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Educating Yorkshire - Mushy Finds His Voice - Full Video HD

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Michael Jordan 'Maybe It's My Fault' Commercial

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What’s Your Learning Disposition? How to Foster Students’ Mindsets | MindShift - Linkis.com

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What’s Your Learning Disposition? How to Foster Students’ Mindsets | MindShift - Linkis.com

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What's Your Learning Disposition? How to Foster Students' Mindsets | GROWTH MINDSET... - Linkis.com

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Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck's work on growth mindsets has dominated much of the attention around how students can influence their own learning. But t

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Teaching students that intelligence can grow and blossom with effort - rather than being a fixed trait they're just born with - is gaining traction in progressive education circles. And new research from Stanford is helping to build the case that nurturing a " growth mindset " can help many kids understand their true potential.

The new research involves larger, more rigorous field trials that provide some of the first evidence that the social psychology strategy can be effective when implemented in schools on a wide scale. Even a one-time, 30-minute online intervention can spur academic gains for many students, particularly those with poor grades. The premise is that these positive effects can stick over years, leading for example to higher graduation rates; but long-term data is still needed to confirm that.

Earlier, well-designed tests of simple and relatively inexpensive growth-mindset interventions had surprisingly shown improvements in students' grades over weeks or months. For instance, promising results from one famous experiment - an eight-session workshop in 91 seventh graders in a New York City school - led psychology researchers Carol Dweck and Lisa Blackwell to start up Mindset Works, a company that offers a computer-based program called Brainology.

However, all the original intervention studies were small and left some educators and policymakers unconvinced. "Some folks, I think, are skeptical just because the effects are big and because they come from something that's so small," said Stanford behavioral scientist David Paunesku. "And I think it's fair that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." There were doubts, too, whether the classroom-based growth-mindset techniques would work if broadly put into practice without intensive training or supervision from the experts who developed them.

"There's so much more good that could come if we could effectively communicate to teachers and train teachers how to do this in day-to-day classroom practices."

To address those issues, Dweck, Paunesku and associates started the Stanford Project for Education Research That Scales(PERTS) with the goal of conducting large-scale randomized, controlled trials of distilled mindset interventions that were briefer and could be easily delivered by internet. The program, which is directed by Paunesku, collaborates with schools in testing various experimental psychology strategies for shifting the ways students think about their education, so as to motivate them to work hard.

A Light Touch Leads to Meaningful Change

In one intervention trial that was part of his Ph.D. dissertation, Paunesku worked with colleagues to enlist 1,594 students at 13 U.S. high schools, including 519 under-performing teens with the lowest GPAs. In spring semester 2012, the kids all logged online for a 30-minute, no-frills slideshow presentation (which they were only told was part of a general study of how and why students learn).

Half the group watched a lesson explaining the basic anatomy of the brain, but the other half received a growth-mindset "treatment": They read an article that described scientific research findings about the brain's malleability and explained that, just as people can get stronger by working out their muscles, anyone who works out their brain through learning can get smarter. The presentation also noted it could be helpful to try different studying strategies. Then, the teens were asked to summarize what they'd learned by composing a note of advice to a hypothetical struggling student.

For example, as one student wrote, "The more you practice or study the more you learn. Your brain has neurons inside that grow whenever you learn something new. Even though you may struggle in a certain subject the neurons in your brain are making new connections and your brain is getting stronger and smarter. ... Struggling in school is absolutely normal and we may feel and call ourselves 'dumb' during these times. If you practice using better ways to study and learn you will get smarter and might struggle less."

By the end of spring term, encouraging changes were afoot, particularly in the students struggling with low GPAs: the proportion who earned satisfactory grades rose to 49 percent from 43 percent the previous semester, a relative gain of 14 percent. Students in the control condition, however, showed a slight downward slide. A 14 percent improvement might not sound like much, but it represents that many more kids who lifted themselves above poor or failing grades, Paunesku said. "Hopefully, that will put these kids on a different trajectory where they would be more likely to actually graduate high school," he said. Students who don't perform well early in the school year usually end up doing worse and worse and are at risk for dropping out.

Fostering other kinds of academic mindsets may help as well. The same study also tested a "sense-of-purpose" psychology intervention (in a separate 30-minute online session) designed to get the teens to link their schoolwork to a meaningful broader purpose - such as preparing for future goals that "make a positive impact on the world." That motivational strategy was roughly as effective as the growth-mindset training, Paunesku said. (Combining the two didn't add up to a bigger benefit.)

