Inculcating Growth Mindset in the classroom.

A concept that is starting to become more and more popular in the world of education is the idea of Growth Mindset. This concept has been deeply developed by the Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, who describes Growth Mindset as a mentality that approaches life as an opportunity to embrace challenges and failure as opportunities to learn and improve one’s abilities and talents. Dweck explains this mentality as the opposite of a Fixed Mindset, that consists on believing that one’s abilities are innate (and they can not be developed), the rejection to challenges because of a possible failure can happen, and the affirmation of thinking that every failure indicates the lack of intelligence and abilities.

This concept directly applies to education, in which there are plenty of situations that imply failure, and possible frustrations among students. Therefore, it is needless to say the importance of having teachers that inculcate the culture of growth mindset in the students, in order to strengthen the students’ self-esteem, learning, and approach to challenges and life in general. It is the teacher’s responsibility of making the students aware of the effect that effort, good attitude, and perseverance can create on their abilities and how these can be developed when adopting this mindset.

There are different strategies that teachers can follow when trying to generate growth mindset among the students. Dweck points out one of them, consisting in the way educators provide feedback to the students; instead of labeling the students by “capable” or “not capable” it is important to educate using the power of yet; that consists in not limiting the abilities of the student by saying that he or she is not able to do something, but saying that maybe is not able to do it just yet. By doing this, the educators are opening a door to plenty of development opportunities, and inviting the student to acquire a growth mindset. On the opposite side, it can happen that students (and also professors), decide to adopt the mindset of what Dweck calls the tyranny of now; consisting in the obsession for the results, grades, qualifications, or labels, instead of dreaming big and embracing challenges that imply great opportunities for development. It is important that teachers educate the students in the yet, and not in the now.

This teaching philosophy would not be able to be applied, if the teachers responsible for the education of the students did not believe in this mentality and followed it themselves. Teachers will only be able to truly inculcate this philosophy in the students, if applying growth mindset to their professional development through modeling. Educators that have this mentality, see themselves as lifelong learners, and see on each of their students an opportunity to learn, and on each of the lessons, an opportunity to improve and offer an even better education to the students on the next class.