# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Why is it that some people seem to be hugely successful and do so much, while the vast majority of us struggle to tread water?

The answer is complicated and likely multifaceted.

One aspect is mindset-specifically, the difference between amateurs and professionals.

Most of us are just amateurs.

What's the difference? Actually, there are many differences:

Amateurs stop when they achieve something. Professionals understand that the initial achievement is just the beginning.

Amateurs have a goal. Professionals have a process.

Amateurs think they are good at everything. Professionals understand their circles of competence.

Amateurs see feedback and coaching as someone criticizing them as a person. Professionals know they have weak spots and seek out thoughtful criticism.

Amateurs value isolated performance. Think about the receiver who catches the ball once on a difficult throw. Professionals value consistency. Can I catch the ball in the same situation 9 times out of 10?

Amateurs give up at the first sign of trouble and assume they're failures. Professionals see failure as part of the path to growth and mastery.

Amateurs don't have any idea what improves the odds of achieving good outcomes. Professionals do.

Amateurs show up to practice to have fun. Professionals realize that what happens in practice happens in games.

Amateurs focus on identifying their weaknesses and improving them. Professionals focus on their strengths and on finding people who are strong where they are weak.

Amateurs think knowledge is power. Professionals pass on wisdom and advice.

Amateurs focus on being right. Professionals focus on getting the best outcome.

Amateurs focus on first-level thinking. Professionals focus on second-level thinking.

Amateurs think good outcomes are the result of their brilliance. Professionals understand when good outcomes are the result of luck.

Amateurs focus on the short term. Professionals focus on the long term.

Amateurs focus on tearing other people down. Professionals focus on making everyone better.

Amateurs make decisions in committees so there is no one person responsible if things go wrong. Professionals make decisions as individuals and accept responsibility.

Amateurs blame others. Professionals accept responsibility.

Amateurs show up inconsistently. Professionals show up every day.

Amateurs go faster. Professionals go further.

Amateurs go with the first idea that comes into their head. Professionals realize the first idea is rarely the best idea.

Amateurs think in ways that can't be invalidated. Professionals don't.

Amateurs think in absolutes. Professionals think in probabilities.

Amateurs think the probability of them having the best idea is high. Professionals know the probability of that is low.

Amateurs think reality is what they want to see. Professionals know reality is what's true.

Amateurs think disagreements are threats. Professionals see them as an opportunity to learn.

There are a host of other differences, but they can effectively be boiled down to two things: fear and reality.

Amateurs believe that the world should work the way they want it to. Professionals realize that they have to work with the world as they find it. Amateurs are scared - scared to be vulnerable and honest with themselves. Professionals feel like they are capable of handling almost anything.

Luck aside, which approach do you think is going to yield better results?

Food for Thought:

In what circumstances do you find yourself behaving like an amateur instead of as a professional?

What's holding you back? Are you hanging around people who are amateurs when you should be hanging around professionals?

Comment on Facebook | Discuss on Twitter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Why is it that some people seem to be hugely successful and do so much, while the vast majority of us struggle to tread water? The answer is complicated and likely multifaceted. One aspect is mindset-specifically, the difference between amateurs and professionals. Most of us are just amateurs. What's the difference?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
grit and resilience theme page - lifehacksforkids

# data[].attributes.headline
NYASCD - The Institute for Habits of Mind

# data[].attributes.subject
NYASCD - The Institute for Habits of Mind

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
November 3, 2017

Stay up to date with newsletters and important announcements! Please fill in your contact information below:

Padlet: What is the why for your community? ANSWER

Mentimeter: How do you want your learners to be? ANSWER

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
NYASCD - The Institute for Habits of Mind

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
NYASCD November 3, 2017 Readings: Design Challenge Reflections: How Did We Do? PL Elements and Habits of Mind Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions Fall Conference Brochure 2017 Orchestrating the Move What are the 16 Habits of Mind? The Four Attributes with Habits of Mind 16 Habits of Mind Chart Important Read More ...

# data[].attributes.headline
The Official Habits of Mind Institute Website

# data[].attributes.subject
The Official Habits of Mind Institute Website

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Click here to join the Habits of Mind Social Learning Institute where you will have free access to:

* Blogs
* Readings
* Resources
* Social networking with educators from all over the world-ask questions, share ideas, pose problems

Online Learning Paths are available with Eduplanet21.com.

Art Costa and Bena Kallick designed four Learning Paths: Introducing Habits of Mind, Activating and Engaging Habits of Mind, Journey of Continuous Learning, and Assessing Habits of Mind. Each offers brief video presentations from Costa and Kallick, activities for the classroom, and a social learning network so that everyone can learn from one another. There are specific lessons about integrating into the curriculum as well as teachers sharing their resources. It is a robust series and is called a Learning Path because it is different from a course -rather more like a book. You can begin and sequence for yourself and have the material forever, no time limit for the learning!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Official Habits of Mind Institute Website

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Click here to join the Habits of Mind Social Learning Institute where you will have free access to: * Blogs * Readings * Resources * Social networking with educators from all over the world-ask questions, share ideas, pose problems Online Learning Paths are available with Eduplanet21.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You don't have to be a cute animal to show the world how to "Be Together. Not the Same." But it definitely helps. Find out more about Android at: http://android.com.

# data[].attributes.body
2:49

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Inspirational - Team Building - Work Related uplifting

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Inspirational video that inspires a co-workers and business people to unite and work towards a common goal.

# data[].attributes.body
Nothing will change unless you change. 4:32

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nothing Will Change Unless YOU Change - Motivational Video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you want a better life than the one you currently live, one of the greatest things you could ever learn is this: NOTHING will change unless YOU CHANGE. Things will never get better until YOU decide to get better.

# data[].attributes.headline
Back to School || inspirational video - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Back to School || inspirational video - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Become A Risk Taker - MOTIVATIONAL VIDEO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Visit my website for self development content and more videos in the future: http://www.projectselfdevelopment.com/ Hope You Enjoy! Disclaimer: I do not own anything in this video. No copyright infringement intended. Music (in order of appearance) 1. Eptesicus - Hans Zimmer 2. A Watchful Guardian - Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard 3.

# data[].attributes.headline
The 4 Types of Team Members You Can Hire - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
The 4 Types of Team Members You Can Hire - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Cart - The 4 Types of Team Members You Can Hire

# data[].attributes.headline
JK Rowling Harvard Commencement Speech Part 1 - June 5 2008 - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
JK Rowling Harvard Commencement Speech Part 1 - June 5 2008 - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
JK Rowling Harvard Commencement Speech Part 1 - June 5 2008

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
JK Rowling is keynote speaker for Harvard University Commencement June 5, 2008.

