The Focused Student: Mindset has a great influence on learning
Welcome back to a new school year. Summer is winding down and school is winding up, bringing with it a different but more regular rhythm. Having free time morphs into being on time as everyone in the household once again shifts gears and goals.
The new school year also brings new ideas. You will be learning from your students as they learn in the classroom. But what they learn in the classroom and how they learn it is a function of something you may encounter only occasionally or obliquely — educational theory.
We educators are a restless bunch, always seeking new and better understanding of how children best learn and how we can best educate. The simplicity of the three Rs that governed education for many of us as youngsters has given way to a plethora of complex concepts that encompass not only learning but also emotional and developmental issues. There is increasing recognition of the need to account for all the factors in order to optimize educational achievement.
Several years ago the big concept was Common Core, with its emphasis on standardized testing and teaching specific topics to specific levels of competency. Common Core still exists, but it is being supplanted by more comprehensive concepts such as student engagement, inclusive pedagogy, universal instructional design, emotional intelligence, the whole child and fixed mindset versus growth mindset. Over the course of several columns, I’ll be exploring some of these educational theories and what they mean for your child’s classroom experience.
Let’s start with fixed mindset versus growth mindset. A person with a fixed mindset says, “I don’t know” or “I don’t get it and never will.” It’s what you see and hear from your student as, “I don’t get algebra.” It’s resignation and hopelessness and worst of all, self-blaming. To paraphrase the theory, a person’s mind has greater capacity to learn than we allow or develop. While each person has a different potential, many students/people limit their potential by limiting their capacity. Words such as “I can’t” or “I don’t” or “I have never been good at...” create a fixed mindset.
Stanford professor Dr. Carol S. Dweck is one of the proponents of the growth mindset theory. You will find her Ted Talk here and it is a few minutes well invested for you and your student to listen to as the school year starts. There’s a reason this Ted Talk has more than four million views.
Growth mindset fosters taking a viewpoint of “I don’t get it yet, but with proper instruction I can and will get it.” This has the effect of removing rather than placing barriers and limitations, and encourages engaging in the learning process so students stretch their capacity. This approach encourages work, determination, motivation and perseverance.
Much academic failure is rooted in an excess of success in our culture. Many of us, especially students, are afraid to fail, convinced that everyone else “gets it” easily (whether “it” is physics, biology or English). We think success is always supposed to happen on the first attempt, and our fixed mindset marks anything else as unrecoverable failure. Growth mindset says, “First route wasn’t the one for you, but there is a route to mastery. Seek it.”
Unfortunately, parents, teachers and society have bought into the fixed mindset. We emphasize results over process. We praise A’s and condemn Ds while failing to see that the latter is part of a process that can lead to success. This approach is more work for parents, teachers and society. But it maximizes opportunity and achievement by all students.
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ROBERT FRANK is the executive director of the Hillside School and Learning Center in La Cañada. He holds a master’s of science degree in special education and has more than 40 years of teaching experience. His column appears on the last Thursday of each month. He can be reached at frank@hillsideforsuccess.org.
