Guidelines for Using Growth Mindset Language
There is a scourge of what can be called “false growth mindsets” among educators. An example of this would be teachers who claim to endorse a growth mindset and use some of the language of growth mindsets (e.g. praising effort) while still implicitly endorsing fixed mindset ideals (e.g. “you tried your best,” implying that their “best” is limited and immobile).
Carol Dweck, Stanford University Psychology professor, saw mindset theory as an antidote to the self-esteem movement, but in practice it is often just the self-esteem movement reborn: praising every child just to make them feel good rather than to help them learn.
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“Too often nowadays, praise is given to students who are putting forth effort, but not learning, in order to make them feel good in the moment: ‘Great effort! You tried your best!’ It’s good that the students tried, but it’s not good that they’re not learning. The growth-mindset approach helps children feel good in the short and long terms, by helping them thrive on challenges and setbacks on their way to learning. When they’re stuck, teachers can appreciate their work so far, but add: ‘Let’s talk about what you’ve tried, and what you can try next.’” (Dweck, 2015)
Helping students to endorse a growth mindset is about more than just praising effort. We need to portray a growth mindset as a reframing of your goals and your interpretation of feedback. Yeager and Dweck (2020) portray fixed and growth mindsets as indicative of wider “meaning systems,” a constellation of beliefs about and reactions to learning situations.
A “fixed mindset meaning system” endorses:
- Performance goals - putting in effort merely to prove oneself competent
- Performance-avoidance goals - avoiding situations that might demonstrate one’s incompetence
- Negative effort beliefs - interpreting the need to exert effort on a task as evidence that one is not naturally good at it
- Helpless attributions in response to difficult situations - interpreting poor performance as evidence of a stable flaw in the self
In contrast, a growth mindset meaning system endorses an opposing constellation of beliefs, including:
- Mastery goals - learning for the sake of learning and the intrinsic desire to improve
- Positive effort beliefs - seeing effort as an inherent aspect of self-improvement
- Resilient attributions - interpreting poor performance as feedback that one can use to improve on later attempts
It is, therefore, important when using growth mindset language in learning interventions to focus on the underlying goals of reshaping students’ attributions, goals, and interpretations of effort and failure.
Carol Dweck provided this helpful graphic to illustrate how we should re-frame our language in this regard:
Below are suggestions for expanding this growth mindset language further:
- You learn more from wrong answers than from right answers! Wrong answers help us find flaws in our thinking. Take a minute to think about why you got the question wrong. Then you won’t get this type of question wrong again!
- Failure is feedback! You can use it to get better.
- The more you practice now, the easier it will be to do these kinds of problems later.
- Let’s try again in a different way.
- You seem to be stuck. Who can you ask for help?
- Nobody is good at problems like this on the first try. Keep at it and it will get easier.
- Take a moment to think about what you learned right before this.
- Why don’t you go back to the last section to test your understanding, then come back and try this question again.
We should be going beyond just praising effort and focus on orienting students towards effective learning strategies, metacognitive awareness, mastery goals, and efficacious attributions.
And remember:
References:
Dweck, C. (2015). Carol Dweck revisits the growth mindset. Education Week, 35(5), 20-24.
Dweck, C. (2016). What having a “growth mindset” actually means. Harvard Business Review, 13, 213-226.
Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2020). What can be learned from growth mindset controversies? American Psychologist, 75(9), 1269–1284. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794