The Growth Mindset Playbook

A Teacher's Guide to Promoting Student Success

Annie Brock, Heather Hundley

• Publisher: Ulysses Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781612436944
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

Discover effective and accessible tools for transforming your classroom and inspiring your students with this easy-to-use guide. Students who harness the power of growth mindset can succeed beyond their wildest imagination. The key is having a growth-mindset teacher who provides support, guidance, and encouragement. Packed with research-based teaching methods, this approachable guide for applying the growth mindset offers: • Tips for overcoming challenges • Strategies for inspiring students • Ideas for constructive feedback • Techniques for improving communication • Examples of engaging lesson plans The follow-up to the bestselling The Growth Mindset Coach, this expert handbook highlights several best practices for helping students realize their potential, explore new opportunities, and succeed socially and academically.

1

PLAY 1: THE BEST WE CAN BE

I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does.

—Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Here’s the bad news. Yep, we’re going to tell you the bad news first, mainly because you have to know what the problem is before you go about figuring out how to tackle it. So, here it goes: A lot of kids have lost hope. They have lost hope in themselves, they have lost hope in their futures, and they have lost hope in you, their teachers. It’s our job to figure out how to get them to hope again. We know that’s an awfully big challenge, and you probably aren’t getting paid much to get it done. But we also know there’s a reason you got into the business of teaching kids, and it sure as heck wasn’t for the money (or the cafeteria food). At your core, you are a person who believes in the very best of people; in fact, you’ve dedicated your life to helping people become the best versions of themselves. We know this business can be tough sometimes, and it’s easy to get bogged down by bureaucracy and forget what we’re here for: the kids. If the kids are saying they’ve lost hope, then it’s our job to help them find it again. And if anyone can do it, it’s you!

LOSING HOPE

In 2015, Gallup conducted its annual student poll, which asks all sorts of questions about the school experience. The poll also includes the “Hope Index,” which has survey items that attempt to measure non-cognitive attributes of the educational experience of American students. The results were troubling. Just over 60 percent of the one million fifth through twelfth graders surveyed strongly agreed with the statement, “I have a great future ahead of me.” If you think it’s bad that 40 percent of our students don’t believe in a fantastic future for themselves, hold on, because it gets worse! Only 33 percent of students strongly agreed with the statement, “I have a mentor who encourages my development.”¹⁰ How can that be? Two-thirds of American students surveyed cannot readily identify an adult who encourages their growth?

For those of us in the business of growth mindset, those numbers aren’t good. Before many students even leave school, they have conceived of an unsuccessful future for themselves. Why? Perhaps because so few students report having an encouraging, supportive adult presence in their lives.

Here are two more results from the Gallup survey: Only half of students responded that they strongly agreed with the statement, “I can think of many ways to get good grades.” And just 35 percent responded they strongly agreed with the statement, “I can find many ways around problems.” So let’s review: Not only are students reporting they cannot find adults who they consider encouraging mentors and that they do not believe in their potential for future success, but a majority of them are admitting to lacking a basic belief in their ability to make good grades and solve problems. It’s hard to make sense of this data, because we know that teachers all across this nation show up to school every day and put everything they have into developing, nurturing, and empowering their students. We also know that our classrooms are filled with curious, capable students with limitless potential. So where is the disconnect?

One view might be that this hopelessness students are reporting is a manifestation of fixed mindsets. If students buy into the idea that they can’t make good grades, they can’t solve problems, no one really cares, and it doesn’t matter because they’re not going to have a successful future anyway, they insulate themselves against the possibility of future disappointment and failure. These are the hallmarks of a fixed mindset. The fixed mindset is convincing yourself that your options are limited and your shortcomings are either genetically or environmentally predetermined.

“Some of you might not have those advantages,” said former President Barack Obama in a speech to students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. “Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right. But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life, what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home… That’s no excuse for not trying. Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”¹¹

Admitting to having potential and high hopes for the future takes courage. It takes a growth mindset. Growth mindset isn’t easy, especially in the difficult circumstances many of today’s students find themselves facing each day. It means tackling challenges head on, persevering through setbacks, and having an unwavering belief in your ability to succeed.

THE GROWTH MINDSET FACTOR

Growth-mindset research suggests that teaching mindset can make a difference, especially for students feeling this hopelessness. Once a person understands their own power to shape their future through dedicated practice, hard work, and effort, it’s a game changer. Dweck often tells a story of teaching a group of young students about their ability to grow their own brain through practice and effort. She remembers one boy raising his hand and asking: “You mean, I don’t have to be dumb?”¹²

Not only has teaching kids about growth mindset proven to increase academic outcomes, but students who have a growth mindset find school less threatening and view it as an exciting place to learn and grow. Moreover, student outcomes increase when teachers model growth mindset and offer explicit instruction on the mindsets and how the brain can grow and change over time.¹³

Dweck’s research suggests that when students adopt the growth mindset, their achievement increases, along with their motivation. Recent research Dweck and her colleagues conducted in 2014 in Chile revealed that students who indicated a strong growth mindset, regardless of their socioeconomic status, had better academic outcomes than students who had strong fixed mindsets, and that growth-mindset students from low-income backgrounds fared better academically than economically privileged students with fixed mindsets.¹⁴ This indicates the potential for closing achievement gaps through growth-mindset instruction.

Student mindsets are heavily influenced by messages from their environments. A growth-mindset teacher can go far in modeling mindset for students, helping them arrive at the understanding that their intelligence, skills, and abilities are not fixed, and that with effort and perseverance they can make great improvements in any area. When students’ fixed mindsets are transformed to growth mindsets, as Dweck reports, student outcomes improve, and students who demonstrate a growth mindset outperform their fixed-mindset peers.

It appears that schools are getting the message that developing mindsets can make a difference in student achievement. In a national study of K–12 teachers conducted by the Education Week Research Center, over half of teachers reported receiving formal training on the topic of growth mindset and made efforts to integrate mindset in their classrooms. When done correctly, cultivating a growth-oriented learning environment can empower students to engage in challenging work, rise up after failure, and realize their potential to succeed in all areas of education. Unfortunately, some research has suggested that many teachers attempting to integrate growth mindset in the classroom may have “critical misunderstandings” about the process, leading to surprisingly low success rates.¹⁵

UNDERWHELMING RESULTS

Researcher John Hattie reported that, despite Carol Dweck’s body of evidence to the contrary, his analysis indicated that teaching growth and fixed mindset had a very low effect size, a measurement of how well an intervention worked according to collected data, in student outcomes. In other words, the results for the mindset intervention were underwhelming. How can this be? Dweck and her colleagues have reams of data indicating the positive nature of the growth-mindset intervention. All the data points to growth-mindset integration in the classroom having positive impacts on students, and here is one of the foremost education researchers telling us that the numbers from the classroom didn’t bear out Dweck’s research results.

Peter DeWitt, a colleague of Hattie, writes in Education Week that Hattie posited, based on his meta-analysis, that the effect size of mindset interventions was low not because of the mindsets of the students, but rather the mindsets of the teachers. That’s right. Teaching about growth mindset didn’t make a lick of difference if the teacher had a fixed mindset. Teachers seemed not to be putting their money where their mouths were. They were teaching growth mindset but not exhibiting it. For those who were both teaching and modeling growth mindset, Hattie suggested, the effect sizes were more profound. DeWitt points to se...