Growth Mindset: Pile of pants

[noblegiraffe]

Another study showing no effect of growth mindset interventions on test scores, in primary school children.
www.tes.com/news/exclusive-growth-mindset-lessons-had-no-impact

Why are schools so susceptible to fads?

Such utter shite:

www.rightmove.co.uk/s6p/63574254

learningspy.co.uk/psychology/growth-mindset-bollocks/

www.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/schools-are-desperate-to-teach-growth-mindset-but-its-based-on-a-lie/

And here's the other charlatan do nos jours:

robertslavinsblog.wordpress.com/2018/06/21/john-hattie-is-wrong/

mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/9475/7229

ollieorange2.wordpress.com/2014/09/24/half-of-the-statistics-in-visible-learning-are-wrong-part-2/

Also not a teacher but I thought you might not mind if I sat in a corner as long as I didn’t drink out of anyone’s favourite mug and bought biscuits?

I started this thread and it didn’t take long for Growth Mindset to get suggested, kindly meant and well intentioned.

I’m all for doing ones best and trying hard but I also want some understanding that there is all sorts of privilege and bias in the world that means some things are harder for some people.
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/primary/3633281-Maths-anxiety-in-Y5-into-Y6-girl

Loving that right move link snuck in there @echt

I think with any of these things we normal people take what we can from it and ignore the crap. So in the same way that there are a few sensible things in the middle of that R/L brain twaddle, there are some things I will carry on doing in class. The can't do it YET thing, the you have to work at it thing and the get a fucking grip and work at it thing. Have you seen Coco Gauff? There's a reason she's good at tennis.

I'm on the lite (sic) version though - most of my classroom quotes are via The Rock.

I'd say it's exactly the opposite of the X Factor. That's just shite.

Loving that right move link snuck in there @echt**

Bloody Mac. It does that quite often, pasting something I clicked on much earlier. :o

I find growth mindset potentially really harmful to kids' self esteem. There are kids who will make improvements with what used to be called a 'can do' attitude. But a student who works incredibly hard to achieve 3s and 4s is never going to become a brain surgeon no matter how much they believe it's possible. It is cruel to them to suggest otherwise.

Growth Mindset was all the rage a few years ago and so we all had to do it even though we thought it was a pile of poop.

Now it's all about Zones of Regulation which will be the in thing for a couple of years till somebody thinks up some other bandwagon to jump on Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

There is undoubtedly a lot of pants attached to GM, as there is with anything that gets monetised by less than rigorous consultants and advisers.

Where I think the original studies and Dweck's work have value is in challenging us to think about what we praise and how we ensure children engage with stuff that is hard.

Having coached chief execs before becoming a primary teacher, I've seen the lasting effects of being a high achiever at school, rewarded for being clever and finding everything easy. These people live their lives in a state of terror and are often really hard to live with. Their identity is so bound up with their academic competence and their success that they are petrified of failing and of appearing anything less than 100% effective.

Posted too early... saw the same pattern in 'G&T' students. GM is a useful reminder that we benefit from having to deal with struggle and from being made to think about ourselves as learners, not just as achievers.

All of these fads stem from a desire for there to be a norm that everyone can reach. Here's a target: we all can attain it if we have enough resilience/self-esteem/put in 10k hours on it. Why the obsession with levelling?

We pay a lot of lip service to celebrating difference but we don't really tolerate it at all in school. When I was younger it was OK to be 'the quiet one' 'the sporty one who isn't that bright' - I know labelling has its evils but the upside was that you got noted for what you did well and left alone about the rest.

“ it is damaging to weaker students to be told that they could be just as good as top-setters if only they tried harder.”

That is not the message I have ever thought was at the heart of Growth Mindset, and thought it’s chief dynamic was testing yourself against your OWN potential.

I do think fads grow out of a good philosophy but get taken up by consultants and self styled trainers and it gets distorted and inflated into something else.

I agree that Dweck's book (I've read it a couple of times) is really useful and helpful research but the way it is watered down in classrooms is pretty damaging. It's a complex and subtle process.

