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/

Gosh this thread is refreshing. I've long had a Rage against Matthew Said who pushes the idea that with practice anyone can be the highest achiever. Whereas it was obvious to me that those who started with natural talent had a huge advantage, and some of us would never acquire talent no matter how hard we worked. I hated the msg "If you haven't attained at highest level it's just because you didn't work hard enough": when I knew that I could see people attaining hugely higher than me who hadn't worked harder than me.

I am a huge fan of making the most of whatever opportunities you're given, but stupid to pretend some people don't have innate advantages. I like this blog about slow & fast runners; they all worked at about 90% of their maxHR, the slow ones aren't slacking off & may have spent as many years training in preparation. Folk simply don't all have the same performance potential.

But lljkk I don't think it is about hard work at all, it's all about productive practice, and they aren't the same thing at all. Differential achievement is partly because some people will have far greater access to the tools that enable you to learn how to do productive practise - either through inner resources or external ones. Those aren't evenly shared out, as surely a glance at the differential in exam results between public and private schools will show you.

I had a truly rubbish instrument teacher as a child, and parents who didn't know anything about classical music. I practised, but not very effectively, and though I kept at it, nobody would ever have called me talented. Yet once I met my husband, who is what you'd call a classically 'gifted' musician (in the same instrument) and who grew up in a highly musical family, he taught me a load of tricks and ways to practise. I'm now pretty good, if I say so myself. If I practised more, I'd be very good indeed. One of my daughters is a very promising violinist. Is she talented? I have no idea. What she does have is the advantage of a very skilled musician as a father who is showing her how to practise, and teaching her the mental tools to keep at it when it's hard and discouraging. That's everything to do with the luck of the draw in life, but it's nothing to do with talent.

because some people will have far greater access to the tools that enable you to learn how to do productive practise

Wot, you mean like more fast twitch fibres, a bigger VO2max, an innate sense of rhythm and ears that can tell without being taught if something is sung in key?

Suddenly DD was the fastest runner in yr4 (I lie, there was a tall boy who could just about keep ahead). There was no productive practice. She just had natural talent.

DH is obsessed about pop songs changing key, he says key changes are horrible & mutters dark things. He only had some music lessons in a few school yrs. I've read music theory and learnt how to play 2 instruments very badly after many yrs of trying, so I know what he's talking out in theory but I can't hear it. People shout at me about my lousy sense of rhythm... after all my hard work (yrs of dance lessons, too). I didn't know it was so bad but apparently it's diabolical.

Amy Winehouse sang like a caterwauling whale. Fact. Or it is to my ears, anyway.

I'm a maths teacher, I've got a masters in maths. I spend quite a lot of my time solving algebraic problems. Yet I've taught GCSE students who can factorise quadratics where a>1 in their heads and despite my best efforts, I can't do it. They certainly haven't practised more than me! It was really interesting to realise that my working memory can't hold and manipulate numbers very well, but if I've got a bit of paper that I can brain dump onto, I'm good. I'm sure that I could spend hours brain training and improving my working memory, but they don't need to in order to achieve something that I can't do.

Just like dyslexia and dysnumeria (or whatever it's called), some people will be tone deaf, and some people will be built to be fast runners. I'm not denying there are innate advantages to acquiring certain skills. I'll never be a trampolinist, my sense of balance and my pelvic floor is shot and I hate heights.

But when we talk about talent I think we are mostly talking about why some people shoot right to the top, whereas some achieve competence but are not exceptional. In that case, you can't really fall back on saying 'oh well some people have a better sense of pitch and rhythm than others' - everybody competent will have that. In saying 'why does x only play in anyville concert orchestra and y in the berlin philharmonic?', I think looking at innate talent tells you very little. In fact, a friend of mine started out playing in anyville concert orchestra. He now plays in one of the world's very very top orchestras. What changed? Well, who knows. Supreme dedication, higher study, the ability not to be discouraged by repeated rejection, parents with the resources to support him through the lean years, luck. A sudden mysterious surge in innate talent? I don't think so!

