I recently watched an interview with Carol Dweck from Stanford University about growth mindset (you can see more here) and these were the notes that I took on that interview that I wanted to share:
Growth mindset and performance have absolutely nothing to do with family income, social status, low-achieving ability, or high achieving ability. A student should not be disregarded or prevented from developing a growth mindset. There are many high-achieving students that are experiencing anxiety because they want to uphold the âperfectâ image. Every test score is the ultimate judgment of who they are. A growth mindset can help them out of that place and give them a larger purpose. We are stunting the potential of our most promising students by making them feel that the meaning of their life is wrapped up in grades and test scores.
Many teachers think of a growth mindset as being open-minded, itâs not that, itâs believing that you and your students can develop their abilities. A lot of teachers have equated growth mindset with effort and effort alone, so they think praising effort is teaching a growth mindset, it isnât. It takes very particular behaviors to transmit a growth mindset to students. Itâs when teachers give challenging and meaningful problems instead of remote memorization. Itâs not just step-by-step formulas. Itâs giving chances for revision.
When a student fails and a teacher focuses on the learning, the thinking, this communicates more of a growth mindset to students. When a teacher praises effort or gets anxious instead of addressing the issue, the students may think oh, youâre covering up my shortcomings or my lack of knowledge/ability.
Telling students, itâs not about grade-getting. Itâs about learning, becoming the person you want to be, finding how you will make your contributions to the world. The focus is on growth and learning.
There is nothing that can diagnose a studentâs potential.
A growth mindset is not optional. The jobs of the future require people who love challenges. Students who love being muddled and confused, struggling, doing it all over again. We donât even know what the jobs of the future are, but we do know it is not memorization or solving an equation by plugging in numbers. If we are going to have a thriving society, we need to give students this love of learning. We, as educators, should be teaching students to be comfortable with uncertainty.
How do you foster a growth mindset in your classroom?
A really powerful thing teachers can do to help students develop a growth mindset is to model it for their students by learning to do something along with them. As teachers, we often feel like we are supposed to be experts and masters of whatever it is we are teaching, and that showing we donât know the answer to something is unacceptable.
Actually, learning how to do something alongside your students is an incredible opportunity for them to see you work through a problem-solving process. When you try things that donât work and you show them how you will take what you learned from that setback and use it to try again, you are showing them a growth mindset!
Next time you are learning how to do something new (coding a robot presents many great opportunities for this), let your students observe your process - it will help them to learn how to learn, and show them that you also have to practice skills, problem solve and work through setbacks, normalizing it for them!
I think this is such an important piece of the puzzle - as @Aimee_DeFoe mentioned, modeling growth mindset is hugely powerful, but so is our language around it. Giving positive feedback for process over product is a step in the right direction, but there is no âone thingâ that will create a culture of growth mindset.
I often thought about it like tending a garden in my classroom. I knew the big picture culture of learning I wanted to have in my classroom, (which included students having a growth mindset) so tried to plant the seeds of that culture in all of the spaces, interactions, and lessons that I could. The thing to me about fostering a mindset is that itâs not just about one process or a lesson here or there - itâs got to be a way of seeing the world and yourself within it. So baking student agency into as many spaces and situations I could was important to me. Itâs hard to develop a growth mindset if you donât feel you have agency over your learning.
For instance, we would have journal time every day, but the journal prompt was chosen from a jar of student questions. So we were reading and writing, but about something that was meaningful and interesting to my students. This motivation then also supported their willingness to apply a growth mindset to spelling and writing.
I think most teachers at the high school level have the benefit of smaller classes. I know I have a ma of 15 due tot the equipment I have in the classroom. My class starts off with the same projects, but I personalize the coursework on their targets and goals. If someone is interested in manufacturing, they work on the Work cell. If they want to go into coding, we use the python CS course. If they want to go into engineering, we work on building projects. Thatâs the wonderful thing about project based learning, we can challenge all our students in different ways.