I'm not a teacher but find this interesting. When i was a kid in the 80s/90s if i did something (usually sport) and complained to my parents i wasn't v good at it, they would just say "no you probably arent very good, we arent a sporty family....but youre good at maths!!" As it happened at high school i discovered a sport i was quite good at, and still practise today but got no positive feedback or encouragement from my parents/teachers. I try to encourage my kids that although they might not be great at something they can always improve from where they started if they want to and keep practising (and that its ok to do something for enjoyment even if you aren't amazing at it)

[not a teacher] It's complicated isn't it? I was definitely a "you're just not good at sports/spelling etc" generation kid, and I don't want that for mine because I know learning is not linear and I became much more academic and much fitter as I got older. If I was a different kid I might not have bothered?

But growth mindset lead to my kid that's poor at spelling and times tables being made to do spelling bees with 100 words and full 144 answer times tables grids on a weekly basis and being told she just had to practice more and keep trying.

We moved schools and it turns out she has a processing problem so that approach was completely inappropriate.

It felt like growth mindest was being used as an excuse not to differentiate properly or to do the SEN testing that was needed.

Has anyone heard of Deborah Eyre’s High Performance Learning? Schools seem to subscribe to it on the basis of all pupils can get A*s. It seems like an extension of growth mindset to me but I might be wrong.

It sounds a bit like Jo Boaler’s ‘everyone can learn maths to the highest level’

She spouts a lot of shit about mistakes creating new connections in the brain even if you don’t know it was wrong. Dodgy neuroscience.

You have to pay a subscription to do it, which makes me very suspicious.

Every time I hear any concept described by slt/external trainer/ass kissing colleague as a 'powerful tool' my bullshit filter kicks in and I assume it's going to be a load of bollocks that generates more work and is a stick to beat us with. GM was no different but seems to have been reduced to a set of laminates that nobody notices any longer.

My 9-year old dd wrote in her ‘learning journey’: this term we learnt that a ‘growth mindset’ is a ‘good thing’. [her quotes]. I think she judged it right!

Every time I hear any concept described by slt/external trainer/ass kissing colleague as a 'powerful tool' my bullshit filter kicks in and I assume it's going to be a load of bollocks that generates more work and is a stick to beat us with. GM was no different but seems to have been reduced to a set of laminates that nobody notices any longer

^^^^

This.

She spouts a lot of shit about mistakes creating new connections in the brain even if you don’t know it was wrong. Dodgy neuroscience

There’s a lot of dodgy neuroscience in schools. Look at Brain Gym, which any hospital neurologist would have simply laughed out of the park. Thankfully Brain Gym is mostly forgotten now and the expensive folders with instructions to cross the midline and press ‘brain buttons’ are long since dumped in the school skip.

Too many of my colleagues fancy themselves as amateur psychologists and/or neurologists.

One piece of feedback I got on my DD5 is that she needs to ‘work on her growth mindset’ not really knowing what it was I googled it appeared from my brief research to be about a ‘can do’ attitude and development of resilience however from the comments here I must have missed something. DD does tend to give up easily if she finds something hard, such as riding her bike. Is there a way to build these characteristics or are you suggesting that they are inherent to the individual?

There's a lot of misunderstanding about growth mindset and what it actually is. Carol dweck has written a couple of articles recently about how her research has been misused. It's basically challenging the idea that intelligence is fixed which is a very Western/American idea and has been shown to be rubbish in study after study. It's definitely not about trying harder. It's more about being open to learning in different ways and thinking about how you are doing it. It's also about acknowledging the significance of emotions on our learning - how panicking stops learning and how people put up walls, which I think is really important, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. If it's being used to bully a sensitive child into being'resilient' then obviously that's bollocks.

The real problem is that Carol Dweck’s results haven’t been replicated.

And if you constantly go ‘oh it’s not working because you’re not doing it properly then it has fuck-all place in the classroom.

I don’t think Brain Gym should be forgotten about.

When I’m queen any politician or civil servant joining the Education dept will have an induction day. Half an hour of that will be a lecture on the crisis of replicability in psychology and ten minutes will be a reminder of the Brain Gym debacle.