# data[].attributes.headline
Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset: An Introduction - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset: An Introduction - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset:  An Introduction

# data[].attributes.headline
Dovetail Learning – Tools for Learning, Tools for Life.

# data[].attributes.subject
Dovetail Learning – Tools for Learning, Tools for Life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Building Resilience, Self-Mastery, and Empathy for Self & Others

# data[].attributes.headline
14 Resources on Teaching a Growth Mindset | ASCD Inservice

# data[].attributes.subject
14 Resources on Teaching a Growth Mindset | ASCD Inservice

# data[].attributes.headline
How To Weave Growth Mindset Into School Culture | MindShift | KQED News

# data[].attributes.subject
How To Weave Growth Mindset Into School Culture | MindShift | KQED News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"It was one of those classes where the bell rings and you don't want to leave. You want to keep discussing," Rodriguez said. "And it's what I want to do now for a career. I really love biology."

In the summer between her junior and senior year, Rodriguez even took a college-level genetics class for fun, although she found out later she'd get college credits for it.

Rodriguez may have found her growth mindset in science class, but she's applying it to all of her life. Take math, one of her least favorite subjects: "It's not my strength, but I have to get through it to get to where I want to be," Rodriguez said. "Sometimes you have to learn to love things you aren't as good at. It will be hard, but you will get through it."

Rodriguez has also taken a whole new approach to class participation. She now sees that when she participates, she's helping shape the direction of the class. She recognizes that it's hard for teenagers to speak up and risk being wrong in front of their peers -- she always worried about being judged for getting the wrong answer -- but when that brave student speaks up, it empowers everyone.

"Don't be afraid to be the first one, because you can make that change in someone else and that would be awesome," Rodriguez said.

Perhaps most importantly, the growth mindset Rodriguez has learned at Arroyo will be a big help to her when she leaves high school.

"I'm a senior, I'm going to go out into the real world soon, by myself," she said. "We're not always going to have teachers or friends or parents to depend on. And sometimes you will make mistakes on your own, and knowing how to grow from that has really helped me."
GROWING CONFIDENT STUDENTS
Rodriguez is the product of four years of messaging from her high school teachers. The Academy of Health and Medicine, a small learning community within Arroyo High, has been pioneering a focused approach to teaching growth mindset that starts with Strong Start, a summer institute that incoming ninth-graders are highly encouraged to attend.

"We'll purposefully try to put them in situations where they'll be uncomfortable, and yet not feel vulnerable -- it's a kinda fine line we walk -- and then provide opportunities for them to work their way through it and find some success," Clark said.

Students deconstruct how working through something challenging felt. Returning sophomores lead the program, many of whom the ninth-graders know from middle school, and who have already been through a year of practicing growth mindset themselves.

Students also talk about the definitions of fixed and growth mindsets and then talk through various challenges from each perspective. When the school year starts, those lessons continue in the classroom. Every teacher in the Academy of Health and Medicine has read Carol Dweck's book, "Mindset," and has discussed how to implement it in their classrooms. The school has moved to standards-based grading to emphasize that mistakes are part of learning and that understanding will come.

"It just reinforces the fact that understanding the first time you hear something isn't the goal," Clark said. "Smart isn't being right fast. It's working through things and understanding things eventually."

Clark brought the idea of growth mindset to Arroyo after a chance encounter with Dweck at a conference. The idea that intelligence grows with effort is one that comes naturally to him as a teacher because of his experiences as a basketball coach. Now, he's trying to get students to approach academics with the same dedication to practice and risk-taking that they bring to sports or other extracurriculars.

"At the end of the day we're trying to create successful kids, some of whom will grow up to do science and some of whom won't," Clark said. "But if they can take what they learn in our classrooms and apply it somewhere else, that's kind of what we're here for."

'When you believe it, they believe. If I didn't believe this, they wouldn't buy what I'm selling.' Arroyo health teacher India Rodgers

He's clear that his job is to teach science, but it's also his job to nurture the individuals he teaches.

The kids at Arroyo often have a lot of challenges outside the classroom. Many of these students will be the first in their families to go to college. Clark knows this and it makes him even more passionate about growth mindset.

"Redefining smart as something that's more effort-based than genetics-based has opened the door for kids," Clark said. "They don't feel like they're behind other kids any longer because they feel that their future is in their own hands, and if they just work through their problems they're going to be OK."
GROWING AS TEACHERS
The multiyear effort to infuse growth mindset into every class is paying off in a big way for students like Rodriguez, and in smaller ways for all students. Health teacher India Rodgers said she notices slight behavior changes in her freshmen first: Quiet but competent kids speak up more and struggling kids receive help from peers more readily.

She also knows that for some kids, the message can take awhile to penetrate. She says students have come back to her years later after having an experience that finally drove the concept home. It's also tough for some kids to transfer the idea that "it's OK to fail" to the academic subjects students find most difficult.

"It's really easy to start with my stuff, and then I try to use what they can do here and help them in other classes," Rodgers said. Students discuss a lot of life issues in her class, so she often has strong relationships with them. She uses those to help them shift their mindsets about classes like math.

She also tries hard to model a growth mindset to her students by being open about her own struggles as a parent and a teacher.

"They're not used to teachers apologizing," Rodgers said. "But I tell them I'm going to make mistakes all the time. And I think showing that helps them realize they can actually make mistakes."

When teachers and administrators say they want kids to have a growth mindset, the school environment has to back up that rhetoric. At Arroyo, the emphasis on growth mindset came alongside a shift to standards-based grading. Kids can see that mistakes along the way aren't negatively affecting them and keep working to master the concepts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How To Weave Growth Mindset Into School Culture | KQED

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Teachers at Arroyo High School are seeing how years of integrating growth mindset messages into every class have changed student attitudes about learning.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why Attitude Is More Important Than IQ | Inc.com

# data[].attributes.subject
Why Attitude Is More Important Than IQ | Inc.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When it comes to success, it's easy to think that people blessed with brains are inevitably going to leave the rest of us in the dust. But new research from Stanford University will change your mind -- and your attitude.

Psychologist Carol Dweck has spent her entire career studying attitude and performance, and her latest study shows that your attitude is a better predictor of your success than your IQ.

Dweck found that people's core attitudes fall into one of two categories: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

With a fixed mindset, you believe you are who you are and you cannot change. This creates problems when you're challenged because anything that appears to be more than you can handle is bound to make you feel hopeless and overwhelmed.

