почему. Может, идеология «попытка не пытка, я чему-то научусь» не самая глупая.

И второе — почитайте книгу, она лёгкая, с примерами, пояснениями и прочим.

На англ. здесь:
http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-Dweck/dp/0345472322/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291852856&sr=8-1

или — вот это да — здесь
http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/3914217/

на русском, не уверена, что есть

Метки: books

1415 words

In reply to Евгений Волков

Re: Growth mindset — гибкий развивающийся образ мышления

by Евгений Волков -

Carol Dweck Explains The ‘False’ Growth Mindset That Worries Her

Abhijit Bhaduri/Flickr

Carol Dweck has become the closest thing to an education celebrity because of her work on growth mindset. Her research shows that children who have a growth mindset welcome challenges as opportunities to improve, believing that their abilities can change with focused effort. Kids with fixed mindsets, on the other hand, believe they have a finite amount of talent that can’t be altered and shy away from challenges that might reveal their inabilities.

Dweck believes educators flocked to her work because many were tired of drilling kids for high-stakes tests and recognized that student motivation and love for learning was being lost in the process. But Dweck is worried that as her research became more popular, many people oversimplified its message.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Dweck explained to reporter Christine Gross-Loh all the ways she sees growth mindset being misappropriated. She says often teachers and parents aren’t willing to take the longer, more difficult path of helping students identify strategies and connect success to those strategies. Instead, her complicated psychological research has gotten boiled down to, “praise the effort, not the outcome.” Dweck also explained what she means by a “false” growth mindset:

False growth mindset is saying you have growth mindset when you don’t really have it or you don’t really understand [what it is]. It’s also false in the sense that nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time. Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait. Something really challenging and outside your comfort zone can trigger it, or, if you encounter someone who is much better than you at something you pride yourself on, you can think “Oh, that person has ability, not me.” So I think we all, students and adults, have to look for our fixed-mindset triggers and understand when we are falling into that mindset.

I think a lot of what happened [with false growth mindset among educators] is that instead of taking this long and difficult journey, where you work on understanding your triggers, working with them, and over time being able to stay in a growth mindset more and more, many educators just said, “Oh yeah, I have a growth mindset” because either they know it’s the right mindset to have or they understood it in a way that made it seem easy.

The interview is full of tips for parents and educators, including the differences between young children and older ones.

 

How Praise Became a Consolation Prize

Helping children confront challenges requires a more nuanced understanding of the “growth mindset.”

A man guides a child riding a two-wheel bike. It's sunset, and the figures appear as silhouettes.
Dinuka Liyanawatte / Reuters

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-praise-became-a-consolation-prize/510845/

As a young researcher, Carol Dweck was fascinated by how some children faced challenges and failures with aplomb while others shrunk back. Dweck, now a psychologist at Stanford University, eventually identified two core mindsets, or beliefs, about one’s own traits that shape how people approach challenges: fixed mindset, the belief that one’s abilities were carved in stone and predetermined at birth, and growth mindset, the belief that one’s skills and qualities could be cultivated through effort and perseverance. Her findings brought the concepts of “fixed” and “growth” mindset to the fore for educators and parents, inspiring the implementation of her ideas among teachers—and even companies—across the country.   

But Dweck recently noticed a trend: a widespread embrace of what she refers to as “false growth mindset”—a misunderstanding of the idea’s core message. Growth mindset’s popularity was leading some educators to believe that it was simpler than it was, that it was only about putting forth effort or that a teacher could foster growth mindset merely by telling kids to try hard. A teacher might applaud a child for making an effort on a science test even if he’d failed it, for instance, believing that doing so would promote growth mindset in that student regardless of the outcome. But such empty praise can exacerbate some of the very problems that growth mindset is intended to counter. A new edition of Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, updated to address false growth mindset, comes out at the end of this month. I recently spoke with Dweck about how she wants her ideas to be applied. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.


Christine Gross-Loh: Could you tell me about the development of the idea of growth mindset? What was it intended to correct? What were you seeing that you felt growth mindset would help improve?