"The hypothesis would then be that later on, when the students take the AP classes or when they just encounter a more challenging concept or when they go off to college, that having these more adaptive academic mindsets will serve them well," he said. To determine whether that's true, the PERTS researchers would have to track the high schoolers' performance over longer time-frames; for instance, they'll be doing two-year follow-ups in some other growth-mindset studies targeting community college students. But such longitudinal work is difficult and costly.

Other not-yet-published, large-scale trials from PERTS and affiliated researchers such as University of Texas (UT) psychologist David Yeager are likewise finding modest boosts in achievement from growth-mindset messages tailored to other learners - ranging from students doing Khan Academy math problems online (who were exposed to single sentences such as, "If you make a mistake, it's an opportunity to get smarter!") to incoming UT Austin freshmen who log into a 30-minute online intervention.

Bringing Growth Mindsets into Schools

Designing online interventions that are quick is critical for wide-scale testing and uptake, Paunesku said, because schools might be hesitant to relinquish class time for them. The PERTS growth-mindset session is much shorter than Mindset Works' Brainology curriculum for middle students, which entails weekly lessons over five to 16 weeks and costs $20 per student for a group of 20 or more. Paunesku and his colleagues are now updating their no-frills interventions with a higher production quality and more engaging content. If further research confirms effectiveness and enough funding support is available, they'd like to make the materials freely accessible to schools, he said.

But Paunesku cautions that "academic mindset interventions are not magic bullets." There may be many reasons why half of the low-performing kids who received the growth-mindset lesson still failed to earn satisfactory grades. Some may not have found the online presentation persuasive enough, he said, if they grew up repeatedly hearing "fixed"-mindset attitudes - such as, "some people are just bad at math" - from parents and peers. And even if students adopt a more adaptive mindset, other obstacles may still loom: A child might have trouble focusing in class because he's hungry or anxious about being bullied, or he may not get enough support from his parents with homework.

"Some folks, I think, are skeptical just because the effects are big and because they come from something that's so small ... and I think it's fair that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Paunesku's high school study is valuable in showing how small changes can have a surprising impact, similar to effects seen in other previous studies of brief growth-mindset messages, said Blackwell, vice president at Mindset Works (which also collaborates with PERTS). However, not only is it not yet known how well the positive impacts of growth-mindset interventions are sustained in the longer term as students encounter more significant challenges and failures in the real world, she notes, but none of the methods work for everybody or do anything to change the classroom contexts in which kids learn.

That is why, Blackwell said, rather than approaching mindsets "solely as an isolated belief within an individual's psychology," Mindset Works has broadened its focus to "changing school and classroom cultures and providing individuals with the tools and strategies to sustain a growth mindset over time." The company rolled out an educator toolkit in 2012 to guide teachers and administrators in cultivating a growth mindset throughout a school.

Paunesku agrees that changing school culture is likely to be fruitful. To complement its half-hour online student interventions, PERTS plans to release an open set of growth-mindset professional development materials, starting with math teachers next year. "There's so much more good that could come if we could effectively communicate to teachers and train teachers how to do this in day-to-day classroom practices," he says.

Experimenting in the Trenches

For many teachers, the growth-mindset philosophy is appealing because it makes intuitive sense. At Cobleskill-Richmondville High School in rural upstate New York, assistant principal Casey Bardin has informally experimented with various academic mindset strategies inspired by work at Stanford, including tactics to bolster a sense of social belonging in disadvantaged students.

Last fall, he held one-on-one "goals meetings" with 70 pupils who were flunking three or more classes. Most lacked a support system at school, with no one to relate to there, he said. Bardin offered encouragement by explaining that intelligence grows with hard effort, and then suggested trying different studying tactics. One kid - an African-American in a predominantly white school - was failing math and four other subjects. After Bardin connected him with a senior who could help him with math, the two teens worked together in study hall every day. By spring, the African-American student was passing all his classes.

Similarly, 29 other under-performing students improved their grades after four weeks, with more than half of them no longer failing any courses. By May, 40 of the 70 had pulled up their academic standing. "I was very excited," Bardin said of the experiment. He now hopes to get buy-in from teachers and other administrators at the high school to expand that work and, down the road, possibly adopt Mindset Works programming, tough budget constraints permitting. Cobleskill-Richmondville High plans to participate in a PERTS research trial next academic year.