People with a growth mindset believe they can improve with effort. They outperform those with a fixed mindset, even when they have a lower IQ, because they embrace challenges, treating them as opportunities to learn something new.

Common sense would suggest that having ability, like being smart, inspires confidence. It does, but only while the going is easy. The deciding factor in life is how you handle setbacks and challenges. People with a growth mindset welcome setbacks with open arms.

According to Dweck, success in life is all about how you deal with failure. She describes the approach to failure of people with the growth mindset this way,

"Failure is information -- we label it failure, but it's more like, 'This didn't work, and I'm a problem solver, so I'll try something else.'"

Regardless of which side of the chart you fall on, you can make changes and develop a growth mindset. What follows are some strategies that will fine-tune your mindset and help you make certain it's as growth oriented as possible.

Don't stay helpless.

We all hit moments when we feel helpless. The test is how we react to that feeling. We can either learn from it and move forward or let it drag us down. There are countless successful people who would have never made it if they had succumbed to feelings of helplessness: Walt Disney was fired from the Kansas City Star because he "lacked imagination and had no good ideas"; Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job as a TV anchor in Baltimore for being "too emotionally invested in her stories"; Henry Ford had two failed car companies prior to succeeding with Ford; and Steven Spielberg was rejected by USC's Cinematic Arts School multiple times. Imagine what would have happened if any of these people had a fixed mindset. They would have succumbed to the rejection and given up hope. People with a growth mindset don't feel helpless because they know that in order to be successful, you need to be willing to fail hard and then bounce right back.

Be passionate.

Empowered people pursue their passions relentlessly. There's always going to be someone who's more naturally talented than you are, but what you lack in talent, you can make up for in passion. Empowered people's passion is what drives their unrelenting pursuit of excellence. Warren Buffet recommends finding your truest passions using, what he calls, the 5/25 technique: Write down the 25 things that you care about the most. Then, cross out the bottom 20. The remaining five are your true passions. Everything else is merely a distraction.

Take action.

It's not that people with a growth mindset are able to overcome their fears because they are braver than the rest of us; it's just that they know fear and anxiety are paralyzing emotions and the best way to overcome them is to take action. People with a growth mindset are empowered, and empowered people know there's no such thing as a truly perfect moment to move forward. So why wait for one? Taking action turns all your worry and concern about failure into positive, focused energy.

Then go the extra mile (or two).

Empowered people give it their all, even on their worst days. They're always pushing themselves to go the extra mile. One of Bruce Lee's pupils ran three miles every day with him. One day, they were about to hit the three-mile mark when Bruce said, "Let's do two more." His pupil was tired and said, "I'll die if I run two more." Bruce's response? "Then do it." His pupil became so angry that he finished the full five miles. Exhausted and furious, he confronted Bruce about his comment, and Bruce explained it this way: "Quit and you might as well be dead. If you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it'll spread over into the rest of your life. It'll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there; you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level."

If you aren't getting a little bit better each day, then you're most likely getting a little worse -- and what kind of life is that?

Expect results.

People with a growth mindset know they're going to fail from time to time, but they never let that keep them from expecting results. Expecting results keeps you motivated and feeds the cycle of empowerment. After all, if you don't think you're going to succeed, then why bother?

Be flexible.

Everyone encounters unanticipated adversity. People with an empowered, growth-oriented mindset embrace adversity as a means for improvement, as opposed to something that holds them back. When an unexpected situation challenges an empowered person, they flex until they get results.

Don't complain when things don't go your way.

Complaining is an obvious sign of a fixed mindset. A growth mindset looks for opportunity in everything, so there's no room for complaints.

Bringing it all together.

By keeping track of how you respond to the little things, you can work every day to keep yourself on the right side of the chart above.
Do you have a growth mindset? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below, as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When it comes to success, it's easy to think that people blessed with brains are inevitably going to leave the rest of us in the dust. But new research from Stanford University will change your mind -- and your attitude.

# data[].attributes.headline
Jack Kilby and the Integrated Circuit - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Jack Kilby and the Integrated Circuit - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Did you know that many of the electronic products you or your family own probably have several ICs? And many of the ICs found in these electronics were made by Texas Instruments (TI). In fact, a TI engineer made the very first working IC - also called a chip or semiconductor - on September 12, 1958.

# data[].attributes.headline
How the Königsberg bridge problem changed mathematics - Dan Van der Vieren - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
How the Königsberg bridge problem changed mathematics - Dan Van der Vieren - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Königsberg bridge problem changed mathematics - Dan Van der Vieren

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-the-konigsberg-bridge-problem-changed-mathematics-dan-van-der-vieren You'd have a hard time finding the medieval city Königsberg on any modern maps, but one particular quirk in its geography has made it one of the most famous cities in mathematics. Dan Van der Vieren explains how grappling with Königsberg's puzzling seven bridges led famous mathematician Leonhard Euler to invent a new field of mathematics.

# data[].attributes.headline
Neil deGrasse Tyson- Why Would-be Engineers End Up English Majors - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Neil deGrasse Tyson- Why Would-be Engineers End Up English Majors - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Neil deGrasse Tyson- Why Would-be Engineers End Up English Majors

# data[].attributes.headline
What makes a hero? - Matthew Winkler - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
What makes a hero? - Matthew Winkler - YouTube

# data[].attributes.headline
How Teens Benefit From Reading About the Struggles of Scientists | MindShift | KQED News

# data[].attributes.subject
How Teens Benefit From Reading About the Struggles of Scientists | MindShift | KQED News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
During the study, the students read one of three types of stories about Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Michael Faraday:

1. Intellectual struggle stories: stories about how scientists "struggled intellectually," such as making mistakes while tackling a scientific problem and learning from these setbacks.

2. Life struggle stories: stories about how scientists struggled in their personal lives, such as persevering in the face of poverty or lack of family support.

3. Achievement stories: stories about how scientists made great discoveries, without any discussion of concurrent challenges.

Researchers found that students who heard either type of "struggle story" improved their science performance post-intervention, relative to students in the control group. The effect was especially pronounced for lower-performing students, for whom "exposure to struggling stories led to significantly better science-class performance than low-performing students who read achievement stories." In addition, students who read struggle stories reported feeling more personally connected to the scientists.

