Throughout the school year, the High School director, Bob Schantz, sends notes home to parents updating them about the High School division and school life. The following is an excerpt from his most recent note. Feel free to ask Mr. Schantz for more information about any of the programs or activities he mentions here when you visit.
Since back-to-school night, several parents have asked me for more information about Carol Dweck’s research on successful mindsets. Perhaps because I can personally identify with much of what Dweck has to say, I am eager to share her research findings. Below are some digested, and hopefully tasty morsels drawn from Dweck’s book titled
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, as well as from an opportunity I had to hear Dr. Dweck speak at an ISACS Conference last fall and from a recent interactive meeting with her through the e-Luminate group. More recently still, Dweck wrote an article for
Educational Leadership titled “Even Geniuses Have to Work Hard,” which I thought had special relevance to many Canterbury students.
In her thoughtful Educational Leadership article, Stanford professor Carol Dweck says, “Teachers who strive to design challenging, meaningful learning tasks may find that their students respond differently depending on the students’ assumptions about intelligence. Students with a growth mindset, (students who believe that they can develop intelligence over time), may tackle such work with excitement, whereas students with a fixed mindset (students who believe that intelligence is an inborn trait) may feel threatened by learning tasks that require them to stretch and take risks.”
Dweck suggests that teachers and parents can take the following steps to foster a growth-mindset classroom culture:
- Don’t praise ability – Praise students’ effort, the strategies they used, the choices they made, their persistence.
- Downplay speed – “Teachers should also emphasize that fast learning is not always the deepest and best learning,” and that “students who take longer sometimes understand things at a deeper level.” Albert Einstein famously stated that he was slow to learn – that’s why he pondered the same questions year after year.
- Have students set goals – For example, a student who can’t understand absolute values might commit to watching a YouTube video on solving linear absolute value equations and teach the process to a friend or classmates.
- Teach the growth mindset – As obvious as it sounds, simply gaining consciousness of the growth mindset can have positive effects. Dweck and her colleagues have developed a curriculum: http://www.brainology.us. Students might share an area in which they used to be inept and are now proficient. “Such discussions encourage students not to be ashamed to struggle with something before they are good at it,” she says.
- Make students advocates – Students might write a letter to a struggling student explaining the growth mindset, urging the student to avoid labeling, and suggesting strategies. All this transmits crucial information to students, says Dweck, and communicates “that their role is not to judge who is smart and who is not, but to collaborate with students to make everyone smarter.
- Make every child stretch. Encourage students to take challenges; don’t let students coast to success. Dweck says, “[Easy successes] can create the fixed mindset belief that you are smart only if you can succeed without effort.” Also, present challenging tasks as fun and exciting. When a student succeeds, say, “Great! You tried different ways, you followed the clues, and you found a strategy that worked. You’re just like Sherlock Holmes, the great detective. Are you ready to try another one?”
I would welcome more conversations with parents about Dweck’s research, and for those of you who wish to delve into her work in greater depth, I recommend her book Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development.