Stop for a minute and think back to your own school days … Even if it doesn’t bring back happy memories, stay with me! You’re 14 years of age, it’s Sunday night and you’re thinking about the week ahead. 

Were there any classes that you dreaded? Maybe there was a subject in which you weren’t that interested? Perhaps you felt that didn’t get on with the teacher, s/he didn’t like you or maybe you felt you just weren’t smart enough to be able to cope with the subject content? 

How did those scenarios affect your motivation to learn? Did you feel demotivated? Each time you walked into a particular classroom, what was your mindset? 

Now, fast-forward to the current day. It is your child/cared-for-young person sitting at home on a Sunday night preparing for a busy week ahead in school. How are they feeling about classes? Do they dread any subjects and, more importantly, why? What will their mindset be in school this week? 

“A mindset is a set of attitudes or a way of thinking that determines how we behave.”

We all bring a mindset to learning scenarios. This is a fundamental belief about how we learn and our capacity to learn new things, about our intelligence and its limits. This mindset leads to various learning behaviours that determine outcomes. 

All too often we hear students (and parents) say something like: “I’m just not good at Maths, French, Music, Art etc., I’ve never been any good and that’s just the way I am.” Some go further to say: “I was born that way and I can’t change that.” These are examples of a fixed mindset.

A fixed way of thinking about ability is very damaging to learning and ultimately shapes how successful we can be. It can also become a self-perpetuating myth because it holds us back: not only in terms of effort but also how willing we are to go outside our comfort zones and to challenge ourselves to grow. 

But a positive mindset can put us on a different path. It means that we may not yet have mastered that subject, topic or task, and that we believe we can improve and that we can achieve more. 

Don’t take our word for this. There is now a growing body of international research from social psychology and neuroscience that refutes the idea of fixed abilities and points towards the impact of a positive mindset on success. 

Allow us to introduce you to Carol Dweck, a Stanford Professor of Social Psychology. According to Professor Dweck, most people tend to hold one of two mindsets about their ability, and often a mixture of both. 

A “fixed mindset” assumes that our character, intelligence and ability are static, and that we can’t change these to any significant degree. Success is therefore the proclamation of inherent or innate intelligence. Those who have a strong fixed mindset will tend to veer towards challenges that affirm pre-existing feelings of competence. They will avoid challenges, especially those that bring a risk of failure. This behaviour becomes a way of maintaining the belief of ‘being clever’ or the perception of being seen as ‘good’ at something. 

Students that hold this view might say things like: “I’m smart at this so I don’t have to work that hard,” or “I’ve already failed this, I’m no good at it, so what’s the point.” 

In contrast, however, a “growth mindset” embraces challenge. In this approach, ‘failure’ is not evidence of being deficient, either in intelligence or capacity to learn. Rather, it is a springboard for learning and growth, and for stretching our current abilities. 

Environmental conditions play a role too in the beliefs we manifest from a very early age. From these spring a great deal of our behaviour and, in particular, our relationship with success, failure and challenge. Over the past 40 years, Dweck’s research with 1000s of students has shown a consistent pattern in the impact of their ability views on their learning. 

Dweck’s work has also been instrumental in stimulating educators and parents/guardians to reflect on certain practices, such as labelling learners at a young age or putting them into static ability groups in particular subjects. Her work on the use of praise has prompted well-meaning teachers to think again about how their language can perpetuate fixed views about ability. Most importantly, her research places effort and growth at the heart of discussions around learning and success. 

Here’s what her work shows.  

1. Students who had a fixed view of their ability/intelligence displayed self-defeating behaviours in the face of learning challenges. Dweck found that these students avoided challenge, gave up relatively easily, they lost confidence more quickly, and blamed their lack of success on a deficit in innate levels of intelligence. They were much less likely to persevere when learning was challenging, and they did not believe that effort made any difference to the outcome. 

2. The more resilient persistent students displayed a growth mindset. These believed that ability could be improved through effort, hard work and by trying new strategies. They saw challenge and obstacles as part of the process of learning and therefore they persevered with tasks for much longer. For them, ‘failure’ was an opportunity to learn, grow and develop.

3. Dweck also found that it was possible to change students’ views about their ability and their capacity to learn. Where this was evidenced, students experienced success and their attainment levels were higher.

For more on Professor Dweck’s work,
check out ‘Mindset’ – The New Psychology of Success.

Lastly, a word of advice … growth mindset is often misunderstood or misrepresented as the simplistic (and unrealistic) idea that we can do anything when we put our minds to it. It is important to have the belief that we can grow our intelligence. But we also need to understand how and why our brains have the capacity to grow and change. Growth mindset approaches are far more than ‘the power of the mind’. They also involve three important proactive steps in the learning process. These are:

Stay tuned as we explore these elements in the coming weeks.

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