Gift of a Growth-Mindset

"The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit." (Mark Twain)

I’m always somewhat taken aback, slightly hurt even, when people praise or express admiration for my intelligence rather than the effort, persistence and dogged determination I’ve put into being prepared, or, divorce my accomplishment from the sacrifices and contributions made by individuals and the opportunities afforded to me by participation in different learning networks. My response is usually an uncomfortable silence and a ‘thank you’ muttered de sotto voce. I have a confession to make. I’m not really that smart. Indeed, as we appear to be moving full-steam-ahead towards another highly contested and questionable educational innovation, viz. sex-segregation, whose outcome is likely to be an increase in the gender gap favouring girls, I want to share some research that suggests why this might not be the best approach and to offer an alternative to educational professionals that is likely to make more of a difference in the immediate and long term – the Theory of Mindsets.

Carol S. Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, in Mindset: The new psychology of success defines two types of mindsets that everyone utilizes to different degrees in different domains of life. When operating within a fixed-mindset the individual believes that some human quality like intelligence, (or some other ability), is static, pre-given or fixed at birth and that individuals possess a certain limited/fixed capacity. Growth-mindset individuals on the other hand believe that human qualities are not static, but learned and can be increased through purposeful effort. From this slight distinction a whole host of differences and associated psychological dispositions develop.

An immediate corollary is that individuals operating in a fixed mindset (FM) have as their goal proving themselves on tasks of fixed difficulty, thereby validating their sense of self through performance while for individuals operating in a growth mindset (GM), the goal, indeed the hallmark, is learning through stretching and perseverance. FM individuals view challenges as a threat to be avoided while GM individuals take these as opportunities to learn, develop and become deeply engaged. In the FM obstacles trigger a response to quit or resign while for GM obstacles trigger persistence and an occasion for exerting more effort. Indeed, effort is a key difference, for FM, effort is seen as embarrassing or fruitless – a demonstration or proof that one is not able to do something while for GM purposeful effort is simply the way one learns, gets better and ultimately the only way one can expect to develop competence or expertise in something that one does not yet know how to do. Dweck states, “it’s startling to see the degree to which people with the fixed mindset do not believe in effort.”

For FM individuals, correction is ignored as not being useful or relevant and blame is assigned to outside sources or forces while GM individuals listen carefully to what can be improved, and pay attention for useable information. For FM individuals other people’s successes are seen as threats which can detract from one’s need to demonstrate superiority while for GM other’s successes are inspirational and again provide opportunities to learn and grow. Dweck’s research has consistenly shown that FM people plateau early, sometimes as early as Grade 6-7 (10-11 years) while GM people experience consistent growth and plateaus do not persist for very long.
With respect to education, FM learners take smart to be “a perfect performance” or “100%” while GM learners view accomplishment as an indicator of progress and expanding capabilities and might make statements like “I got 60% which is great cause I got 52% last time and I’ve been working really hard.” FM students greet lack of success by attempting to avoid such occasions while GM students view it as a necessary reality check, an opportunity for important and constructive feedback and persist with changes to their previous behavior/strategies. FM learners tend to remain at a consistent level of performance, if they start high they end high and vice-versa. GM learners almost all end up higher no matter where they begin. Finally, FM learners tend not to assess their ability accurately, lie about their grades/accomplishment and effort, blame others for their failure and may cheat to maintain a level of performance and achievement they believe should come ‘naturally’ without requisite effort. If this sounds like some politicians, well, I leave you to form your own opinion. GM learners on the other hand tend be more honest about grades, their self-assessments are more accurate and they assume responsibility for their achievements or lack thereof.