Many high school students view scientific ability as a fixed trait that is not responsive to effort. As the researchers wrote: "When students struggle in science classes, they may misperceive their struggle as an indication that they are not good at science and will never succeed." By identifying a scientist's struggles and introducing the growth mindset he or she applied to accomplish great works, the students were able to empathize with the scientists during their own struggles. The researchers identified stories as a learning tool because of stories' ability to influence readers' beliefs.
Struggles in the Science Classroom
Kristen Blabac, a middle and high school science teacher at Montrose School in Medfield, Massachusetts, says that the results of this study make a lot of sense to her: "Scientists don't just wake up one day and make a great discovery. It takes years of study, research, learning from mistakes and trying again." When students hear the backstory to a discovery -- even briefly -- it can help demystify the work of scientists.

Montrose began a schoolwide emphasis on "growth mindset" three years ago, and Blabac says that the science classroom is fertile ground for teaching teens about the power of embracing setbacks. Take the scientific process: Students begin an experiment by coming up with a hypothesis. If they come to the end of the process and discover they cannot support this hypothesis, students can feel defeated. "They might think, 'Something went wrong. This is bad. I can't do science,' " says Blabac. To counteract this, she spends time helping students reframe their thinking, asking them, "Did you learn something from this process? If you did this a second time, what would you do differently?"

These are the types of questions real scientists ask themselves, says Blabac, who keeps pictures of diverse scientists around her room to help students "put a face to the discovery."

Recently, Blabac brought in several local scientists to judge the sixth-grade science fair - partly because interacting with them helps students counteract the mental image of "an elusive scientist in a sterile lab with a white lab coat." As her students pointed out, "they came in dressed like regular people," and they talked about their families, their hobbies and their interests outside of science.

One of the judges, a chemical engineer at MIT, thanked students for sharing not just their successes, but also "their mishaps, what they learned from their experiments, and what they would do next if they were continuing the work." One of those "mishaps" occurred in a group that tried to grow sugar crystals from three types of sugar. "They outlined a great plan," says Blabac, "and it didn't work at all! No sugar crystals. They could have gotten discouraged, but instead they decided to do the experiment again -- after the science fair is over. There's no grade tied to this -- they just want to figure out why their experiment didn't work."

Montrose head of school Karen Bohlin said that these experiences and stories help students reframe scientific "struggle" from a negative to a positive. When students hear about how real scientists engage in trial and error and learn from their mistakes -- and then practice this process themselves -- they begin to appreciate the importance of developing "intellectual carefulness, intellectual honesty and intellectual humility -- habits of mind essential to doing good science."

Or as Blabac tells her students, "If you only do the experiments you already know the answer to, you are not moving science forward. Scientific advancement always requires taking some risks. We can learn a lot of valuable information from 'failed' experiments."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Teens Benefit From Reading About the Struggles of Scientists

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During the study, the students read one of three types of stories about Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Michael Faraday: Intellectual struggle stories: stories about how scientists "struggled intellectually," such as making mistakes while tackling a scientific problem and learning from these setbacks.

# data[].attributes.headline
Motivational Speaker goes off after being disrespected by high schoolers. "Have You lost your mind" - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Motivational Speaker goes off after being disrespected by high schoolers. "Have You lost your mind" - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Motivational Speaker goes off after being disrespected by high schoolers. "Have You lost your mind" Eric Thomas Channel on Youtube-ETTHEHIPHOPPREACHER Eric Thomas on Instagram-ETTHEHIPHOPPREACHER Eric Thomas on Periscope-EricThomasbtc Eric Thomas on Twitter-EricThomasbtc Eric Thomas on the web-www.ETinspires.com

# data[].attributes.headline
10 Things You Need to Know to Develop a Growth Mindset

# data[].attributes.subject
10 Things You Need to Know to Develop a Growth Mindset

# data[].attributes.headline
Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back - "For my ally is the Force " (Force Theme, Yoda's Theme) - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back - "For my ally is the Force " (Force Theme, Yoda's Theme) - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Best Master Yoda Quotes | Star Wars I-VI

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back - "For my ally is the Force " (Force Theme, Yoda's Theme)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Questo video è parte di un lavoro più ampio, intitolato "John Williams, la Colonna Sonora di Star Wars: Analisi dei principali leitmotiv". I video caricati per questo progetto sono degli esempi, o tracce della colonna sonora pubblicata dalla Sony Classical o brevi estratti dei film, interessanti per l'uso del materiale musicale.

# data[].attributes.headline
The message our children need to hear but almost never do - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.subject
The message our children need to hear but almost never do - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Peter Greene, a veteran teacher of English in a small town in Pennsylvania, wrote the following post about how hard it is to be young today. The moving piece describes the "One Wrong Move" syndrome and how scared children are of making a mistake for fear of ruining their lives because that's the message that society sends them. He ends the post with a moving description of a class he once taught, what he told his students and how they reacted. This appeared on his Curmudgucation blog, and I am republishing it with permission.

By Peter Greene

Back in November, writer Hanna Rosin started a ball rolling with her Atlantic magazine cover story about the high rate of student suicides in Silicon Valley. Two high schools in Palo Alto have a 10-year suicide rate between four and five times the national average.

If students from wealthy families in one of the most affluent communities in the country are feeling driven to these sort of extremes- what the heck can that mean? And it's not just the issue of suicide. Rosin writes:

The rich middle- and high-school kids [Arizona State professor Suniya] Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm.* They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average. Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft.

Rosin pointed to huge pressure put on kids by their families, and Rebecca Rosen followed up with her piece, also at the Atlantic, " Why Affluent Professionals Put So Much Pressure on Their Kids. "

Rosen's conclusion is that affluent professionals find their own position fragile, and their ability to pass that position on to their children non-existent.

All of this results in what the economists Garey and Valerie Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, brilliantly termed " the rug rat race." As they wrote in a 2010 paper, "The increased scarcity of college slots appears to have heightened rivalry among parents, which takes the form of more hours spent on college preparatory activities." In their findings, the rug rat race takes place primarily among the most educated parents, because there simply aren't enough spots at elite schools for less-educated parents to even really have a shot, especially as the competition accelerates. It's for this reason that the most educated parents spend the most hours parenting, even though they are giving up the most in wages by doing so.

If you're looking for one of the sources of the idealization of competitiveness that has leached into public education, well, here it is:

As one soccer parent told Friedman during her research on parenting in such a competitive culture, "I think it's important for [my son] to understand that [being competitive] is not going to just apply here, it's going to apply for the rest of his life. It's going to apply when he keeps growing up and he's playing sports, when he's competing for school admissions, for a job, for the next whatever." Friedman concludes, "Such an attitude prepares children for winner-take-all settings like the school system and lucrative labor markets."