- Via MindShift
This article appeared on MindShift on July 16 2014 and was written by Ingfei Chen. About Ingfei Chen
Ingfei Chen is a freelance writer in Northern California whose work has appeared in Scientific American, the New York Times and Smithsonian.

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New Research: Students Benefit from Learning That Intelligence Is Not Fixed

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Teaching students that intelligence can grow and blossom with effort - rather than being a fixed trait they're just born with - is gaining traction in progressive education circles. And new research from Stanford is helping to build the case that nurturing a "growth mindset" can help many kids understand their true potential.

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malcolm mitchell (american football player)

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georgia bulldogs football team (american football team)

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UGA Football: Malcolm Mitchell Book Club: 2014

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A chance encounter in a local bookstore led to junior wide receiver Malcolm Mitchell joining a group of Athens women for a monthly book club.

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Activities and Assignments linked to videos

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WKCD has assembled five short videos that provide a lively introduction to growth mindset and why it matters, for students as well as teachers.

Professor Carol Dweck outlines her block experiments with children

Actor Will Smith tells talk show hosts about his fierce work ethic

Mindworks CEO Eduardo Briceño gives a fast-paced overview in a TEDxTalk

Musician Derek Sivers offers up a humorous and convincing case for failure

Six high school students talk about potential and pushing their limits

At the end of each video we offer suggestions for activities and assignments, for use by teachers (as part of a professional development workshop) and by students (as part of their classroom learning).

We encourage you to browse through the presentation and pick those videos that work for your situation and audience—and to amend the suggested activities and assignment as you see fit.

For those who want to dig deeper, here are several popular books and websites.

Reading

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How. (2009)

Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Technology of Success (2006)

Carol Dweck, "Even Geniuses Work Hard," Educational Leadership (September 2010)

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (2008)

Websites
Larry Ferlazzo's Best Resources on Helping Students Develop a "Growth Mindset"
Mindset Works, including The Brainology Program (Carol Dweck and Lisa Blackwell)

About Mindset

The concept of "mindset" has gained increasing attention since Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck introduced it in her 2007 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Those with a "fixed" mindset believe that people's intelligence and abilities are static and outside their control-the widely accepted theory of cognitive development through the 1960s. In contrast, those with a "growth mindset" know that intelligence is dynamic. As neuroscience has now decisively shown, the brain does change based on one's experiences and efforts.

Regardless of the research, all of us develop beliefs about our own intelligence, beginning in childhood. Some children worry that they don't have enough. Others grow up thinking that they can do anything if they just work hard at it.

These beliefs make a big difference in how children do in school, research shows. Even students who consider themselves "gifted" often avoid challenge, for fear they might lose status if they fail. But when we teach youth that intelligence is malleable, they more readily take on challenges, persist through difficulties, and experience intellectual growth. (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007)

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WKCD has assembled five short videos that provide a lively introduction to growth mindset and why it matters, for students as well as teachers.

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Another Bacon post on perseverance and the challenges of teaching

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Another Bacon post on perseverance and the challenges of teaching

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Making change happen...a hard row to hoe.

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Change is hard to affect. I believe the preferred term is "challenging" but I do mean hard. At this time of year there appears to be an epidemic of students who just want to give up. They want to d...

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Where it started...

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Mindset Website John Hattie and Carol Dweck

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Mindset Website John Hattie and Carol Dweck

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This speech was my inspiration when I returned to school to complete my post graduate diploma

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JK Rowling speech at Harvard 2008 commencement "The Fringe Benefits of Failure"

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JK Rowling speech at Harvard 2008 commencement "The Fringe Benefits of Failure" https://youtu.be/qmyKidgR--8 British Harry Potter author JK Rowling 2008 Harvard commencement speech, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure" in which she takes us on a journey through her past situation, desperation, and how failing helps one get rid the superflous to focus on fulfilling one's dreams! Subscribe to our "Historic Speeches" playlist http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8qI0uXwsdWB7L79LL2nKR7d3YDvK44gt

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The skill of self confidence | Dr. Ivan Joseph | TEDxRyersonU

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The Power of Resilience: Learning and the Brain

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The Power of Resilience: Learning and the Brain

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The Power of Resilience: Sam Goldstein, Ph.D. at TEDxRockCreekPark

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Fostering strength, hope and optimism in our children. If Beaver, of the 1950's television sitcom Leave it to Beaver, were a student today, he might not be doing so well.

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How to make stress your friend: Learning and the brain

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How to make stress your friend: Learning and the brain

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Kelly McGonigal: How to make stress your friend

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Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case.