A caution and a clarification. The Theory of Mindsets seeks to provide an explanation at individual, inter-individual, and socio-cultural levels of the complex relationship among individual effort, failure, persistence, motivation and societal messages, in achievement, or rather, life-long learning. It does not ignore the contributions made by biology, but suggests that it is not as critical a factor as one’s belief in (and actual) effort, persistence and challenge seeking that influences learning for the majority of individuals in a population. Indeed while there may in time prove to be a biological basis for different mindsets, and perhaps even other types of mindsets, at present, the importance of the theory is in sensitizing educational consciousness to the important role that certain types of beliefs play in achievement and success across different spheres of endeavor. While I present the mindsets dichotomously this is a simplification and I invite interested readers to check the entire book and Carol Dweck’s website for themselves where she engages with the more subtle nuances of the theory.

So how are these mindsets created and can they be changed? What can teachers and parents do and what are the wider implications of these mindsets for our society? I’ll discuss that in the second and third parts of this article.

(Part 2)
Very early in Form 4 Mr. Mercier, our English teacher graded an essay of mine as a D (fail). Looking over that piece I suspect he was being a little generous – somewhat gently telling me that the quality of work was not quite up to his standard and that I could improve with effort if I worked at it. Over the course of form four, through lots of independent extra reading, time in Carnegie library, writing practice, and without going for extra lessons my English mark crept up slowly through a C a B and eventually a low A. More importantly, I knew for myself that the quality of my writing was improving. I had learnt to assess my own work. In form 5 I finally earned an A from Mr. Mercier, it was for a short story on a hurricane and its aftermath which I had spent weeks researching and pleasurably writing and rewriting in a state of flow the weekend before submission. Several months later I would learn that I had won the “Best Short Story” prize from CXC in the 1993 examination, however it is the D and the A from Mr. Mercier on those essay which I hold more dearly as the indicators of my determination to get better at writing.

Teachers and parents play a crucial role in creating (and sustaining) fixed or growth mindsets. They are also essential in changing mindsets. According to Dweck’s research the way praise and labels are used and what is emphasized, are important. In her studies on praise she found that almost all students who were praised for their ability were pushed almost immediately into the fixed-mindset, becoming more risk-averse to challenge, failure and sources of potentially disconfirming information about their ‘brightness.’ In contrast 90% of students who were praised for their effort, i.e. for doing what is needed to succeed, took up new more challenging tasks from which they could learn. The take-away message here is if you want to create fixed mindsets in children praise their ability/intelligence or talent, say things like, “Kevin you’re so smart/dumb/bright/stupid/fast/slow.” But if you want to create a growth-mindset person, praise the effort with statements like, “Kevin, that was a great report, I can tell you did a lot of research and put in a lot of hard work, it shows, there are a couple of places you might like to go to develop your thinking on this further…”. Dweck says, “praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance” and advises, “If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort and keep on learning.” She offers suggestions for after-school conversations involving every member of the family answering questions like, “What did you learn today?”, “What mistake did you make that taught you something?” “What did you try hard at today?”

Labels and stereotypes also work to affect mindsets. Dweck’s research suggests that a great way to create FM learners is to use limiting labels such as “What type of learning mode are you? Are you a visual learner?” Rather fewer labels should be used and when necessary ones that are as expansive as possible such as, “I see you’re really good at picking up visual information from the environment…how else might you learn?” These different approaches send different messages. When teachers use limiting labels the message is “you have fixed traits and I’m judging them” while the other message is “I see you as a developing person and I’m interested in your growth.” Indeed this is one way the FM undermines achievement – by turning every opportunity to learn into a test and need to ‘prove’ oneself as ‘good/smart/bright/able’ and turning teachers into judges (sometimes jury and executioner as well) instead of allies in learning.

Finally teachers (and administrators) whose pedagogy is conducive to producing FM learners tend to focus on knowledge as product in their classroom, i.e. something pre-given and fixed, right or wrong. Growth-mindset teachers however make a subtle shift of focus to knowing as way of being – helping learners to connect disparate bits of knowledge into robust knowledge networks by emphasizing processes of coming to know. While both FM and GM teachers (and parents) may set high standards, GM teachers are honest with students about where they are, teach children how to reach them, help them to develop the tools and skills to succeed and actively enact the belief that all students can reach them. They see these as their responsibilities and they cultivate an atmosphere of mutual trust and intervulnerability where it is safe to learn from failure, including their own. Growth mindset teachers love, and live, to learn. This is critical. FM teachers (and administrators) on the other hand create an atmosphere of judging, mistrust, and fear of failure. They see themselves as “finished products” whose sole responsibility is to “impart their knowledge” and assess the correspondence between what they know and what their students have come to know. They believe that tests measure intelligence, now and forever and since ability is fixed, there’s no point in expending effort behind someone who doesn’t have the ability.