And the competition is all the more important because of the vast gap between the top tier and everyone else. The gap between the middle class and the wealthy elite is now a chasm, and by the time a child is 18, the feeling goes, his trajectory is already set. While the wealthy elite cannot pass on, say, their legal practice, they are the only people with the resources to get their children every inch of extra help available. Private lessons, personal coaching, top equipment, the best technology- only the wealthy can provide those necessary tools to land on the right side of Prosperity Gulch.

This echoes the work of Robert Putnam in "Our Kids,"in which he discusses how soft ties and social capital give wealthier children an extra edge. Wealthy parents can always pick up the phone and make a call. Wealthy parents can throw money at the problem. That ties us back to studies such as the one from John Hopkins that shows how family and neighborhood cast a long shadow over a student's future.

What Rosin and Rosen underline is just how scared and worried the wealthy are- just one wrong move and Little Pat will end up with a life that's Less, a life that's Not Good Enough. Little Pat will be a failure.

But if that's what the wealthy of Silicon Valley are thinking, what about the rest of us? Remember Richard Corey? The poem has two characters- Corey and the ordinary people who narrate- and its power doesn't just come from saying, "The rich have troubles you know nothing about." It also says, "If the most successful guy we can think of is that miserable, what hope do we have?"

And so that fear of failure, and the massive depth of what failure will mean, slowly leaches down into the whole system. It works its destructiveness in different ways. The children of Silicon Valley end up super-pressured, hammered into the shape their parents demand. But on lower levels of the economy, levels where parental units don't have access to every possible advantage, there is fear mixed with hopelessness.

For all the pressure Silicon kids feel, wealth gives them one other important advantage- the Do-Over. Putnam and the John Hopkins study both highlight this- how rich and poor kids both take drugs at similar rates, but poor kids are more likely to pay a huge price for being caught. When a rich kid screws up, dad can make some phone calls, use some connections. The poor kid is just screwed. And yet Rosen and Rosin suggest that the rich kid pays in other ways, emotionally and psychologically.

And so, in different ways, children grow up on a razor's edge, imagining a world that will destroy them the moment they make One Wrong Move, raised by families that believe it, too. I'm also reminded of the work of Jessica Lahey, the teacher-writer whose book The Gift of Failure, has touched such a nerve with so many people. It has become a radical, revolutionary idea that children need to fail, that failure is a necessary part of growth, that you do not build muscles by having your parents lift weight for you.

But, but, let them fail??!! If they fail, that might be the One Wrong Move! It might be the moment that defines their downward spiral into failure and squalor, with the child ending up living in a van by the river eating canned cat food warmed on a hot plate, alone and miserable. They can't afford to fail. They can't handle failure.

Much of the education reform movement has been a reflection of this mindset. We must set benchmarks, and we must get students to meet them because if they don't meet those benchmarks, they will be failures and the nation will fail and our national defense will be compromised and our international standing will disintegrate (and our seat at the United Nations will be moved to a van down by the East River). Everyone must be made to understand that if these third graders don't pass the super-duper Big Standardized Tests, then that is a failure of epic dimensions.

I am more and more wondering how and when America turned into a nation so deeply steeped in fear (the same terrible fear that has arguably turned Trump into a viable presidential candidate). It is harming our children. Some are raised in a bubble, repeatedly told through word and deed that they are not strong enough to face life and that all of their energy must go into building a protective shell. Some are raised out in the open, with no tools or assistance but repeated insistence that they must Grit Up and Get Tough.

Even those who get those wealthy do-overs pay, as Rosin and Rosen suggest, by a look or speech that says, "I had to pay this price for you, because you can't hack it. If someone didn't bail you out, you'd be at the bottom of the barrel somewhere because that's what you actually deserve." Some learn that they must expect failure. And all of that is before we get to those who emerge from college, untested and untoughened, walking into the world and demanding their soft, protective bubble- right now.

And all of this fearful vision of the world becomes increasingly self-fulfilling as we make the world harder and uglier and meaner. Instead of giving help where we can and lifting up people around us and designing our institutions to do the same, we let people flounder and sneer at them- "You'd better toughen up, because this is how the world works." Well, people- this is how the world works if we decide to make the world work this way!

Yes, life comes with hard, unpleasant, painful challenges built in. But that's why we have a moral imperative not to add more hurt and trouble when we can help it. This does not have to be a world in which One Wrong Move ruins your life.

Let me tell you again, those of you who don't teach- this is wearing on our children.

I know this is long, but I'm going to finish with a story. Just a couple years ago, I taught a class of juniors who were just so paralyzed with fear they couldn't do much of anything. These were honor students, the top students that my rural/small town high school had to offer. And they couldn't get past their fear-inflicted need to never do a thing unless they were sure it was right (because one way to avoid making One Wrong Move is to never move at all).

So one day, I snapped. They were breaking my heart. So I dropped the lesson, and I got personal (and understand-if you told my students that you thought I was all warm and fuzzy, they would laugh at you). I said something along the lines of, "Look, I'm going to say some things about you, and if you think I'm getting it wrong and I don't understand, just stop me."

I told them I thought they were afraid, that they were terrified that they were going to screw up and their life would be a disaster. Nobody said a word. So then I told them about some of my former students. (I have taught in the same small town for over thirty years, so I have seen pretty big sections of my student life stories.) I told them about several students who were sure they wanted to go to college for one thing and then dropped out and started over or switched schools or changed majors, and today they are living happy lives in rewarding careers. I talked about students who made terrible mistakes, like the one honor student who ended up running away from her husband with her drug dealer and ultimately serving time in prison- after which she turned her life around, found new work, fell in love, and now has a fine family and a happy life. I talked about how, when my first marriage fell apart, I thought I was done and felt as if I had failed in every way that could possibly matter, and yet it turned out that I was a lot stronger than I thought I was.

And then I told them about themselves. I told them about how they were strong and smart and capable. I told them about how they had so much talent and brains and ability and value, and that they had good hearts and good heads and that they could trust themselves. I told them that no matter how carefully they planned, it was likely that a lot of things in their lives were not going to go the way they planned or expected, but that they would handle it and sometimes those unexpected twists and turns would bring huge rewards. I told them they would find their way. I told them that I really believed in my heart that they would all turn out okay. It's going to be okay. You can handle this. It's going to be okay.

Some bowed their heads. Some just sat. And some wept.

The point of the story is that the message I felt moved to deliver- that they are strong, they are valuable, they can handle what happens next, they will be okay- that's a message our children are hearing almost never from the culture. Instead, what they hear over and over is, "You are balanced on the edge of disaster, and if you make one wrong move, you will topple over into the pit, and knowing you, you're probably going to make that one wrong move."

