Growth Mindset - brilliant or bobbins?

[noblegiraffe]

As I just posted on another thread I'm starting to see the shine on Growth Mindset starting to tarnish a little.

It is certainly all the rage in schools at the moment, my school has posters up all over the place about seeing mistakes as stepping stones to success and how it's possible to improve with practice and so on. We are told to praise effort over achievement and other sensible-sounding things. However, there seems to be a bit more to the whole thing than that, and children might be identified as having a 'fixed mindset' and interventions put in place, which starts sounding a bit culty to me.

What are other schools doing?

It might be worth being aware that the evidence might not be all that.

These researchers struggled to explain why their growth mindset intervention program in the UK didn't produce statistically significant results:
educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/uploads/pdf/Changing_Mindsets.pdf

and David Didau wrote this blog (which is well worth a read) wondering whether Growth Mindset is slipping into pseudoscience. The poster in there which he has seen in a school is awful!
www.learningspy.co.uk/research/is-growth-mindset-pseudoscience/

Are we being sold another Brain Gym?

[Eolian]

Yep. It's not that ALL these ideas ate necessarily inhetently rubbish, but the more of them get wheeled in and then abandoned, the more tired and cynical about them everybody becomes.

[storynanny]

Absolutely. There have been some really brilliant initiatives that have worked well just discarded and not enough time to devote to further developing them once the newest idea wheeled in.

[echt]

This the answer. Not.

[70ontheinside]

Started at a new school in September that bought into the quackery is supposedly 100% growth mindset. I have never encountered as many "I am stuck" and "I can't do it"s before. They were either very, very crap at embedding their growth mindset or GM is just a huge pile of poo...
The general idea is actually ok, but as ever you cannot teach growth mindset in stand alone PSYCHE lessons.

[echt]

The thing that pisses me off about it is it's a belief system, and if our schools buy into it, we all have to believe. Like a cult really.

Why is it good to have a growth mindset? Are those who don't have one bad? Do they do less well in life?