Teachers themselves have to be in the growth-mindset. The best teachers I have met in the Dip Ed and B.Ed were not necessarily the ones with the highest certificates, teaching at the best schools with the best students, but rather the ones whose emphasis in the programme, and in their classrooms was learning from and with their students – developing (as) growth mindset learners. These have been far too few though as many aspects of our education system and national culture, including teacher preparation, reinforce the fixed-mindset. The good news however, is that because mindsets are beliefs, we can choose to believe, and then do otherwise. We can change our minds. Dweck’s research demonstrates that a person can be shifted from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset over the course of 20 minutes, perhaps even over three short articles, simply by shifting focus and emphasis, drawing attention to the mindsets and being attentive to language. Conversely, a person can be shifted out of growth to fixed mode by emphasizing the wrong things, the wrong utterance, praising individual ability rather than effort etc. One wonders what happens when this happens day in day out, year in year out via our educational policies and systems? We need to ask ourselves in our classrooms and homes who/what do we want (our students) to be? I want my children to be surrounded by GM teachers at home and in school and in their community.

Finally, while I’ve used the term FM and GM teachers or learners I don’t mean to label some people as inherently possessing a fixed-mindset or growth-mindset. All of us are capable of being on either side in some domain and it is our mindset in the domain of interest that influences our actions. For example, when it comes to learning about changing and improving education, especially mathematics, I think I’m a growth mindset person. When it comes to football, I’m more a fixed mindset person, though adopting a more growth mindset position it is likely that I haven’t gotten anywhere with football because I haven’t ever put in much effort there – so who knows what I might accomplish if I spent more time and energy learning to play football? A growth mindset is infective. Dweck says it well, “with the right mindset and the right teaching people are capable of a lot more than we think.” The choice of where to expend our efforts though is still ours.

Part 3- Wider implications
When I began submitting articles as a new staff member to the UWI School of Education column, I was told, that my ideas, interesting as they were, were not presented in a style that was appropriate to the medium (Newspaper) and appealing to its audience. I could have approached this with a fixed mindset that I already knew how to write, the editors couldn’t appreciate what I was trying to say, or that I wasn’t any good at that type of writing and stick to writing in and for the Academy. Instead I approached it as a challenge – to learn how to write for different audiences. I talked with people, like Pat, whose growth-mindset and effort over a long time made her demonstrably more competent at it than I; like Lynda, who understood about the nature of the medium; and my wife Shalini who could help me with my grammar, clarity, and expression. I did that not because I like writing – indeed writing remains for me the least pleasurable aspect of intellectual work – but because I believed I had, and have, a responsibility to help others to grow and learn from my learning also. It also provides yet another occasion from which I learn.

So, why bring these ideas to the attention of educators? It is not an attempt to demonstrate superior intelligence nor is it my staking out a little space in the academic agora of educational reform ideas in Trinidad & Tobago, rather it is to say, “I’ve had opportunities as part of my Phd. thus far to engage with some really interesting ideas and people from whom I have learnt and from whom I think educators in TT could also learn and which pose some interesting challenges for rethinking education that goes beyond simply separating boys from girls but speaks to the whole fixed-mindset system of education in Trinidad and Tobago. Where and when does the fixed mindset enter into the educational consciousness of our population? How does it happen? Does our obsession with SEA, CXC and now Phds. have anything to do with it? Perhaps our tiered educational system? And what about the media attention given to the top 100 and scholarship winners? By looking at these might we find something more to learn that what we already know? Might we learn something about what we value and what we teach our children to value?