We have allowed our school system to be overrun with an intent to find and weed out losers, instead of a system designed to lift up every student and help each one find the strength to win. Remember drivers' ed, when your teacher told you to keep your eyes on the road and not the ditch, because you will go where your vision is focused. We need to stop focusing on failure. We need to stop devoting mental energy on the fear of the "wrong moves" and focus on the right ones.

Most importantly, we need to work for and demand a world fit for humans. No, I don't want a fuzzy world with no sharp edges in which no hard things ever happen. That's not real. But we should demand a world in which young men and women don't feel that failing a test or losing a sporting event is the figurative End of Their Life, and we should continue to demand a world in which men and women don't feel they are in danger of being shot down because someone thought they made one wrong move.

We don't need to demand a world that is all fluffy bunnies and rainbows, but it doesn't seem too much to demand a world that doesn't just grind up our children.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies- God damn it, you've got to be kind.
- Kurt Vonnegut

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The message our children need to hear but almost never do

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Teacher: "Instead of giving help where we can and lifting up people around us and designing our institutions to do the same, we let people flounder and sneer at them-- 'You'd better toughen up, because this is how the world works.' Well, people-- this is how the world works if we decide to make the world work this way!"

# data[].attributes.headline
How Peer Pressure Builds Grit | Class Hacker

# data[].attributes.subject
How Peer Pressure Builds Grit | Class Hacker

# data[].attributes.headline
Nocking The Arrow: Unlocking a Learner's Mindset?

# data[].attributes.subject
Nocking The Arrow: Unlocking a Learner's Mindset?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What do you get when you mix one part "I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn." - Albert Einstein

Carol Dweck, with one part Will Richardson, with another part George Couros? You get a concept I call the learner's mindset. What is a learner's mindset? Not only is it an inner narrative describing personal growth and fulfillment, I believe possessing a learner's mindset is a crucial element in the true transformation of schools and education.

"I am convinced that the best learning takes place when the learner takes charge."

"Innovation is not reserved for the few; it is something we will all need to embrace if we are to move forward." The Innovator's Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity

"learning a passion for learning is more important for your practical success than learning any particular facts or skills."Michael Feldstein / Will Richardson, From Master Teacher to Master Learner

"Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It's about seeing things in a new way. When people...change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework."Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

When experiences, resources, and social connections are used intentionally to advance learning, a learner's mindset grows. Learning is not a steady, upward trajectory. There are setbacks, challenges, and mistakes that make learning a roller coaster ride. A growth mindset helps us to adjust dips, rises, twists and turns. Growth mindset also serves us reminders that challenge and failure are golden opportunities to forge ahead. Beyond fostering a perspective about personal development, George Couros says that those with an innovator's mindset use development (- For educators in this innovation era, there needs to be a shift from knowing to learning. A learners first mentality creates conditions where learning goals, processes, strategies, and products provide models for student learners, so they can be more self-determined with their learning. A favorite analogy from - learning) to create new ideas and systems for learning.
"You can't teach 21st-century learners if you haven't learned this century." Gary Stager Carl Rogers suggests people are natural born learners, and somewhere between kindergarten and twelfth grade, the natural inclination to learn gets buried beneath layers of compulsory curriculum, and teacher-centered pedagogy. A learner's mindset is the embracing of inquiry, curiosity, and creativity. Optimally, folks with a learner's mindset intentionally share their learning transparently knowing this practice will fuel learning experiences for others.
"...the educator needs to understand and be able to articulate and demonstrate the process of learning, him or herself. It is a mistaken assumption that educators know how to do so. The learning process can be made overt through recording and clearly articulating the steps, procedures, and/or strategies for doing so." - Dr. Jackie Gerstein Heutagogy, when the learner assumes responsibility for their own learning, should be an attainable, if not an essential objective for modern schools. Seymour Papert illustrates this concept of learning from "master learners". "If I wanted to become a better carpenter, I'd go find a good carpenter, and I'll work with this carpenter on doing carpentry or making things. And that's how I'll get to be a better carpenter. So if I want to be a better learner, I'll go find somebody who's a good learner and with this person do some learning. But this is the opposite of what we do in our schools. We don't allow the teacher to do any learning. We don't allow the kids to have the experience of learning with the teacher because that's incompatible with the concept of the curriculum where what is being taught is what's already known." Seymour Papert

"What would schools be like if the adults in the building purposefully and explicitly lived and shared the process of being a learner?" - Scott McLeod / George Couros; The Innovator's Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity

A learner's mindset supports our personal growth narrative and is a perspective essential to truly transforming schools and education.

How does one develop a learner's mindset?

What are the practices, experiences, and conditions that support a learners first mentality?

References and Resources

photo credit: Floating Around in the Wind via photopin (license)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What do you get when you mix one part "I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn." - Albert Einstein Carol Dweck, with one part Will Richardson, with another part George Couros? You get a concept I call the learner's mindset .

# data[].attributes.headline
Beyond Growth Mindset: Creating Classroom Opportunities for Meaningful Struggle - Education Week Teacher

# data[].attributes.subject
Beyond Growth Mindset: Creating Classroom Opportunities for Meaningful Struggle - Education Week Teacher

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
First Person

Growing interest in teaching "grit" or "growth mindset" is a hopeful sign. It reflects an increasing awareness that richer, deeper learning can flow from having students struggle with a challenging task and persisting until completion.

But with this hopeful sign comes the risk of an ends-means reversal, a common misapplication of many good ideas. Consider cooperative learning, for example. Cooperative learning was intended, as growth mindset is now, to be a means to deeper, richer learning. But too often it became the end itself. In many classrooms, students have learned to be better "cooperators" but often without any distinct benefit for deeper learning. To avoid a similar fate with growth mindset, the instructional goals must be richer-learning, not just struggle.

Seventy-five years of research documents that learning is enhanced when students persist until successful-through perplexity, dilemma, and struggle. This "struggle effect" appears even in studies of conceptual teaching and learning when investigators were not looking for it.

This result wouldn't surprise the philosopher and education reformer John Dewey. In 1910, Dewey described learning as beginning with a dilemma-an uncertainty about how to proceed. Struggling to work through uncertainty and ambiguity to discover a solution was, for Dewey, essential to meaningful learning.

Struggling and persisting in the face of uncertainty is finding its way back into prescriptions for good classroom practice. Advocates for meaningful struggle recommend that teachers avoid telling students how to solve problems. Instead, teachers are urged to allow students to wrestle with a problem and try to solve it themselves.

