Photo courtesy of usnavy. Licensed under CCLC2.0
I was inspired today by a TED Talk by Carol Dweck. It struck home since I had just been to a school site council meeting where the Advanced Placement (AP) History scores were reported as widely outperforming the national average. What did these have in common? A growth mindset.
It sounds like common sense when Dr. Dweck presents it. That seeing potential in students and treating them as ‘not yet’ winners rather than ‘already’ failures shouldn’t be unusual. As with other areas of life that should be common sense, we have lost our way and what should be obvious is a rediscovered secret.
Believing in potential
The implied first step Dr. Dweck made was to believe that kids who are disadvantaged and underachievers can do better. If we don’t believe more is possible, we will never see the opportunity to improve. Our local high school started with the belief that kids lacking obvious signs of AP readiness could and should try the advanced course. Other schools with a fixed mindset rule out the possibility. The consequence is that our high school has been expanding the number of sections offering AP and increasing the percentage passing. In this case, more kids are passing the AP test now than had been taking the course in the past!
This isn’t limited to schools. Too often, people are viewed like robots. Few look for someone who will need to grow to fill that need or grow beyond that need any time soon. We find someone who can do a job and stay put for years, hopefully becoming more efficient so we get more produced per dollar spent on them over time.
Encouraging a growth mindset in education
What I find exciting in what Dr. Dweck is promoting is the next step of improvement. Our school made the leap to believing more kids have potential to do well in an AP course. That belief led to identifying students with a growth mindset. What I love about Dr. Dweck’s talk is that she challenges us to take the next step and move more students to ‘not yet’ winner from ‘already’ loser.
Great teachers must do this instinctively. A teacher for one of my kids sees him as a straight A student and is helping him see himself as such even though he is ‘not yet’ there with his grades. Too often, we get mired in past grades defining us. My hope is that schools all over would embrace this philosophy of abundance, see the ‘not yet’ in students, and, finally, help students with a fixed mindset begin to see their own potential.
Business needs a growth mindset too
Business needs the growth midset just as much as our kids. Just like kids who need to be challenged to develop a growth mindset, employees who see no need to grow will be threatened by the need to change. Just getting improving efficiency job tasks won’t keep us in business when the world changes. It hasn’t worked for decades, but fails badly in today’s pace of change. When the old ways of doing things don’t work anymore, we need team members who can grow to meet challenges we can’t imagine. The irony is focus on efficiency fails to achieve long-term efficiency.
What do you think? How can we encourage those around us to have a growth mindset?
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