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By the second week of January, that resolution that once seemed so reasonable - go to the gym every other day, read a book a week, only drink alcohol on weekends - is starting to seem very ... hard. As you are teetering on the edge of abandoning it all together, Kelly McGonigal is here to help. This Stanford University psychologist - who shared last year how you can make stress your friend - wants you to know that you're not having a hard time sticking to a resolution because you are a terrible person. Perhaps you've just formulated the wrong resolution.

McGonigal has, for years, taught a course called "The Science of Willpower" through Stanford's Continuing Studies program and, in 2011, she spun it into a book, The Willpower Instinct. The TED Blog spoke to McGonigal this week about how willpower is often misunderstood, and what we each can do to improve it. (We also asked her about the talk Why dieting doesn't usually work.) Below, an edited transcript of the conversation.
So, why is willpower such a struggle?
It's a great question. I define willpower as the ability to do what matters most, even when it's difficult or when some part of you doesn't want to. That begins to capture why it's so difficult - because everything we think of as requiring willpower is usually a competition between two conflicting selves. There's a part of you who is looking to the long-term and thinking about certain goals, and then another part of you that has a completely different agenda and wants to maximize current pleasure and minimize current stress, pain and discomfort. The things that require willpower pit those competing selves against each other. Willpower is the ability to align yourself with the brain system that is thinking about long-term goals - that is thinking about big values rather than short-term needs or desires.

The reason that so many things can trigger that kind of conflict is because that's the essence of human nature. Modern cognitive neuroscientists see this as the fundamental structure of the human brain - that there are competing systems that think about the world differently and that respond to challenges differently. I think of it as: the immediate self versus the future self. We need both systems for survival. But a lot of our modern challenges really tempt us to be in the mind-state of immediate gratification, or escaping immediate discomfort. It can be quite a challenge to access the part of you who is willing to take that big picture and tolerate temporary discomfort.
So, given this idea of two competing selves who want different things, how effective are New Year's resolutions for tapping into the ability to think long-term?
I think it depends on how you go about making your New Year's resolution. Typically, when people are making a New Year's resolution, they don't start with the right questions, so they end up making a resolution that is ineffective. Most people start with the question: "What should I do?" It may not even be a conscious, implicit kind of thing, but they start from: "What do I criticize about myself that it's time to change?" Or "what is it that I don't really want to do that I know I should do?" It's kind of a typical self-improvement perspective. "I don't really like exercise, I guess I should do it." Or "my closet is a mess, it's time to get organized." "I've never had a clean desk in my life, but I think that good people have clean desks, so this is the year I'm going to have one."

People come up with resolutions that don't reflect what matters most to them, and that makes them almost guaranteed to fail. Even if that behavior could be very valuable and helpful - like exercise - if you start from the point of view of thinking about what it is you don't really want to do, it's very hard to tap into willpower. If there's no really important "want" driving it, the brain system of self-control has nothing to hold on to.

The kind of New Year's resolution that works is when you start really slowing down and asking yourself what you want for yourself and your life in the next year. What is it that you want to offer the world? Who do you want to be, what do you want more of in your life? And then asking: "How might I get there? What would create that as a consequence?" When you start from that point of view, then New Year's resolutions can be incredibly effective. They begin to turn your attention to choice points in your everyday life where there really are opportunities to align your energy and attention in the direction that matters to you. I think most people start from the choice points, without wondering whether this is even the right thing to be choosing. People get to the behaviors too soon, in my opinion.
Any tips for how to find those big things and then narrow them down to specific resolutions?
A very practical way is to ask: At the end of 2014 - on January 1st, 2015, looking backwards - what are you seriously going to be grateful that you did? Is there a change you know that you're going to be glad you made? What would that feel like? That can tap into something that feels really authentic.

I was just doing a radio interview at one of the NPR stations in New York, and I was chatting with the studio producer. I asked her if she had any New Year's resolutions, and she's like, "Oh yeah - to stay fit." She sounded so not enthusiastic. Then after a few seconds of silence, she said, "I'm kind of thinking about finding a way to play the piano again." She was lighting up a little more. "It used to be so important to me, and I really miss it. It's like my soul wants to play the piano again, and it would be giving it back to my soul." And I'm like, "That's your resolution! What is this getting fit stuff?"