In Dweck’s research fixed-mindset learners, of all achievement levels, by as early as Grade 5 (9-10 years or about Std. 4) had come to believe that tests measured not only how smart they were at present but how smart they’d be in the future when they grew up! They defined themselves by the test. Consequently, for FM learners, not only was it important to succeed now, but such success had to be flawless and flawless in the right way – perfect and fast. I’ve heard similar sentiments from a high-achieving student in my research, where a transition from pencil to pen between Primary and Secondary school was blamed for her performance on a test as she could no longer erase and her mistakes remained as an indictment rather than a testament to her learning.

“Speed and perfection are the enemy of difficult learning” Dweck argues, providing a strong critique against timed-testing used for dubious if not dangerous sorting purposes. For FM learners, success is proof of their ability, and for high achieving FM students, this is often the route to being seen as special, better, superior and ultimately entitled to rewards without effort or (in)actions without consequences. I recognize, sadly, such a mindset among those posted on a Facebook group by students of a school which has produced two of our Prime Ministers, who mindlessly brag about abuse, fraud, cheating, laziness, lack of effort, greed and their insensitive, ignorant and uncritical individualism.

Fixed-mindset educational cultures, Dweck notes, have transformed failure from an action (I failed) to an identity (I am a failure) and continually reinforce this idea. Failing at anything becomes the great Fear and since one’s abilities are fixed, there’s no way out – why even bother trying. Growth-mindset cultures on the other hand don’t send the message that failure or success defines one’s identity – but that intelligence can be developed with effort and appropriate, knowledgeable guidance. I don’t know that this is the message we’ve been sending to boys and men over the last few months (and indeed years). Indeed we’ve got fixed-mindset and growth-mindset learners across all of our school types, gender categories, races, religions etc. and we ought to be as concerned with the ill-effects of high achieving FM learners who rise to positions of authority and (ir)responsibility as we are with low-achieving FM learners. A question we ought to be asking is “Do we produce too many fixed mindset learners and what are they doing to our society?”
What I find useful about the Theory of Mindsets is how it productively re-situates the locus of the problem of achievement from within individual gendered and racialised bodies constructed as deficient, defective or deviant in some way to a broader network of capillary relations which can be affected by a certain degree of mindfulness on every individual’s part. I also think Dweck’s ideas have implications for our culture as a whole especially leadership at the highest levels. Indeed I find a certain resonance with ideas of Wilson Harris in his descriptions of the Block Mentality and the Literate imagination, the different types of consciousness described by Fanon and Freire, Bob Marley’s endless invitation to “Emancipate ourselves from mental slavery” and the questions and pleas of Dr. Morgan Job and Lloyd Best, especially his obsession with understanding “how a culture could escape itself.” A short answer, perhaps, is that it must do more than change its leaders – it must also change its mindset.

While its been said that politics has a morality of its own, in our history thus far, such a morality seems to be have been more aligned with fixed mindsets than growth mindsets. I invite those offering themselves up for election, especially those new to national politics, to bring their growth mindsets to the parliament, serving, representing and ultimately learning from the population. For those going to the polls I suggest an alternative to choosing between person or party – vote for the candidate with the growth mindset! One way to assess that is not to look only at their history of success, but look especially at their history of recovery from failure and setback. Look at whether or not they assign blame or take responsibility. This silly season let’s give ourselves and the next generation the gift of growth mindset leaders. Primary teachers and Principals, when exam results come out in the next month or so, praise the effort not the ability. Be honest about what SEA is and does. Let’s work to break the cycle of fixed-mindset-edness among our students. When the new academic year rolls around next September it is my hope that teachers, in all schools facing the same issues and concerns that they faced this year might begin to face them with, and offer their students, something hopeful – the generative germ of a growth-mindset. Finally, maybe if we could stop pretending that we already know it all, maybe, just maybe, we might as Sprang used to say, “lun sumting.”