- Dweck offers two key terms, Growth Mindset and Fixed Mindset. Explain these two concepts. Use a Dweck quote for each as part of your explanation. Be sure to offer your explanation in a way that a friend might understand it.
A growth Mindset is a mindset that finds satisfaction in the process while a fixed Mindset is more invested in the end result. Fixed mindset people tend to want things to come easily while growth mindset people are more willing to take on new challenges and get things wrong. To a person with a fixed mindset, school was a place where “their intelligence had been up for judgement,” instead of a place where it was okay to make mistakes.
- Dweck names at least two ways to stimulate a Growth Mindset or to building a “bridge to yet” (3:53). What are they? Use a quote for each and offer a response. Do these seem reasonable? Does something about them bother you? Why?
Dweck’s first suggestion for stimulating a Growth Mindset is “praising the process that kids engage in, their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement” instead of their intelligence. I agree with this. I think that while it is important to praise someone when they do something well and succeed, it is equally important, if not more important, to make the person, especially a child, feel good about just trying. I think a big part of fixed mindsets is a fear of failure, but by encouraging just the act of putting in effort and putting value in the process instead of the end result, then the child will have already succeeded.
The second way of creating a growth mindset is to change the way students think about struggling. For many students “effort and difficulty made them feel dumb.” Students should be taught that to struggle is to grow and to grow is to learn. I think that this is important to create students who have a positive mindset when it comes to learning. We need to stop instilling a fear of failure in kids that they’ll just have for the rest of their lives.
- Intelligence. Dweck’s ideas may suggest a notion of intelligence or smarts that is different from what many might think about when considering intelligence. How do you see her model of intelligence? Explain with evidence from the text.
Dweck’s model of intelligence is a person who is willing to put in the effort to improve. She puts more value in those with a good work ethic than those who may be naturally talented at something.
- Write about a fixed mindset moment in your own learning history. Explain how that moment worked out for you. Be sure to offer enough detail for a reader to grasp the situation, your approach/experience, and the outcome. (We all have them at some point!) Make sure to explicitly link your experience to a specific idea (or ideas) in Dweck’s talk.
I think I often get stuck in a fixed mindset. In high school, maintaining a grade that was an eighty five (a B-) or above was the most important thing. I also tended to befriend people who would be disappointed in a ninety eight which created a level of self doubt. Having a fixed mindset ended up being discouraging most of the time and often made me like I wasn’t as good as the people around me even though, like them, I was an honors/AP student with a 4.0 gpa. That feeling sometimes made me feel like it wasn’t worth trying as hard because I wouldn’t get to their level even if I tried.
