Assessing Our Mind-Set
Independent thinking is not just for students
We have been talking lately about how best to encourage our students to be independent thinkers, an important component of our educational philosophy. This is a quality I think about not only for our students but for our school as well. Given the current state of the economy and the less-than-optimistic predictions for the foreseeable future, it’s tempting to develop a mind-set that calls for a circle-the-wagons approach: take on nothing new, develop contingency plans for worst-case scenarios, and generally fall back to a defensive position.
Recently, Stanford economist Dr. Paul Romer commented that the current economic crisis “is a terrible thing to waste.” Politics aside, I found the comment thought-provoking and applicable to our lives together at St. Margaret’s. While there will always be factors beyond our control, we still are best able to move the school forward if we look for the opportunity in an otherwise gloomy situation and develop what psychologist Dr. Carol S. Dweck calls a “growth” mind-set.
In her book Mindset:The New Psychology of Success, Dr. Dweck distinguishes between “fixed” and “growth” mind-sets. “These beliefs create different psychological worlds: one in which students are afraid of challenges and devastated by setbacks and one in which students relish challenges and are resilient in the face of setbacks.” Her premise applies just as much to adults and to schools as it does to students. If you believe, for example, that each of us has a specific amount of intelligence, this fixed mind-set would make challenges threatening and mistakes and failures demoralizing. In other words, you might think it’s the best we’ve got and apparently it wasn’t good enough! Conversely, if you believe that intelligence can be cultivated through effort and education, you possess a growth mind-set that sees challenges and setbacks as opportunities for getting smarter and being better.
Dr. Dweck’s evidence is very compelling. “Those with a growth mindset were much more interested in learning than in just looking smart in school. This was not the case for students with a fixed mindset.” The differences carry over into critical aspects of life such as effort, resilience and honesty. Students with growth mind-sets approach a bad grade or a poor performance with the determination to learn from it and do better. In contrast, students with fixed mind-sets believe that working hard means they don’t have ability and that things would come naturally if they did. Faced with setbacks, those with fixed mind-sets confessed that they felt dumb, and said that they would study less next time and would seriously consider cheating.
How did we get to this point? Dr. Dweck attributes much to the “self-esteem movement” of the 1990s, which promoted the belief that self-esteem could simply be handed to children by telling them how smart and talented they are. This created a fixed mind-set that intelligence is something you have and not something you could develop. One example (of many) illustrates her point. Fifth-graders were given an IQ test. One group was offered the praise, “Wow, that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” The other group was told, “Wow, that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.” The children praised for their intelligence did not want to learn. When offered a challenging task, the majority opted for an easier one in which they could avoid making mistakes. They lost their confidence as soon as problems got more difficult. They also lost their enjoyment, and, as a result, their performance plummeted. The children praised for their effort wanted a task they could learn from, and they maintained their confidence, motivation and performance. Finally, the children praised for their intelligence frequently lied about their scores, suggesting that it was too humiliating for them to admit mistakes.
There is much to learn from this study in our roles as parents, teachers and school leaders. Our task is to step back and assess our mind-set: fixed or growth. If our students are to become independent thinkers with the ability to develop their intelligence, we need to help them see learning as a growth experience and not as cosmetic. If we as a school are to emerge from this current crisis stronger and better, then we need to carefully examine our strengths and weaknesses, work even harder to emphasize our core values and mission, and see these challenges as a growth opportunity we can’t afford to miss.