By the way, you can spend the first week [of the year] looking around. One year my resolution was to focus on being a better mentor, and to look for ways in every professional relationship to do that. You start looking around, and you see every conversation as an opportunity to choose that value and move toward that goal. Just spend a week saying, "If what matters is improving my health, if what matters is spending more time with my family, if what matters is reconnecting to creativity, what choices do I make every day that either could get me closer to that?"
So on those things you feel like you should be doing - the going to the gym or the quitting smoking - is there a way to build your willpower towards those things?
One of the things I always encourage people to do is to not try to do things alone, and to start outsourcing their willpower a little bit. If it's exercising, you should be doing it with a family member, a friend, a co-worker. Or sign up for a series of classes after work. Because then, it's like a bigger pool of possible willpower. If you're exhausted after work, and you normally would say, "Screw it, I'm going home," if there's somebody who is going to meet you in your office, and say, "Hey, aren't we going for a walk now?," it doesn't matter if you feel like it in that moment. There's going to be a bigger pool of motivation that will support you through when you're feeling most exhausted or least motivated.

Another thing I encourage people to do is - if there's a behavior that they put off or don't do because of anxiety or self-doubt or because it's boring or uncomfortable - bribe yourself. If you hate exercise but truly, truly want the consequences of exercising, you should give yourself permission to do whatever you don't want to let yourself do - like read trashy gossip magazines, or download a whole series of a TV show that you can plop on in front of you on the treadmill. As long as it doesn't conflict with your goal, then you should go ahead and pair the thing you don't want to do with a reward that you might otherwise not give yourself permission for. That can be very effective for beginning to prioritize and make time for things.

Also, give yourself permission to do small steps rather than think that there's an ideal you need to meet. I wrote a review paper about two years ago showing that you can get pretty much the same health benefits from doing 5 to 15 minutes of exercise a day as from an hour. There are a lot of things like that, where we think, "I won't get my novel done unless I can put aside a whole weekend to write." Well, you could create a novel in a paragraph a day. So I encourage people to think: what's the smallest step that they could take that is consistent with their goal? And not necessarily worry about whether they believe it's sufficient.
That is actually very freeing.
New Year's resolutions can be fun! If you think of them like a science experiment, you can always learn something from a resolution. A lot of times, people aren't willing to learn the lesson - and sometimes the lesson is that you think you want to change this, but you don't really want to, and sometimes you don't need to. That sometimes we look for the things we think we can control.

It's funny how this happens sometimes even when we go after the things that really are core to our identity. I did this New Year's resolution makeover once with this woman who had made the same resolution year after year to become a better cook, because she thought that's what good moms and good wives did. She was a terrible cook, and she didn't want to learn how to cook. That's a mistake people make, is they think they're just going to fundamentally change who they are with a resolution. "I'm going to become a morning person." "I'm going to become a health nut." "I'm going to become organized." The best resolutions are ones that strengthen something you already are, but you may not have been fully investing in.
Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself I wanted to ask about the idea of working with other people and outsourcing willpower. Have you ever seen Derek Sivers' talk on TED.com? It's called Keep your goals to yourself and it suggests that people are more likely to achieve goals if they keep them private.
There is some data that suggests you might feel like you have accomplished your goal if you can create a public identity as somebody who is pursuing that goal. And I have overwhelming feedback from my students in my Science of Willpower class that, if they actually can truly create the identity - that they really sense that "I am someone that trained for a marathon," or "I am somebody who is committed to this" - that it actually makes it easier to make choices.
Sandra Aamodt: Why dieting doesn't usually work And did you see Sandra Aamodt's talk, Her idea is that the brain seeks to keep weight stable over the long-run, so dieting can backfire because it makes a person so focused on food. Does that fit with your research? Why dieting doesn't usually work?
People are really interested in creating habits, and there's so much excitement now about habit design. Habits are really, really hard to create because they require complete automaticity. You need to basically be making choices in the absence of any motivation and it takes a long time to get that in place. But when you have a value or commitment, that's something different. It can be a conscious choice that when you're in a restaurant - if your identity is as somebody who takes good care of your health - then that becomes a default way to make a good choice in that moment. Anything that you do to create that identity can actually make it easier to make choices that don't feel like deprivation.
She showed a really interesting graph of four health factors - eating fruits and vegetables, exercise three times a week, not smoking, and drinking in moderation - and how, if people who are overweight do just one of those things, their risk of mortality lowers to the same level as a normal weight person.
That's one side of that research. Then there's the whole other side of how social support and pride can support having more strength to move towards your goals. If you know that other people are paying attention to you, and you know that you're going to be able to celebrate your success - you're going to be able to post on Facebook that you actually did run that marathon, or even that you just made it to spin class, or whatever your version of that is - that anticipating that social sharing is very motivating for people. It's more motivating than even success in itself. The self-savoring is not as motivating as knowing you're going to be able to savor a success with somebody else. Then when you hit the wall - when you experience setbacks - social support encouragement is also so important for getting back on track.
To bring it back to your TED Talk, How to make stress your friend, it sounds to me like what you're saying about willpower is related - that it's not so much whether you have willpower, but how you think about willpower.
I think that from top to bottom, making your resolution social allows you to access different supports, both internal and external. One more reason to go public - being a role model for someone. People will do things when they know that they're inspiring change in others. It's a natural progression that you see in many areas - whether it's people who are recovering from addiction, or someone embarking on a physical challenge. This is what people naturally do.