Carol Dweck: I’ve always been interested, since graduate school, in why some children wilt and shrink back from challenges and give up in the face of obstacles, while others avidly seek challenges and become even more invested in the face of obstacles. So this has been my primary question for over 40 years. At some point, my graduate students and I realized that a student’s mindset was at the foundation of whether [he or she] loved challenges and persisted in the face of failure.

When students had more of a fixed mindset—the idea that abilities are carved in stone, that you have a certain amount and that’s that—they saw challenges as risky. They could fail, and their basic abilities would be called into question. When they hit obstacles, setbacks, or criticism, this was just more proof that they didn’t have the abilities that they cherished.

In contrast, when students had more of a growth mindset, they held the view that talents and abilities could be developed and that challenges were the way to do it. Learning something new, something hard, sticking to things—that’s how you get smarter. Setbacks and feedback weren’t about your abilities, they were information you could use to help yourself learn. With a growth mindset, kids don’t necessarily think that there’s no such thing as talent or that everyone is the same, but they believe everyone can develop their abilities through hard work, strategies, and lots of help and mentoring from others.

Gross-Loh: When I first interviewed you about growth mindset a few years ago, I remember that it was a relatively unknown idea. But growth mindset is now so popular that I’ll hear people who aren’t steeped in educational theory say, “Praise the effort, not the child (or the outcome).” Why do you think this idea struck such a chord, and how did you find out there were people misunderstanding it?

“Nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time.”

Dweck: Many educators were dissatisfied with drilling for high-stakes tests. They understood that student motivation had been a neglected area, especially of late. So many educators, as well as many parents, were excited to implement something that might re-energize kids to focus on learning again, not just memorization and test taking, but on deeper, more joyful learning.

But a colleague of mine, Susan Mackie, was doing workshops with educators in Australia and observed that many of them were saying they got growth mindset and were running with it, but did not understand it deeply. She told me, “I’m seeing a lot of false growth mindset.” I just did not get it initially—growth mindset is a very straightforward concept, and besides, why would people settle for a false growth mindset if they could have a real one? But I started keeping a list of all the ways people were misunderstanding growth mindset. When the list got long enough, I started speaking and writing about it.

Gross-Loh: Could you elaborate on false growth mindset?

Dweck: False growth mindset is saying you have growth mindset when you don't really have it or you don’t really understand [what it is]. It’s also false in the sense that nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time. Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait. Something really challenging and outside your comfort zone can trigger it, or, if you encounter someone who is much better than you at something you pride yourself on, you can think “Oh, that person has ability, not me.” So I think we all, students and adults, have to look for our fixed-mindset triggers and understand when we are falling into that mindset.

I think a lot of what happened [with false growth mindset among educators] is that instead of taking this long and difficult journey, where you work on understanding your triggers, working with them, and over time being able to stay in a growth mindset more and more, many educators just said, “Oh yeah, I have a growth mindset” because either they know it’s the right mindset to have or they understood it in a way that made it seem easy.  

Gross-Loh: Why do you think these misunderstandings occurred?

Dweck: Many people understood growth mindset deeply and implemented it in a very sophisticated and effective way. However, there were many others who understood it in a way that wasn’t quite accurate, or distilled it down to something that wasn’t quite effective, or assimilated it into something they already knew.

Often when we see kids who aren’t learning well, we might feel frustrated or defensive, thinking it reflects on us as educators. It’s often tempting to not feel it is our fault. So we might say the child has a fixed mindset, without understanding instead that, as educators, it is our responsibility to create a context in which a growth mindset can flourish.

Gross-Loh: So it seems that the danger is that some teachers think they have growth mindset and believe it will transfer to their students, even though they themselves don’t really understand it. How about this: Are there educators who do understand the idea that abilities can be developed, but don’t understand how to pass it on to students? Are there certain children who are more vulnerable to this sort of misunderstanding of growth mindset?

Dweck: Yes, another misunderstanding [of growth mindset] that might apply to lower-achieving children is the oversimplification of growth mindset into just [being about] effort. Teachers were just praising effort that was not effective, saying “Wow, you tried really hard!” But students know that if they didn’t make progress and you’re praising them, it’s a consolation prize. They also know you think they can’t do any better. So this kind of growth-mindset idea was misappropriated to try to make kids feel good when they were not achieving.

