Avoiding a False Growth Mindset

This week’s article summary from The Atlantic is How Praise Became a Consolation Prize.

Carol Dweck’s growth mindset has been a major influence in many schools for the past ten years or so.

But just as Frankenstein’s monster grew beyond the doctor’s intention (to create life), Dweck discovered that many of us misunderstand and misuse what her research reveals.

As such, she has been on an extended tour clarifying and redirecting teachers and parents on how to properly foster a growth mindset in children (and themselves).

To Dweck, many of us subscribe to a simplistic growth mindset ‘lite' which leads to poor implementation and results in kids forming a false growth mindset.  

She feels that the greatest misuse is praising effort only, rather than on how effort contributes to the intended successful outcome.

For Dweck, the goal is to learn and improve, not just to try. 

The error many teachers and parents make is over praising a child's effort regardless of the outcome. 

In baseball, for example, it doesn’t help to keep telling a player who always strikes out to keep working hard and trying. From an empathy perspective, we know how bad it feels to always walk back to the dugout without ever hitting the ball. Clearly the child’s effort is not leading to a successful outcome, and he/she must re-strategize how to learn to hit a baseball. 

We don’t want the player to think he/she can never hit, yet we need to connect effort to the intended outcome and, if needed, help the child come up with a new strategy (and maybe a new batting coach).

I’m sure many of us can think of situations when our effort no matter how great was not enough to lead to achievement, proficiency, and mastery—and for Dweck always connecting the effort to the intended outcome has been lacking in how many of us try to instill in our kids a growth mindset.

Joe

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In her research, Carol Dweck identified two core mindsets, or beliefs, about one’s own traits that shape how people approach challenges: fixed mindset, the belief that one’s abilities were carved in stone and predetermined at birth, and growth mindset, the belief that one’s skills and qualities could be cultivated through effort and perseverance.

But Dweck recently noticed a trend: a widespread embrace of what she refers to as false growth mindset—a misunderstanding of the idea’s core message.

Growth mindset’s popularity led some teachers to think it was simpler than it was, that it was only about putting forth effort or that a teacher could foster growth mindset merely by telling kids to try hard. But empty praise can exacerbate some of the very problems that growth mindset is intended to counter.

I recently spoke with Dweck about how she wants her ideas to be applied.

Growth mindset is now so popular that I’ll hear people who aren’t steeped in educational theory say, “Praise the effort, not the child (or the outcome).” Why do you think this idea struck such a chord, and how did you find out there were people misunderstanding it?

Many educators, and many parents, were excited to implement something that might energize kids to focus on learning, not just memorization and test taking, but on deeper, more joyful learning. But often teachers do not understand a growth mindset deeply. I started keeping a list of all the ways people were misunderstanding growth mindset. When the list got long enough, I started speaking and writing about it.

Could you elaborate on false growth mindset?

False growth mindset is saying you have growth mindset when you don't really have it or you don’t really understand what it is. It’s also false in the sense that nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time. Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a growth mindset in an area but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait. Something really challenging and outside your comfort zone can trigger it, or, if you encounter someone who is much better than you at something you pride yourself on, you can think “Oh, that person has ability, not me.” We all, students and adults, have to look for our fixed-mindset triggers and understand when we are falling into that mindset. A lot of what happened with false growth mindset among educators is that instead of taking this long and difficult journey, where you work on understanding your triggers, working with them, and over time being able to stay in a growth mindset more and more, many educators just said, “I have a growth mindset” because either they know it’s the right mindset to have or they understood it in a way that made it seem easy.  

Why do you think these misunderstandings occurred?

The most common misunderstanding of growth mindset is the oversimplification of growth mindset into being about effort only. Students know that if they aren’t making progress and you’re praising them, it’s a consolation prize. So this kind of growth-mindset idea was misappropriated to try to make kids feel good when they were not achieving. The mindset ideas were developed as a counter to the self-esteem movement of blanketing everyone with praise, whether deserved or not. The whole idea of growth-mindset praise is to focus on the learning process. When you focus on effort, you have to show how effort created learning progress or success.

What should people do to avoid falling into this trap?

A lot of parents or teachers say praise the effort, not the outcome. That’s wrong: Praise the effort that led to the outcome or learning progress; tie the praise to it. It’s not just effort, but strategy. Effective teachers who have classrooms full of children with a growth mindset are always supporting children’s learning strategies and showing how strategies created that success. Students need to know that if they’re stuck, they don’t need just effort. You don’t want them redoubling their efforts with the same ineffective strategies. You want them to know when to ask for help.

Is there a right way to praise kids and encourage them to do well?

A new line of research indicates that the way a parent reacts to a child’s failure conveys a mindset to a child regardless of the parent’s mindset. If parents react to their child’s failures as though there is something negative, if they rush in, are anxious, reassure the child, “Oh not everyone can be good at math, don’t worry, you’re good at other things,” the child gets it that no, this is important, and it’s fixed. That child is developing a fixed mindset, even if the parent has a growth mindset. But if the parent reacts to a child’s failure as though it’s something that enhances learning, asking, “Okay, what is this teaching us? Where should we go next? Should we talk to the teacher about how we can learn this better?” that child comes to understand that abilities can be developed. So, with praise, focus on “process praise”—focus on the learning process and show how hard work, good strategies, and good use of resources lead to better learning. You can see evidence of fixed mindset as young as 3.5 or 4 years old; that’s when mindsets can start becoming evident, where some kids are very upset when they make a mistake or get criticized and fall into a helpless place. That’s when children become able to evaluate themselves.