But noble I'd hazard a guess that there are field medal prize-winners who also can't factories quadratics where a>1 in their heads, and work best when they brain-dump onto paper. My husband can't do basic mental arithmetic very effectively (I'm the one who does that, and I'm an arts person through and through), but he still has a PhD in physics. I don't think the presence of absence of certain mental agilities are very straightforwardly predictive of how successful you'll be in a given subject.

factorise, even - my autocorrect is certainly lacking in innate talent:)

Problem with saying that hard work => success for everybody, is then it's YOUR FAULT if you don't succeed because you didn't work hard enough. That pressure is counter-productive, because a lot of people would rather say they stopped caring then risk the chance that in spite of their very hardest work they didn't achieve what they wanted.

Pretending that innate talent doesn't matter is insideous & very very demotivating.

This is really interesting because I've been having this debate with both my kids. They both learn fast and easily, and they both go to a school which is very much in to the growth mindset. So they see a contradiction between 'everyone can try hard and get there' and their own classroom experience which is of the opposite.

I do think that the focus on resilience is helpful - not giving up, trying a different approach, asking for help etc. But in practice it doesn't seem to work very well. In their eyes, it's always the same people in the 'learning pit', and never them, so they see it as less and less relevant. If it was working, they would be able to apply it to things they do find hard (and this is what I'm trying to encourage them to do).

I'm more comfortable with 'everyone is good at something, you just have to find it, and at the same time keep on working at the stuff you find tricky' as an approach.

I don't think the presence of absence of certain mental agilities are very straightforwardly predictive of how successful you'll be in a given subject

No but if there is a particular area where that mental agility is important, then clearly those DC will thrive and I will struggle. Despite me (on paper) being clever, they will have a massive head start. If both me and the GCSE student were to take up something like chess, then they would be advantaged from the start by being able to hold more move combinations in their heads.

It was quite a revelation to me, TBH, that people can have different mental strengths in the same way that they can have physical ones.

This is all interesting to read. My 5 year old's school follow growth mindset. On the whole it comes across as positive, ds is more willing to try at things he struggles with because he wants to show good growth mindset. On the other hand he has been telling me about other DC who are not showing growth mindset, those children are specifically DC with SN, and I can't help but wonder where he, a 5 yr old, has got the idea that they're not trying hard enough.

It seems bizarre to me to suggest that all children have the potential to be high fliers, and that is a dangerous notion that I suspect will lead to more children disengaging with education as they feel they are crap at it.
Growth mindset was very damaging fro my now 16 yr old. School was a nightmare for him and despite him having processing difficulties identified, alongside other stuff we are only now realising (ASD, OCD, Tourette's), all teachers, without exception, worked on the basis that he was deliberately lazy and disruptive, from being 5 until February this year when we took him out of school. Growth mindset without any attempt to understand his difficulties have left him knowing beyond shadow of a doubt that he is shit, and he is so traumatised that he will not do any academic work at all.
Knowing this means we can keep a close eye on how this is going with ds3 and hopefully prevent the self esteem issues which seem inevitable when a child is told they just need to work harder.

Lljkk I've said several times that I don't think hard work = success! But I do think a focus on innate talent is especially lethal to ambitious kids with disadvantages in life, because failure is often NOT down to innate factors. Its down to a lack of opportunity and support. Otherwise, why do rich kids on average get better gcses? Hopefully not because you think they have greater talent!!!!

All children need appropriate work for their level and encouragement in their enthusiasms, not pronouncing on whether or not they have innate talent. My 6yo ds does not find schoolwork easy and that is partly down to inappropriate ks1 expectations. The most damage as I see it is being done to his self-esteem, because he refuses to try and risk failing again. For me, him having a growth mindset doesn't involve trying and failing to meet ridiculous government writing targets, but it does mean him believing for eh that he can form an 'a' correctly (he can) and daring to try to do it again even if he doesn't get it right first time. I agree that growth mindset is dangerous if it involves another stick to beat poorly performing pupils, but it is equally dangerous if only those suceeding already are encouraged to think they can reach for the skies.