The mindset ideas were developed as a counter to the self-esteem movement of blanketing everyone with praise, whether deserved or not. To find out that teachers were using it in the same way was of great concern to me. The whole idea of growth-mindset praise is to focus on the learning process. When you focus on effort, [you have to] show how effort created learning progress or success.

Gross-Loh: What should people do to avoid falling into this trap?

Dweck: A lot of parents or teachers say praise the effort, not the outcome. I say [that’s] wrong: Praise the effort that led to the outcome or learning progress; tie the praise to it. It’s not just effort, but strategy … so support the student in finding another strategy. Effective teachers who actually have classrooms full of children with a growth mindset are always supporting children’s learning strategies and showing how strategies created that success.

Students need to know that if they’re stuck, they don’t need just effort. You don’t want them redoubling their efforts with the same ineffective strategies. You want them to know when to ask for help and when to use resources that are available.

All of this is part of the process that needs to be taught and tied to learning.

“Focus on the learning process and show how hard work, good strategies, and good use of resources lead to better learning.”

Gross-Loh: Is there a right way to praise kids and encourage them to do well?

Dweck: Many parents and teachers who themselves have growth mindset aren’t passing it on because they are trying to protect the child’s confidence, focus on the child’s ability, and kind of boost the child’s view or protect the child from a failure. They’re conveying anxiety about ability.  

But we have a new line of research (with my former graduate student, Kyla Haimovitz) showing that the way a parent reacts to a child’s failure conveys a mindset to a child regardless of the parent’s mindset. If parents react to their child’s failures as though there is something negative, if they rush in, are anxious, reassure the child, “Oh not everyone can be good at math, don’t worry, you’re good at other things,” the child gets it that no, this is important, and it’s fixed. That child is developing a fixed mindset, even if the parent has a growth mindset.

But if the parent reacts to a child’s failure as though it’s something that enhances learning, asking, “Okay, what is this teaching us? Where should we go next? Should we talk to the teacher about how we can learn this better?” that child comes to understand that abilities can be developed.

So, with praise, focus on “process praise”—focus on the learning process and show how hard work, good strategies, and good use of resources lead to better learning. Be matter-of-fact, with not too strong or too passive a reaction.

You can see evidence of fixed mindset as young as 3.5 or 4 years old; that’s when mindsets can start becoming evident, where some kids are very upset when they make a mistake or get criticized and fall into a helpless place. That’s when children become able to evaluate themselves. We collaborated … with researchers from the University of Chicago who had a longitudinal project with videotape of mother-child interactions. What we found was the more praise was process-oriented—not a ton, just where the greater proportion of the praise was process praise [versus outcome praise]—the more those children had a growth mindset and a high desire for challenge five years later, when they were in second grade.

Gross-Loh: That’s very helpful to know for parents of young children.  But what about older kids who might feel discouraged and worn-down after years of feeling that they weren’t smart enough or a fear that they would never be able to be successful? Is it ever too late to foster a growth mindset in students?

Dweck: No—we’ve developed a number of online workshops addressed at adolescents and shown that when we teach [those] students a growth mindset, many of them regain their motivation to learn and achieve higher grades, especially students who have been struggling or students who have been laboring under a negative stereotype about [their own] abilities.

Research conducted last year by my former graduate student, David Yeager [now a professor at the University of Texas], on 18,000 students entering ninth grade, shows us that students who took growth-mindset workshops are seeking more challenges.

You can’t tell adolescents, “We’re adults, we have the answer, and we’re going to tell you what it is.” So we said, “We’re scientists from Stanford University and the University of Texas, and we need your help. We’re experts on the brain and how students learn, but you’re the experts on being a freshman in high school and we’d like your input for a program we’re developing for future freshmen.”

We then taught them about how the teenage brain is especially open to learning. We talked about how it’s a time of great plasticity, a time they need to take advantage of, and that they can grow their brains through taking on hard tasks in school and sticking to them. We had the students write a letter to a struggling freshman, counseling that person in terms of the growth-mindset principle, which is often very persuasive. We had testimonials from some public figures, talking about how a growth mindset got them to where they were.

