Mindset and Learning
“I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.” Thomas Edison, asked by a reporter about all his failures and whether he would give up….
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From Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Fixed mindset is the belief that success or failure is governed by your innate talent or intelligence.
It leads to a desire to look smart and therefore a tendency to avoid challenges, give up easily, see effort as fruitless or worse, ignore useful negative feedback, feel threatened by the success of others. As though achievement were a zero sum game and anything you achieve diminishes me. As a result, they may plateau early and achieve less than their full potential. All this confirms a deterministic view of the world and is self-fulfilling.
Growth mindset is the belief that success or failure is governed by effective effort, not that you can do anything that you set your mind to, but that you are capable of learning and growing if you work smart.
It leads to a desire to learn and therefore a tendency to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, see effort as the path to mastery, learn from criticism, find lessons and inspiration in the success of others. If they can do it, so can I. As a result, they reach ever-higher levels of achievement. All this gives them a greater sense of free will.
It is important that faculty truly believe that all their students are capable of learning and succeeding in their classes.
- Inspire their own self-belief by expressing confidence in their ability to achieve if they exert effective effort.
- Remind them that they have overcome difficulties in the past and ask them to think about how they did so—this promotes metacognition.
- Help them understand the neurobiological basis of learning: A synapse is the gap between two neurons across which communication between the neurons occurs. The brain changes via synaptic plasticity whereby connections between particular synapses are strengthened or weakened through a number of processes. Changes to the brain occur via:
- synaptogenesis (creating new synapses),
- synaptic pruning (destruction of unneeded synapses) and
- neurogenesis (creation of new neurons).
- The brain has the ability to functionally reorganize itself depending on the stimuli available and the task required. In other words, it can learn. It’s how we learn.
Here’s a link to a helpful graphic and additional resources.
For students
From New Science of Learning, pp 125-6:
“With the exceptions of illness or financial difficulty, we believe that the determiner of whether you [the student] will or will not walk across the stage and receive your diploma depends almost totally on just five basic things:
- Your willingness to spend the significant amount of time and effort that it takes to learn and remember the skills, behaviors, and content of your courses
- Your willingness to take learning risks that challenge you to grow as a learner
- Your willingness to learn from failures, even for things beyond your control, and make adjustments as you progress
- Your belief in yourself that you can learn, even though it will be challenging at times
- Your ability to celebrate successes in your academic progress and build on your belief in your own future abilities.
“Time, effort, risk, learning from failure (a valuable experience when learning, and an opportunity for growth). And believing in yourself will get you to the graduation ceremony…. Believing you can make it, and then putting in the work is critical.”
What you can do to cultivate a growth mindset:
- Learn to hear your fixed mindset “voice. Recognize defeatist or limiting language that you tell yourself, like that you’re “not good” at what you’re about to do. Instead try: “I’ve struggled with this, but maybe I just need to change my approach,” or “I’d like to do better at … and I will, with enough practice.”
- Recognize that you have choice.How you interpret challenges, setbacks, and criticism are choices. You actually have agency in your thoughts and actions.
- Talk back to yourself with a growth mindset voice.
- A fixed mindset is already defeatist and says things like “I just don’t have the talent [or the intelligence] to do …”
- The growth mindset answers: “Yeah, I’m not sure I can do it NOW, but I think over time I can learn.
- A fixed mindset predicts failure: “If I Fail, I’M a failure.”
- The growth mindset answers: “Failure is information on how to get better.”
- Take growth mindset action. The more you choose it, the easier it will become to choose it again and again. Success comes slowly and can be frustrating. But once you see it working, you’ll discover you can push yourself to new levels.
Adapted from New Science of Learning, pp 137-8