A Mindset for Success

In your classroom and school

Tony Swainston

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781785831973
• eBook ISBN: 9781785832284
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In A Mindset for Success: In Your Classroom and School, Tony Swainston analyses how the ways in which schools currently conceptualise and measure success could be limiting students' potential to achieve it. It is critical for schools to move away from the many talent and IQ myths that presently exist and to stop categorising students in a way that damages their ability to grow and develop. Tony outlines key practical steps that can be taken in order to do just this, building instead a growth mindset culture in all classrooms and across schools. A mindset for success can benefit everyone by giving more meaning to learning that, in turn, brings greater fulfilment for teachers and pupils. A Mindset for Success illustrates how grit, resilience, determination and perseverance can be nurtured in every child, enabling them to take on the challenges of life and our changing world, which will lead them to greater academic success and personal happiness. By exploring the importance of emotional intelligence and student well-being, it offers a holistic view of the academic and social development of students. Educators will no doubt be aware of the theory of fixed and growth mindsets. That success can be a self-fulfilling prophecy and that attitudes to, and beliefs about, learning and intelligence profoundly influence academic outcomes is well-established. But how do you actually apply this in order to transform learning in classrooms and the organisational culture in schools? Drawing on ideas and research by Hattie, Dweck, Seligman, Goleman and Ericsson, amongst others, Tony outlines the latest thinking about mindsets and explores what schools can do to make a difference. Class teachers will find a plethora of techniques to get the best out of their learners, including strategies for coaching and deliberate practice, and affirmations to increase motivation and autonomy. For head teachers and senior leaders, there is advice about how to consistently involve all teachers, support staff and parents in order to have the greatest impact upon students' mindsets. A practical guide to changing mindsets in schools. Suitable for teachers and school leaders.

Part I

Why changing mindsets in our schools matters

Chapter 1

The academic and social impact of mindsets

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

Anon.

Mindsets and academic progress

Professor Carol Dweck, in her remarkable book Mindset, provides many examples of where children with a growth mindset academically outperform those children with a fixed mindset.1

As we will explore in more detail later on, one such example looked at a group of American students who all had the same maths score when they left elementary school to enter junior high school. (In the UK this would be students leaving junior school to go to secondary school at 11 years of age.) The students were assessed in terms of their mindset: some of them had more of a fixed mindset and others had more of a growth mindset. The students were tracked over a two year period to see how their maths scores changed. The findings showed clearly that the maths scores of the students with a fixed mindset went down, whereas the scores for the students with a growth mindset progressively rose. We will return to what growth and fixed mindsets mean in more detail in Chapter 2.

From my own experience, I too have found that working with schools on a mindset for success programme has brought about significant academic change. For example, a school in Ripon in north Yorkshire that I worked with found that at the end of one year of focusing on mindsets, the academic results were the best the school had ever had. Of course, it is notoriously difficult to measure the impact of individual interventions in schools. There are so many variables that come into play that it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about what particular intervention has created any change that takes place. The mindset of this head teacher, with his readiness to take a risk on trying something new, being open to possibilities, believing in the potential within each of his staff, as well as the pupils, and having a willingness to find solutions that come from strategies that may not be the most obvious ones, inevitably contributed to the success of the school. However, the head teacher is also convinced that the mindsets intervention was a significant factor in raising the level of attainment in the school. In addition to the academic progress of the pupils, the head teacher reported that both adults and pupils were talking about learning in a very different way at the end of the mindset for success programme than they were at the beginning.

I believe that the two things are in fact interconnected, with the change in language about learning impacting on learning and attainment levels. Although it is far easier to measure changes in something like examination results compared to changes in the beliefs and attitudes of adults and pupils, the latter are nevertheless critically important. There is, obviously, an ongoing and vigorous debate about whether the things that we measure or count in schools, such as examination results, are in fact the things we should focus so much of our attention on in the 21st century. Research clearly indicates that, for example, emotional intelligence (EI) seems to play a far bigger part in the level of success an individual experiences in life compared to the part that IQ plays.2 Is the main reason that our focus is on IQ in schools because EQ is harder to assess than IQ? Once again, we are reminded of the maxim mentioned earlier on – ‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted’ – and how this suggests that we are often drawn to the easier alternative, even though it may not be giving us the best results.

The evidence clearly shows that the type of mindset that a child has will impact on their academic progress, but there is more.

Mindsets impacting on the social development of pupils

Schools are clearly, and rightly, concerned with providing the best learning for their students. Better academic outcomes for students will enable them to have more options in their lives. But I also know, from personal experience, that teachers, head teachers, support staff, parents and everyone else involved in the nurturing of young people in our schools also care enormously about developing what we might call the ‘holistic child’. This is why it is important that, as they progress through and eventually leave school, children are given the tools to support them to face life’s challenges and to show determination, grit, resilience and perseverance. These things, which they can learn and develop, will help them to get the most from their lives. Significant in all of this is for children to learn about mindsets and how adopting more of a growth mindset will help them to develop their determination, grit, resilience and perseverance.