Finally we talked about why someone would want a growth mindset. We realized that some kids would be overjoyed to hear you can develop your intellectual abilities, but others might not think it was the most exciting thing. So we then had a whole section on why you might want to develop your mind. Teenagers are really excited about the idea that they can do something to make the world a better place. So we asked them what they want to make their contribution to in the future—family, community, or societal problems—and then talked about how having a strong mind could help them make their future contribution.

We’re excited about this because we know the world of the future is going to be about taking on ill-defined, hard jobs that keep changing. It’s going to favor people who relish those challenges and know how to fix them. We are committed to creating a nation of learners.

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Growth Mindset: Clearing up Some Common Confusions

by Евгений Волков -

Growth Mindset: Clearing up Some Common Confusions

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By Eduardo Briceño

A growth mindset is the understanding that personal qualities and abilities can change. It leads people to take on challenges, persevere in the face of setbacks, and become more effective learners. As more and more people learn about the growth mindset, which was first discovered by Stanford Professor Carol Dweck, we sometimes observe some confusions about it. Recently some critiques have emerged. Of course we invite critical analysis and feedback, as it helps all of us learn and improve, but some of the recent commentary seems to point to misunderstandings of growth mindset research and practice. This article summarizes some common confusions and offers some reflections.

Confusion #1: What a growth mindset is

When we ask people to tell us what the growth mindset is, we often get lots of different answers, such as working hard, having high expectations, being resilient, or more general ideas like being open or flexible. But a growth mindset is none of those things. It is the belief that qualities can change and that we can develop our intelligence and abilities. The opposite of having a growth mindset is having a fixed mindset, which is the belief that intelligence and abilities cannot be developed. The reason that this definition of growth mindset is important is that research has shown that this specific belief leads people to take on challenges, work harder and more effectively, and persevere in the face of struggle, all of which makes people more successful learners. It is hard to directly change these behaviors without also working to change the underlying understanding of the nature of abilities.

Confusion #2: To foster a growth mindset, simply praise children for working hard

A body of research has shown that telling children that they’re smart and implying that their success depends on it fosters fixed mindsets. When these children later experience struggle, they tend to conclude that their ability is not high after all, and as a result they lose confidence, so our praise has the opposite effect of what we intended. On the other hand, praising hard work or strategies used, things that children control, has been shown to support a growth mindset.

This research was designed to learn more about one of the ways to support a growth mindset, not to identify all there is to fostering a growth mindset. When people newer to the growth mindset framework initially learn about this research, they sometimes conclude that we should simply praise children for working hard. But this is a nascent level of understanding. First, exhorting students to work hard would be an attempt to directly change behaviors without changing the underlying belief about the nature of abilities.

Second, students often haven’t learned that working hard involves thinking hard, which involves reflecting on and changing our strategies so we become more and more effective learners over time, and we need to guide them to come to understand this. For example, a novice teacher who sees a student trying very hard but not making any progress may think “well, at least she’s working hard, so I’ll praise her effort,” but if the student continues to do what she’s doing, or even more of it, it’s unlikely to lead to success. Instead, the teacher can coach the student to try different approaches to working, studying, and learning, so that she is thinking more deeply (i.e. mentally working harder) to become a better learner, and of course the teacher should do the same: reflect on how to adjust instruction. “It’s not just about effort. You also need to learn skills that let you use your brain in a smarter way. . .   to get better at something.” (Yeager & Dweck, 2012.)

Third, cultivating growth mindsets involves a gradual process of releasing responsibility to students for them to become more self-sufficient learners, and praise is a communications technique that tends to be more helpful earlier in that process of building agency. Later on, adults can ask students questions that prompt them to reflect, so that they’re progressing down the path toward independence.

Fourth, praise and coaching are not the only, or most powerful, ways to foster growth mindsets. For example, another method is modeling lifelong learning and making it visible, which gets us to the next confusion.

Confusion #3: Growth mindset is about changing young people, not adults

Some recent criticisms paint growth mindset work as solely focused on the students and not the adults. This is a misunderstanding of what growth mindset efforts are about. In our work with educators, we encourage the adults to start with themselves. If we don’t work to shift our own mindset about ourselves and our students, then we won’t work to change many other important things in the system necessary to improve education. Furthermore, our efforts to foster growth mindsets in students are likely to fail because we will say and do things that reflect our fixed mindset beliefs, which students will notice. We must deeply explore mindsets within ourselves and then gradually work to develop our own growth mindsets and our habits as learners. This means authentically working to become better at what we do throughout our lives, including how we teach and how we create contexts that help students thrive, and making our learning process visible to one another and to students.

