Teaching a Growth Mindset - Carol Dweck

Stanford University we are born to learn to develop our skills to have an impact on the world and if you don't believe me just take a look at this this is a colleague's five month old nephew who just turned on the computer for the first time but that's old even at birth we learn an amazing amount much more than we ever suspected but just a few years later we start seeing this and this my work is about why this happens and what we can do about it in my work we find that students can have different perspectives on their intelligence talents and abilities when they're more and more of a fixed mindset they believe their talents and abilities are just these fixed traits they have a certain amount and that's it this makes them afraid of learning they're so worried about looking smart and not looking dumb that they back off from challenging learning but when they're in more of a growth mindset they can forget about smart and dumb they can focus on developing their abilities as a result they take on challenges they are more resilient in the face of setbacks and they learn more this was writ large in a recent study we did with all of the 10th graders in the country of Chile 160,000 students we were able to assess their mindsets and we had access to their achievement test scores in language and math and what we found was that every at every single level of family income the students who endorsed more of a growth mindset substantially outperformed the students who endorsed more of a fixed mindset and what was really remarkable was that many of the poorer students who had a growth mindset were performing at the level of much much much richer students who had more of a fixed mindset what's really exciting to us is that we're learning more and more about how to teach students a growth mindset in one of our early studies we took a bunch of students making that really difficult transition to seventh grade many of them were already showing declining scores especially in math half of them were taught terrific and useful study skills but the other half was taught a growth mindset with those study skills they learned that when they stepped out of their comfort zone to do hard things and they stuck to them the neurons in their brain could form new connections stronger connections and over time they could get smarter this message was thrilling to the kids and when we checked in on them at the end of the year we found that the students who had just learned the useful study skills were continuing to show declining grades especially in math but those that had learned the growth my set with their skills caught fire and showed a sharp rebound in their grades recently we developed growth mindset modules for university students who are taking computer science we found that women who went through the modules compared to the control group felt a much greater sense of belonging in computer science they performed better in computer science and they intended to take it again in the future and by the way the male's benefited from that growth mindset message as well thinking really big about learning this fall headed by David Yeager a former Stanford PhD student we launched a nationwide study we have delivered growth mindset computer-based modules to high school students across the country and we will now learn for whom it works best when it works best and for whom we need to improve our programs tailor our programs so that more and more students around our nation can become effective learners again also thinking big about learning we teamed up with computer scientists at the University of Washington to create a new kind of math game for elementary school students in the typical game students rack up points for zooming through the game and getting right answers but not in our game not in brain points in brain points they got points for sustaining their effort for trying many story mataji's and for making progress and they did all those things but the most exciting finding for us was that in the regular game it was really the high achievers who loved playing it who played a long time and stayed until the end but in the brain points version many many many more of the lower achievers stayed in played a long time stayed till the end they immersed themselves in this learning because everyone can win at this game this kind of training changes the meaning of difficulty for students in a fixed mindset as you see on the right when students are in that mindset difficulty is a bad thing they want out and what you see on the left is a student who just made an error and nothing is happening in their brains they are avoiding that error running from it but on the right you see a student in a growth mindset who just encountered an error they are processing it deeply and correcting it on the next trial that's called learning now so far I've talked about individuals having a mindset but what about a whole school or a whole community stephanie Fryeburg who got her PhD at Stanford and is now a professor at the University of Washington went back to her native American community where she grew up and she created a whole growth mindset environment she trained the teachers all summer how to teach kids their brains can grow how to tailor their practices to convey that message she made a TV show for the communities parents and worked with them as well and when the kids showed up in the fall they were told every day because we care about you we're going to spend six hours today growing your brain they were immersed in the setting where everybody was committed to devoted to growing their brains now this school on the reservation was traditionally at the bottom of the district after a year to a year-and-a-half of immersion in a growth mindset environment the kindergarteners and first grade graders in that district went to the top of the district which by the way included a cellent sections of Seattle the older kids the third through fifth graders many of them were gaining a year and a half to two years per year it's exciting to think of what students are capable of and these were students who are not thought to be capable of much in the end they were capable of almost anything now in today's world learning doesn't stop at school it doesn't stop in the classroom in a recent study we looked at a group of Fortune 500 companies and what we found was that people were very easily able to say whether they were in a growth mindset company that valued everyone's development or a fixed mindset company which was focused on talent and what we found was that people in the growth mindset companies said they felt empowered to learn innovate create and the managers told us they saw much more potential among their young workers for learning rising becoming stars within the company the irony is that in the fixed mindset companies they're identifying the talent buying the talent grooming the talent but a few years later they didn't see those people blossoming to the same extent and thinking very very big we have a whole program of research in the Middle East we are finding that when we teach Israelis Jewish Israelis or Palestinians a growth mindset about groups the idea that groups aren't fixed they have the capability to grow and develop when they learn this they want to learn more about each other and they're willing to entertain compromises for the sake of peace this is a very very small beginning to a very very big problem but we may just have found a take-off point for learning recently we've encountered a mystery we always thought adults with a growth mindset would create kids with a growth mindset it was so nice to think that ah those were the days but we're wrong and it turns out that many adults with a growth mindset are not passing it on and in one study Kathy Luce on working with Joe bowler in the ed school found that many math teachers in middle school had a growth mindset they even said the words growth mindset in their classroom but unless they were teaching for conceptual understanding unless they were giving feedback to students that deepen their conceptual understand and unless they gave kids a chance to revise to show their growing understanding those kids did not develop a growth mindset about mass in my lab Kyla hi Mavis my graduate student and I are finding that many parents endorse a growth mindset but if they react to their kids failures or difficulties with anxiety concern those kids are not developing a growth mindset but when they react to the kids setbacks or failures as an interesting platform for learning let's see what you did let's see what we can do now those are the kids who are developing a growth mindset putting it all together we are thinking really really big and working really really hard so that everyone children adults no matter what age can look like this again thank you for more please visit us at stanford.edu

Channel: Stanford

Views: 312,820

Keywords: Education, teaching, learning, Stanford 125, Thinking Big About Learning, psychology, mindset, motivation, behavior, developmental psychology, social psychology, personality psychology, growth mindset, achievement, Stanford University Department of Psychology, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Id: isHM1rEd3GE

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2015