In Chapter 4 we will look at the meta-research (research of the research) carried out by Professor John Hattie, which examined a wide range of influences that impact upon the learning of students. His investigation revealed that the most significant thing we can work on as educators, and which makes the biggest difference to the learning of students, is the expectations of the student. Think for a moment about all of the things you could do to support the learning of your students in the classroom. Out of all of these, Hattie has found that it is student expectations (with an effect size of 1.44 for those of you who would like to know this) that comes out as being the most important. And this resonates perfectly, as we shall see, with the findings of Carol Dweck on mindsets. In addition, Hattie found that interventions like social skills programmes, not generally associated directly with academic progress, do in fact support learning in all subjects. This indicates again that enabling and encouraging students to understand more about themselves and others provides them with a better chance of learning well in academic subjects. There is a direct correlation between personal and social development and academic success; in other words, increased levels of EI (which we will look at in more detail in Chapter 8) will support a student’s academic progress.

Growth mindsets offer an optimistic view about what is achievable in life for each and every student. But at this point we might want to ask ourselves how much we personally believe that it is possible for people to change the way they view life. For example, how much of our optimism or pessimism is changeable? Well, according to research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky it seems that half of a person’s baseline level of well-being comes from their DNA.3 This baseline level indicates how much we lean towards either cheerfulness or negativity. But, as Donna Wilson says, this leaves plenty of room for each of us to influence our level of optimism through three easy steps.4

These three steps involve thoughts, behaviours and brain chemistry, and they help students to improve their feelings and well-being. The following summary provides a little more information about these steps.

1. Thoughts. In Chapter 7 we will explore the TEA-R model and how our thoughts affect our emotions, which in turn affect our actions and results. Essentially we are what we think, and students should be taught this in school. We can learn to think in ways that enhance our level of optimism, and the work on mindsets will definitely support this.

2. Behaviours. In order to achieve things in life we have to do something. Thought itself is not enough. Positive actions and determination will help us to achieve a great deal and alter our level of optimism. In terms of learning, a student needs to know where they are with their learning now, where they want to get to and the next step (or steps) they need to take in order to get there. As educators, it is important that we can provide them with this information and also with the skills they need in order to make the transition. This constant movement towards higher levels of mastery will again encourage the student to have a more optimistic outlook.

3. Brain chemistry. The brain produces chemicals called neurotransmitters that affect how we feel. The chemicals that are associated with making us feel good and creating a positive mood include dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. One way of producing these chemicals is through physical activity. Therefore, it is wise to tell children that if they are feeling less positive, then some form of physical exercise may well help them to feel a lot better. This message will clearly help them throughout their entire lives, and these ‘good mood’ chemicals will support them to focus more clearly on the academic work they are doing.

Expanding on the first of these steps, and as a way of helping students to think effectively about their own thinking, I have developed a simple metacognitive model which I use with schools called FACT. F stands for focus control, A stands for advice control, C stands for centred control and T stands for thought control.

Focus control

Focus control is about accepting that we have a choice about what we decide to focus our attention on. For example, do we focus on our strengths or our weaknesses? Do we focus on our successes or our failures? Whatever we decide to focus on is our choice, but we must accept that this will influence where we direct our energies. And, of course, once we decide what our main focus of attention is, then our reticular activating system (RAS) will direct our subconscious to be on the lookout for things that correspond to this focus. (The RAS is something that is very important for us all to know about, and will be explained in Chapter 5.) Teachers who are focused on the ‘bad’ behaviour of students will see this everywhere, whereas teachers who understand that students can sometimes be challenging but nevertheless also have a lot of very positive characteristics will see examples of students displaying these things all around the school.

Perceptions rule and create our reality for us. We have all come across those people who are doubters or cynics and who want us to prove to them that something is possible. They may say to us, ‘Show me and then I’ll believe it,’ and this is often said with a high degree of self-assurance that sometimes verges on arrogance. In a way, they are saying ‘seeing is believing’, and if they don’t see it then they won’t believe it. In my training, I often say to people that ‘seeing is believing’ is not always true, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Why changing mindsets in our schools matters
• Part II: What mindsets are all about
• Part III: How to change the mindsets of a school community
• Part IV: Practical activities that change mindsets
• Appendix A: School focus and goal setting document
• Appendix B: Example of a 12 month mindset for success programme
• Appendix C: The ABCDE model
• Appendix D: Who is this?
• Appendix E: The seven day diet
• Appendix F: The language we use
• Bibliography
• Copyright
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