Capturing Key Ideas

Evidence suggests that significant learning benefits result when students are allowed to do some of this hard work on their own and struggle with ideas they do not quite yet understand. Benefits are gleaned when the lesson goal is helping students deepen understanding and learning of important concepts or problems. Struggle is most useful when it helps students grasp and retain key lesson ideas, the ones with the most payoff in comprehension and understanding

For example, suppose the goal of a 4th grade lesson is introducing the concept of adding fractions with unlike denominators. Students already know how to add fractions with common denominators, such as 2/5 + 1/5. One question teachers might typically pose in the new lesson is, "Can you find a common denominator for the problem 1/2 + 1/3 = ? "

But this question does not get at the key idea for the lesson-recognizing that units or wholes must be broken into same-size parts to calculate an exact answer to the problem. Finding common denominators can eventually be part of a procedure for finding the size of these parts, but finding common denominators at this point does not call students' attention to the key idea.

A better question to start the lesson is this: "Can you find how much juice we would have if we added 1/2 cup of juice and 1/3 cup of juice? Show how you found the answer by drawing a picture or writing how you thought about the problem." This question provides students with an opportunity to struggle with the key idea they need to understand-how to divide a cup of juice into smaller, equal amounts, so you can find an exact total amount for 1/2 + 1/3.

Asking students to persist or struggle with classroom tasks can yield big benefits for deeper learning. But struggle is only productive when students engage with a task that captures the central idea of a lesson.

Struggle vs. Frustration

Engaging students in productive struggle is a challenge for teachers as well as the students. It takes time, persistence, and some experimenting to plan rich learning opportunities that challenge but don't frustrate students. Activities need to stretch students' thinking and performance just beyond the level they can do on their own-the zone of proximal development, or ZPDs, some call it.

Struggle works and does not frustrate when students have the knowledge and tools to tackle novel problems-ones they've not seen before, and are just beyond what they've already learned and mastered. In mathematics, that might mean a problem that can be solved by applying concepts learned in previous weeks-for example, the principle described earlier that finding exact answers when adding (or subtracting) fractions requires amounts to be divided into same-size parts. Designing challenging tasks that do not frustrate students but require just enough stretch takes refined and continuing teacher assessment and judgment.

Another crucial teaching role in productive struggle lessons is providing timely assistance. When a challenging task opens a productive-struggle zone, the teacher's judgment is again critical. Success depends on teachers recognizing when a little timely assistance sustains student persistence but does not prematurely terminate productive struggle and learning.

Getting the right balance can be difficult. For teachers accustomed to avoiding student struggles, there is temptation to intervene and help students get the right answers. To do so runs the risk of turning the activity into the classic recitation-style lesson-turning students into passive receivers of knowledge and teachers into "tellers."

For teachers who are adopting a new emphasis on grit and growth mindset, the other extreme can be equally problematic-urging students to persist with a task that is well beyond their ZPD, without necessary tools to meaningfully tackle the challenge.

Ear Training

John Dewey was asked what he meant when he advocated that teachers should not "tell students what to do." Puzzled that he had been interpreted this way, he said teachers could tell students all they wanted to tell-but they should be aware students would only hear what they have been prepared to hear. Struggling, or persistence, for Dewey, was (among other things) a way of preparing children to hear. Educators would do well to adopt this rule of thumb for how and when to engage students in struggle-that is, when you're preparing them to hear something really important. This places meaningful parameters on what students should struggle with and when teachers should encourage it.

Creating opportunities for meaningful struggle in the classroom that truly enrich student learning involves several key elements:

Determine timing and placement for productive struggle within the unit or curriculum-lessons that are "preparing students to hear something really important."

Align struggle activities with clear, specific learning goals.

Design struggle tasks based on assessment of students' prior knowledge and skills.

Foster a safe environment that encourages student inquiry and exploration of important ideas.

Use probing questions to solicit student thinking and provide strategic assistance to nudge students through their ZPDs.

Follow-up each struggle episode with carefully structured lessons that build on students' ideas, address misconceptions, and help students forge new understandings.

Assist students to reflect and articulate what they learned as a result of productive persistence.

Valuable student growth and learning won't come from struggle alone. There is little purpose in persistence that yields no tangible benefits in increased knowledge, understanding, or skill. But giving students an opportunity to struggle through a difficult problem with a clear learning goal in mind, combined with just enough stretch and strategic assistance, students can develop lasting connections about important ideas, increased capacity for productive struggle, and durable skills for solving novel problems in life.

Web Only

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
Back to Top

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Brad Ermeling, James Hiebert, and Ron Gallimore

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Beyond Growth Mindset: Creating Classroom Opportunities for Meaningful Struggle

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
First Person Growing interest in teaching "grit" or "growth mindset" is a hopeful sign. It reflects an increasing awareness that richer, deeper learning can flow from having students struggle with a challenging task and persisting until completion. But with this hopeful sign comes the risk of an ends-means reversal, a common misapplication of many good ideas.

# data[].attributes.headline
Positive Mindset May Prime Students' Brains for Math - Education Week

# data[].attributes.subject
Positive Mindset May Prime Students' Brains for Math - Education Week

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Scans provide support for theory

Having a positive mindset in math may do more than just help students feel more confident about their skills and more willing to keep trying when they fail; it may prime their brains to think better.

In an ongoing series of experiments at Stanford University, neuroscientists have found more efficient brain activity during math thinking in students with a positive mindset about math.

It's part of a growing effort to map the biological underpinnings of what educators call a positive or growth mindset, in which a student believes intelligence or other skills can be improved with training and practice, rather than being fixed and inherent traits.

"Our findings provide strong evidence that a positive mindset contributes to children's math competence," said Lang Chen, a Stanford University postdoctoral fellow in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. "Beyond the emotional or even motivational story of 'positive mindset,' there may be cognitive functions supporting the story."

Seeing a Mind in the Brain

In a forthcoming study previewed at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago in October, Chen and colleagues tested 243 children ages 7 to 9 for intelligence, numerical problem-solving and math reasoning in word problems, reading ability, working memory, and math-anxiety levels. Chen also gave the students a survey designed to identify positive-mindset levels in math, such as questions about how much they enjoyed solving challenging problems and how competent they felt in learning math.

The researchers focused on math because other studies have found that a student's mindset can be different for different domains-he or she could believe that reading ability can be improved but that skill at soccer is innate, for example-and math is a subject often associated with a fixed mindset.

