Annie Brock - In Other Words

Text copyright 2018 Annie Brock and Heather Hundley. Design and concept copyright 2018 Ulysses Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. Any unauthorized duplication in whole or in part or dissemination of this edition by any means (including but not limited to photocopying, electronic devices, digital versions, and the internet) will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

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ISBN13: 978-1-61243-814-6

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Contents

Table of Contents

In 2006, Dr. Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, published a book called Mindset that changed the way many educators, including us, approached student learning. Armed with an aggregation of 30 years research, Dweck outlined a powerful theory on the two mindsets she had uncovered in her research subjectsfixed mindset and growth mindset.

Dwecks journey began while she was studying how students coped with failure. She realized that students tended to handle failure in one of two ways: Some seemed to thrive in the face of a challenge, while others did their best to avoid challenging situations. She noted that students willing to grapple with a difficult problem tended to have better overall academic outcomes than those who practiced avoidance techniques. The more she looked, the more she realized that the mindset with which a person approached a situation made a tremendous difference in the outcome of that situation. She named the two mindsets fixed mindset and growth mindset.

FIXED MINDSET: The belief that we are born with a fixed amount of intelligence and ability.

GROWTH MINDSET: The belief that with practice, perseverance, and effort, people have limitless potential to learn and grow.

Heres the thing about the mindsets: Both fixed mindset and growth mindset exist in us all. Its whether we choose to view various situations through the lens of the growth mindset or the fixed mindset that makes all the difference. In Mindset, Dweck points out that all people begin life with a growth mindset. Indeed, babies are the very picture of the growth mindset. They dont care if what they are saying makes sense as they are navigating learning to speak, and no matter how often they fall in the pursuit of learning to walk, they always get back up. So, the question becomes, at what point do fixed mindsets begin to develop? Some would argue that fixed-mindset tendencies begin to emerge in childhood.

Dweck writes of raising children to have a growth mindset: If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children dont have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.

Much in the same way, teachers can offer students the gift of pursuing challenges, working through mistakes, and learning there is a direct line leading from effort to growth. In this book, we seek to give educators the tools to communicate with students, create Growth-mindset classroom atmospheres, and provide praise and feedback in a way that fosters growth mindsets.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book is meant to be a shorthand guide to communicating with students. Much of what is written here has been adapted from our longer works on the topic of growth mindsetThe Growth Mindset Coach and The Growth Mindset Playbook. Consider this a primer of sorts, a cheat-sheet version of Playbook and Coach filled with tips, strategies, and go-to phrases designed to help teachers shift their thoughts, words, and deeds into the growth-mindset zone.

When it comes to praise and feedback, many parents and teachers fall into the same fixed-mindset traps that can ultimately hamper childrens ability to develop growth mindsets. When we say well-meaning things like, Youre so smart! we are overlooking the fact that those wordswords that are associated with personal attributesmay ultimately be damaging. Youre so smart, might feel like appropriate praise in the moment, but later when the student meets with inevitable failure, they may fall to pieces because the words they internalized about themselvesyoure so smartdont seem so true, after all.

In our book, The Growth Mindset Coach, we differentiated between person praise and process praise, and we gave tips to teachers for providing feedback in a way that helped students see that academic success is about overcoming obstacles, putting forth effort, and turning mistakes into learning opportunities. In this book, in addition to offering a primer on growth-oriented praise and feedback, well delve into methods to maximize growth-mindset communication in various school relationships, examine the ways that the two mindsets may play a role in the school day, and introduce you to the tools you need to respond to situations with a growth mindset. Well also demonstrate how you can create conditions in your relationships, classroom, and school in which the growth mindsets of others will have the opportunity to flourish. The sections of this book discuss: