Growth mindset not working? Maybe you've got False Growth Mindset

[noblegiraffe]

Or you're saying you've got a growth mindset when secretly you don't. Or you've got a growth mindset about English but not about maths.

Or maybe you've wholeheartedly jumped on another faddish bandwagon when a bit of common sense and fewer fancy labels would be better?

www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-praise-became-a-consolation-prize/510845/

Salty, that's not right. If you read the original research (ie not Malcolm gladwell!) the guy agrees that his 10000 hours idea has been totally twisted, but he also totally debunks the idea of innate talent. Clearly there are some fixed limits - if you are 5 foot 1 you'll never be a professional basketball player - but they are surprisingly few. I think he essentially sums it up as work harder and smarter. You need effort, targeted practise and good teaching, as well as the inclination to do it. (You could spend 10000 hours playing the piano badly and still be crap!).
There are clearly issues with a growth mindset but I equally hate some of the comments above about 'so and so will never be a mathematician/singer/artist's. I always got told as a child that I couldn't draw. My dad and teachers had the idea that i had no natural talent, so that was that. Well, im now at art college, and im doing pretty well. Sure, it may be there are natural limits to ability, but you teachers out there please have the humility to remember that you don't and can't know what those limits are for any given individual.

The summary of the original 10000 hour research btw is Anders Ericsson, Secrets from the new science of expertise. It's an enlightening read.

And another thing to remember is that assessments of 'talent' are biased by all sorts of issues, not least class. You are basically on much safer ground thinking that somebody's potential is limitless given the right conditions (not all of which are summed up by effort). Otherwise you are on the very slippery slope involving thinking that private school kids must be cleverer because they get better exam results...

zoe - that's not what the current research I'm reading says.

For example:

The psychologists reanalyzed data from six previous studies of chess competitions (1,083 subjects in total) and eight studies of musicians (628 total) for correlations between practice and success, and found huge disparities in how much chess grandmasters and elite musicians had practiced. One chess player, for example, had taken 26 years to reach a level that another reached in a mere two years. Clearly, there's more at work than just the sheer volume of hours practiced,

www.fastcodesign.com/3027564/asides/scientists-debunk-the-myth-that-10000-hours-of-practice-makes-you-an-expert

One final thing: 'So do I have a fixed mindset? A growth mindset? Did my mindset change halfway through the task?'

Personally I'd say yes, your mindset changed halfway through the task. You thought you couldn't do it, and therefore didn't succeed. But then you decided that obviously you could (since a bunch of y7s did it) - and worked until you did. Doesn't that speak volumes about the importance of mindset, or whatever you choose to call it?!

Salty there is obviously more at work than the sheer volume of hours practised. Like I mentioned, there is such a thing as useless practise. I could play the same piece on the piano badly ever day for 50 years, and it would still be rubbish. If you read Ericsson he accounts for a lot of the criticism of his work, most of which was based on Gladwell and other 'pop science' mangling.

Also (sorry, I'll stop soon, I realise I'm posting too much - this is a bugbear of mine!) surely the fact that they were chess grandmasters or elite musicians at all is the significant point?!

I'm not sure I'd call that article 'research' either. It's taking a simplistic summary of complex research and drawing equally simplistic conclusions.
Sure, it's not down to 'just' practising 10000 hours (which was never the conclusion in the first place), but there's a very, very long way between that and saying that talent is innate and fixed!!!

Does it really matter? Resilience, growth mindset, 10000 hours of practice, whatever?
Surely what's really important is having some faith in your students, know that they need to work smart AND hard, and a belief in the plasticity of the brain. And most importantly communicating this to the students. I've known students who were bottom set, appeared low ability, poor literacy etc when in yr7, and have been "written off" by some teachers. Yet something happened from yr8-yr10 and suddenly they switch on, start working, and achieve great results!
And I've also had some lovely students who worked their bloody socks off and not get a single C. Yet go in to college and be really successful. As I knew they would eventually and I told them so. And it's these students the current system let's down because the emphasis is on good exam results, and not getting them could destroy self esteem. We need an emphasis on long term life success. Life long learning. And resilience.

Personally I'd say yes, your mindset changed halfway through the task.

Well that just makes nonsense of all the efforts to identify whether students have fixed or growth mindsets if it is something that can be changed halfway though a task by a minor intervention, surely?

Lets.

The thing with 10,000 hours of practice is that if you have a puny individual training for 10,000 hours at swimming alongside Michael Phelps, with exactly the same expert inputs, who is going to end up the better swimmer? Clearly the guy with the extra lung capacity, big feet, longer arms.

Outside of massively obvious lack of effort, you only have to look at your own school reports to see that a lot of the time a teacher won't necessarily have a good picture of whether a student tries hard or not. Effort is massively subjective - I'm going to do that really really annoying thing of talking about my own school experiences to a load of people who actually currently work in schools (sorry) - but as a kid/teen when I looked at my school reports, the effort grades on my report bore pretty much no relation to how hard I felt I was working at things. In fact in the subjects I enjoyed and found easy, and therefore didn't spend much time on, I usually got a 1 for effort, whereas quite often for the ones I slogged over to get a crap grade, a teacher would give me a 2 or 3 for effort. I gave up trying in PE altogether when, after a year of working my arse off, she gave me the bottom grade for effort. My teenage brain thought, well, why bloody bother at all then? Unless measurement of effort is now completely different and infallible, I think it can be a risky thing to focus too much on.

I would say yes, the idea of identifying fixed or growth mindsets is a bit bizarre, because clearly we all have some of each. But that doesn't mean the whole concept is nonsense, surely? It just means that it's easy to fall back into thinking we can't do something because we aren't clever enough, when that's not actually the case.

As for the puny individual vs michael phelps - yes, clearly sports are one area where innate physique matters. But probably not as much as you'd imagine. At a guess, the puny individual after training for 10000 hours with top experts is likely to not still be puny! And probably will be competing at a very high level indeed. In the end, isn't that what matters? The problem at the moment is that for all the faddy 'growth mindset' exercises, most of our education system is still premised on a fixed mindset, and that is a huge problem. The UK streaming system for instance is hugely alien to me. To me it means taking a random snapshot of ability at a given stage, and entrenching it further and further. I was pretty rubbish at maths for most of my school career, but suddenly had a spurt of interest (and hard work!!!) at A-level and by 18 I got the equivalent of an A (not UK system). In the UK, I'd have been hived off in a lower ability group and not even got a shot at an A!!!

Likewise you could look at how many professional sportspeople were born early in the school year. They started out with a minor advantage (larger size and developmental readiness a their year group), which gets built upon and built upon until it acquires an importance out of all proportion to the initial advantage, which was pretty random anyway.

Oops, I thought this was the staffroom

I don't think anyone ever disputed that with practice you get better at something, or that self-belief is important.

What's bullshit is packaging it up with labels and questionnaires and expensive interventions. The commercial marketing of 'try a bit harder and you can do it'.

Namejustfornappies yes yes and yes I love your post! I don't much care what it is called, I just want teachers and parents to somehow communicate to kids that their current level of achievement is not a fixed entity. For that, teachers and parents need to actually believe it, and I'm not sure many of them really do.

I'd agree with you there - labels and questionnaires and expensive interventions are clearly bullshit, and how this concept has been packaged for schools is obviously highly problematic. But I think the fundamental point about instilling a growth mindset still stands. It's a bit more than just having self-belief isn't it? It's more the idea that innate ability is malleable.

In practice, teachers and parents and the school system do all the time put limits on what they think kids can achieve. I've been at the sharp end of that. I think the idea of forgetting the whole concept of innate talent is amazingly liberating for everybody, and it's only really come into focus for me reading some of this new(ish) research. Suddenly I don't need to worry about whether I have innate talent for drawing - I'm just working incredibly hard at it, having been taught for decades that I was shit at it. But the number of people who are now saying to me 'oh I wish I had your talent, I could never do that' is ridiculous. Five years ago they'd have said 'don't give up the day job, that drawing is rubbish'!!!

I'd hate to be a family member of the person who puts in the 10 000 hours of practising with no talent...

Just saying...as somebody who grew up with a violin player who did have talent. It was still bloody painful at times.

In my job as an academic teacher, I do come across students who work incredibly hard with relatively little talent. They do improve, if given the right support, and it is definitely worth doing. But they don't end up having the really bright ideas.

Otoh I have never seen a bone idle student, however gifted, write a really good essay either. Somehow the work has to go in there.

zoemaguire many British schools apply a system of loose setting, so you can move up the sets by working a bit harder, and a good teacher will show you how to do it. My ds went from bottom sets to top sets in several subjects during secondary. This is very far from a fixed mind set.

Worth remembering that 10,000 hours is 1.14 years of solid practice, which is a huge investment of time over many years. I wonder how many people who are genuinely crap at something have actually put that many hours into mastering something, for a fair comparison with those who were actually good at it to start with.

Growth Mindset is the new Brain Gym. I'm sick of hearing how it's apparently going to 'cure' all the issues in our school. The reality is that a good nights sleep, less junk food and limits being set on use of electronic devices would be of much more benefit.

We've just started talking growth mindset in my Y2 class and i do think there's a lit of good in it. Mostly the message that if something seems hard, we shouldn't just give up, we should look for another way to approach it. It's not about just trying harder, it's about getting the right help, using the right strategies and believing in yourself.

I guess it's different in a KS1 classroom compared to secondary schools, but I don't want any of my pupils thinking 'I 'm no good at maths' etc and so far it does seem to be having an impact.

There are several factors which will influence success: Talent, good teaching, a child's own drive and many others. Thinking of them as normal distributions of bell curves, some children will be found at each extremes. However, success will be dependent on a combination of all of them.
I agree with Zoe's comment:
Sure, it may be there are natural limits to ability, but you teachers out there please have the humility to remember that you don't and can't know what those limits are for any given individual.
A baby does not have its IQ written on its forehead. All you can do is get them to take the next step in their education and give them the belief they will improve with practice. Telling them they are not one of the ones who will be great will only stop their drive. Equally labelling them as genius can be damaging. Any less then perfect score will indicate they are no longer the best.
Most adults at the top of their game realise they will be statistically unlikely to win a Nobel Prize or make an Oscar speech, but most who try can get a career which interests them and more important than succeeding, enjoy the journey.
All this seems common sense and what good teachers do by instinct. It does not need posters or someone with a PhD or a teaching fad.

Corythatwas I was an academic, i taught for many years. I'd never have pronounced on which students were hardworking but 'lacking talent', to me that is a huge overreach. Time and again I've seen people who didn't initially strike me as brilliant go on to great things, and conversely high flyers not live up to their potential. A friend of mine was rejected twice by Cambridge as a teenager yet has ended up as a brilliant academic right at the top of her field. Many many people didn't shine at school or university but go on to greatness. Primo Levi apparently received mediocre grades in Italian at school, yet went on to become one of the most extraordinary writers of the 20th century. I'd be prepared to bet some of his teachers thought he was lacking in original ideas as well.
If somebody is hardworking but not doing brilliantly, to me that suggests not lack of talent but inadequate studying strategies. That's where we teachers come in - we aren't there to make pronouncements about what is innate in anybody, and in fact I'd say that kind of judgement is actively unhelpful.

I'm pleased to know it is possible to move between sets at school, though I still have concerns about the whole setting system and what it tells students about their relative worths.

zoe, just to clarify: not talking about teens who did badly at A-level or were rejected by Cambridge, but about undergraduates whom I have taught over several years, and been very proud of because of what they have achieved. But still cannot help seeing that at the end of their 3 years, and despite accessing all available support, they find it very difficult to understand new ideas or see why their own ideas don't always make a lot of sense.

We do pride ourselves on the support we offer specialist writing support open to any student who asks for it, dyslexia centre for those who need that etc etc. And we do get surprises of the kind you mention. But also students for whom a rather middling Third is an achievement that should be celebrated by both sides, not seen as some kind of failure because somebody else got a very good First.

I don't see what's so horrible about that. I have colleagues who can do things I can't, seriously brilliant people who lead the world in their field. I don't feel there has to be anything wrong with own work because I am not them.

As for the setting system at school, what it has done for someone like my son was that he didn't have to spend every English or maths lesson having his nose rubbed into the fact that he couldn't do what his friends did. Instead, he got appropriate work for what he could do at that time, and the advice he needed to gradually improve and move up. We saw a huge improvement in his confidence when the setting started and he actually got a teacher who could focus on teaching at his level.

Cory, I guess what I'm uneasy with is the idea that we can separate out innate talent from all the other factors that influence performance. There are so many variables, and however well we know a student, we are still on opposite sides of a divide. We don't know the half of what us going on in their heads.

It's not horrible to set limits on what we see our students achieving, and as you say, sometimes it's a struggle to get somebody through a degree at all. But all the same I do think talk of innate talent is potentially dangeeous. Your son ended up in top sets, which is great, and he must have had great teachers and support at home, but too often students will perform in line with people's expectations, either because they don't have the confidence to think they can do better, or because they aren't given the chance to show what they are capable of. My daughter turns into a rubbish swimmer during school lessons, they don't expect anything of the kids so a lot of them, including dd, don't see the point in bothering. They proudly gave her a 5m badge the same week she got a 600m badge in her after-school lesson!!

I'm not suggesting you don't give your students your full support, obviously! Just that assessments of innate talent seem a very shaky basis on which to predict student progress.

The same applies higher up. Re your comment about not rising right to the top of your own field - I'm sure there are many reasons you aren't (perhaps wanting a life and to see your kids occasionally?:)) - but I doubt innate talent or lack of it has much to do with it. One of the most brilliant scientists I had the privilege of knowing was doubtless very clever. More importantly though, he lived his subject and had always been encouraged by his parents to believe that dedication could get you anywhere. A hard problem was an excuse to get stuck in, not to doubt his talent because he couldn't master it immediately. The archetype of a growth mindset, in fact

Apologies, that last bit was meant to sound supportive not patronising or presumptive, but reading it back im not sure i suceeded! Have been drinking too much Xmas booze, sorry:)