Of the children in the study, 47 were asked to either stare at a fixed point or identify whether a series of addition problems were correct while being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, a noninvasive method of identifying brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow in the brain.

Chen and his colleagues found that students with higher positive-mindset levels in math were more accurate at identifying correct and incorrect math problems, even after controlling for differences in IQ, age, working memory, reading ability, and math anxiety.

A lower positive-mindset level was likewise associated with lower math performance.

"This is very, very exciting," said Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who first coined the terms "growth" and "fixed" mindsets, but who was not involved with Chen's study. "We've typically asked how does [mindset] affect students' willingness to take on challenges and their ability to stick to that challenge when they hit setbacks. This opens up a whole new area, which is getting ready to solve a problem.

"My hunch is that often in the fixed mindset, your mind is preoccupied with 'Is this hard?' 'Will I look smart?' 'What will happen if I don't do this?' 'I'm not good at math,' instead of getting that brain ready to do it," Dweck said.

Mapping the Links

Students with high positive-mindset levels had generally greater brain activity in a number of areas of the brain associated with math problem-solving: the hippocampus, the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the left supplementary motor area, the right lingual gyrus, and the dorsal cerebellum. In particular, the researchers found faster, smoother connections, called "upregulation" between the hippocampus-an area often associated with the ability to quickly remember math facts and processes-and the other brain areas associated with math problem-solving.

Imagine starting your car on a frosty morning. If you warm up the engine a bit before starting out, the car is primed to work better. And if you've just tuned up your engine, it is able to run more efficiently.

Chen's findings suggest a positive mindset could be giving the brain a similar double boost: "Overall, there is an upregulation of the general cognitive network involving memory, spatial processing, and cognitive control supporting math cognition," he said. "Then, specifically, one of the interesting components is the hippocampal region, which shows a very specific effect for memory retrieval for problem-solving. If we want to solve 3+4=7, there are several different ways to solve it, but the hippocampus plays a role in retrieval rate in solving arithmetic problems. It's one of the cognitive-core hallmarks for efficient problem-solving for math in children." The more positive the mindset, the higher the activation and upregulation researchers saw in those areas and the better students performed on the math problems.

Echoes of Other Studies

Dweck said that pattern aligns with separate findings by Bruce McCandliss, a Stanford education professor not associated with Chen's study, who found differences in the brains of people who perform better at solving math problems, but had not looked at whether those differences were related to mindset.

"For certain people when they get ready to solve a problem, their brains are in a ready, prepared state," Dweck said. "It's as though they've prepared what they are going to need and gotten it all online."

Chen's study is one of the first to look at the potential benefits of positive-mindset levels on cognitive processing generally, but there is already mounting evidence that a growth mindset can improve the emotional and motivational supports for learning.

For example, studies have found that students with high growth-mindset levels are less likely to suffer from performance anxiety or stereotype threats, and more likely to learn from-but not obsess over-their mistakes. A 2011 study by Jason Moser, a neuropsychologist at Michigan State University, found people with a high growth mindset were more likely to show conscious attention to mistakes and learn from them more quickly.

"A lot of researchers, cognitive scientists, have traditionally thought of motivation as something very separate from intellectual performance or ability," Dweck said, but as a broader group of researchers from neuroscience, education, and psychology have started working together, "we are finding the brain doesn't separate these things. The way we have modularized the human mind will not hold up."

Thinking and Emotion

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, an associate professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, who studies how emotions contribute to learning, agreed.

"The emotion and thought structures in the brain are totally entwined, totally docked in the brain," she said. She has found the cognitive habits often associated with a fixed mindset-like focusing on grades or considering errors a threat to your identity-can make the brain react emotionally to the wrong things during learning.

"If you are trying to do math and worrying about whether you are going to fail or not, rather than the process of doing math, ... that is not deep learning," she said.

Chen and his colleagues are in the middle of a larger, longitudinal study tracking how 60 students' attitudes and underlying brain activity change as they grow from age 7 to 12. The researchers are trying to identify differences in students' mindsets and performance if they started out performing generally well or poorly in math.

Separately, the researchers are also working with Jo Boaler, a Stanford math education professor and a co-founder of Youcubed, an intervention to improve growth-mindset levels in math.

"Mindset can change quite a lot across age and grade level, so we really want to see how that change can relate to different brain functions and different math achievement," Chen said. "We want to look at the unique contributions of positive mindset to math achievement and development."

Published in Print: December 9, 2015, as In Math, Positive Mindset May Prime Students' Brains

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
Back to Top

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Positive Mindset May Prime Students' Brains for Math

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Having a positive mindset in math may do more than just help students feel more confident about their skills and more willing to keep trying when they fail; it may prime their brains to think better. In an ongoing series of experiments at Stanford University, neuroscientists have found more efficient brain activity during math thinking in students with a positive mindset about math.

# data[].attributes.headline
Professor Carol Dweck 'Teaching a growth mindset' at Young Minds 2013 - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Professor Carol Dweck 'Teaching a growth mindset' at Young Minds 2013 - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Professor Carol Dweck 'Teaching a growth mindset' at Young Minds 2013

# data[].attributes.headline
6 ways to teach growth mindset from day one of school | The Cornerstone

# data[].attributes.subject
6 ways to teach growth mindset from day one of school | The Cornerstone

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Angela is a National Board Certified Teacher with 8 years experience as a K-12 instructional coach and 11 years experience in the classroom. As founder of Due Season Press and Educational Services, she has created printable curriculum resources, online courses, 4 books, the Truth for Teachers podcast, and the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Club.

# data[].attributes.headline
Watch "The Power of Belief - Mindset and Success: Eduardo Briceno at TEDxManhattanBeach" Video at TEDxTalks

# data[].attributes.subject
Watch "The Power of Belief - Mindset and Success: Eduardo Briceno at TEDxManhattanBeach" Video at TEDxTalks

# data[].attributes.headline
Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit | TED Talk | TED.com

# data[].attributes.subject
Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit | TED Talk | TED.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn't the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of "grit" as a predictor of success.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ashton Kutcher Speech - Teen Choice Awards (HQ) - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Ashton Kutcher Speech - Teen Choice Awards (HQ) - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ashton Kutcher Speech - Teen Choice Awards (HQ)

# data[].attributes.headline
Never Say Can't - Jennifer Bricker - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Never Say Can't - Jennifer Bricker - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jennifer Bricker was always told to never say 'Can't' Which is why after watching her idol performing gymnastic moves she refused to admit she couldn't do the same. Is that because of nature or nurture though???