We encourage the schools we serve to train teachers early in their growth mindset efforts, involving reflections and discussions on adult beliefs and continuous improvement practices. We provide professional learning resources to help them do so. Dr. Dweck and other mindset researchers speak about the importance of fostering a growth mindset in adults and have researched the mindsets of educators, managers, leaders, and other grownups. Growth mindset research is about learning how we humans can all become more motivated and effective learners, not about how we can change students but not ourselves.

Confusion #4: All that matters is what’s in the mind

Another confusion about mindset is that the only determinant of success is our mindset. But that’s not the case. Context, culture, environment, and systems matter. For one thing, people’s mindsets (as well as other beliefs and behaviors) are strongly shaped by the people around them. Beyond that, people’s destiny is not only a function of what’s within them, but also of what’s around them. A lot of the early mindset research studies focused on individual’s minds because they were seeking to understand how humans work. But mindset researchers recognize, research, and speak about the importance of shifting culture, context, and systems, and both researchers and practitioners actively work on that aspect of change efforts.

Confusion #5: Improvement is all about changing beliefs and not doing anything else

Related to that, another confusion we see, also reflected in recent commentaries, is that growth mindset work is solely about fostering the belief that we can improve, but not about changing the educational system or actually doing anything about that belief. Carol Dweck has talked extensively about changing learning tasks, testing practices, and grading systems. Too many tasks and teaching approaches are superficial, irrelevant, unengaging, and not learner-centered. We do need to change these tasks, the curriculum, and the pedagogy. We need to change the idea that school is about testing rather than about learning. We also need to better tackle broader issues such as childhood trauma and lack of exposure to early reading. People who dive deeper into growth mindsets learn about how important these issues are and how we might begin to address them, and a growth mindset helps them take on the challenges. As David Yeager and Gregory Walton point out:

[Mindset] interventions complement—and do not replace—traditional educational reforms. They do not teach students academic content or skills, restructure schools, or improve teacher training. Instead, they allow students to take better advantage of learning opportunities that are present in schools and tap into existing recursive processes to generate long-lasting effects . . . Indeed, [Mindset] interventions may make the effects of high-quality educational reforms such as improved instruction or curricula more apparent (Yeager & Walton, 2011).

Deepening our understanding over time

As with anything else, the deeper we go into mindsets, the deeper our understanding becomes. Over time, more nuanced questions arise, such as about the relationship between mindset and performance, results, failure, potential, assessments, mistakes, and many other things. For example, early on a teacher who is learning about mindset may start oversimplifying mistakes as always being ‘good’, but this can confuse learners, as mistakes are not always something we should seek to do. With time we start distinguishing stretch mistakes, sloppy mistakes, aha-moment mistakes, and high-stakes mistakes.

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Growth Mindset Enables Change

Research has shown that developing a growth mindset is beneficial in a variety of contexts, from education to the workplace to interpersonal relationships to sports to health. It leads people to take on challenges they can learn from, to find more effective ways to improve, to persevere in the face of setbacks, and to make greater progress, all of which we need to further cultivate in education. Furthermore, there is evidence that its benefits are most pronounced for people who face negative stereotypes, such as underserved minorities and females in STEM, and as a result growth mindset efforts can narrow the achievement gap.

Let’s Learn Together

Growth mindset is a seemingly simple concept, but there is a lot of nuance to the framework and its applications. I hope that this article helps clarify common misconceptions. We invite people to continue diving deeper into this body of work and engage in explorations together. We welcome further feedback because it takes a village, or more precisely, all of us, to foster better learning.

Eduardo Briceño is the Co-Founder & CEO of Mindset Works, which he created with Carol Dweck, Lisa Blackwell and others to help people develop as motivated and effective learners, including educators. Carol Dweck is still on the board of directors, but has no financial interest in or income from Mindset Works. The ideas expressed in this article are entirely Eduardo Briceño’s.

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