Growth Mindset: Reading Beyond the Headline
In the spirit of Carol Dweck’s work, it is essential that schools question the effectiveness of their Growth Mindset principles and practices. For teachers to foster a Growth Mindset in their student, key Growth Mindset skills such as ‘Growing from Setbacks’, ‘Seeking Feedback’ and ‘Tackling and Monitoring Learning’ are skills that must be explicitly taught, practiced and students should be able to track their progress over time. Teachers modelling a Growth Mindset themselves and being aware of the impact of the type of feedback they give to students is also of importance when developing students’ mindsets. As alluded to in the article above, it is the schools’ implementation of Growth Mindset practices that is key, and of course, simply putting posters up in every classroom and running a Growth Mindset assembly does not work.
“Every young Australian should emerge from schooling as a creative, connected, and engaged learner with a growth mindset that can help to improve a student’s educational achievement over time.”
However, asking teachers to allow students multiple attempts at success on an assessment task, to help students see setbacks not as failure, but as information, or to find time to explicitly teach the skills that build resilience is, for many, a shift too far from standard teaching practice that involves delivering content, students submitting a piece of work on which they receive feedback before the class moves on to the next topic.
It is the Fixed mindset of the education system and the politician mentioned in this article that are failing our students, not the Growth Mindset approach to student learning. Indeed, the global climate protests last Friday demonstrated the true power of our young people believing in the possibility of change when we focus our attention and effort.
At New Tech Network, we give teachers the tools to scaffold key Growth Mindset skills, the rubrics to track student growth and we give school leaders a framework to create learning communities focussed on continual collaboration and improvement at every level of the school system.