Yes! My talk was right after hers at TEDGlobal 2013. I remember basically agreeing with everything she said.
So, make friends with the fact that you can move towards goals that are really important to you?
There are two things she said that really stood out to me, and that I agree with very seriously. One was that she talked about the importance of being kind to yourself. She made the point that self-compassion is much more motivating than self-criticism. That's very important. When I first started teaching the Science of Willpower, it was the thing nobody believed - researchers and psychologists and writers have done a great job of getting this message out, because I don't get near the resistance I used to get to the idea. And still, it's so amazing how many people believe that they are more motivated by self-criticism and shame than anything else. They aren't really paying attention to the effect on their behavior and choices when they are that hard on themselves.

The other thing I remember Sandra saying was about the futility of trying to lose weight. And that's absolutely right. Whenever I'm in any situation where people are asking me to talk about losing weight, I always try to change the language to creating health because you cannot control weight. It's exactly what Sandra said - the brain and the body, they will fight you. Losing weight is almost always a consequence of making good choices - but it's not always a consequence. You can make good choices and not lose the weight. The most important thing in Sandra's talk was the idea that making the healthy choices is going to give you the consequence of health, even if you don't lose the weight.

I hope TED has more talks from obesity experts, because nobody knows this research about how weight doesn't predict health. There's so much important science out there that people are not paying attention to. That was my favorite part of her talk.

I've been joking about that - that my work has always been to basically take an inner experience that people reject, force them to accept it and understand it, so that they can make peace with it. One of the reasons why I teach this Science of Willpower class and wrote the book is because I kept hearing from people that they felt like they had no willpower. They thought they were the only ones and that their willpower struggle was uniquely wrong with them - they were so lazy, they were so stupid, they were so hopeless. They didn't understand the fact that we all experience willpower challenges. It's part of what it means to be human.

It is similar to the way that I'm now trying to help people appreciate stress, and understand that this is human and that it can help us. It's not always helpful, but there are aspects to it that, when we can make friends with it, we have a lot better chance of using it to good ends. I feel the same way about willpower. When you understand what a craving is and why it's there, you can also appreciate the part of you who can make a different choice.

One of the big lessons from The Science of Willpower is if you really fight the inner experiences, it's not going to end well. If you decide you're going to fight cravings, fight thoughts, fight emotions, you put all your energy and attention into trying to change the inner experiences. People tend to get more stuck, and more overwhelmed. When you try to control the things that aren't really under your control, you get to feeling more out of control. Whereas where you really have the freedom is in your choices.

That's very similar to stress. If you think you can't feel stress and that stress is always going to be toxic, you're magnifying any of the toxic aspects of stress. By fighting stress, you're making stress worse.

Yes. Willpower is about being able to hold opposites. So I can feel the emotion, I can feel the craving, and at the very same time, I just make my awareness big enough to hold my commitment to make a different choice. Your ability to hold those opposites is what gives people willpower over time.

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Kelly McGonigal on why it's so dang hard to stick to a resolution

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By the second week of January, that resolution that once seemed so reasonable - go to the gym every other day, read a book a week, only drink alcohol on weekends - is starting to seem very ... hard. As you are teetering on the edge of abandoning it all together, Kelly McGonigal is here to help.

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Do rewards hinder learning?

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A Calgary school's decision to axe all certificates and ceremonies honouring academic and athletic achievement is garnering the support of a controversial author and education critic who says rewards aren't at all useful to students.

St. Basil Elementary and Junior High School is doing away with all certificates and ceremonies honouring academic and athletic achievement, saying awards eventually lose their lustre to students who get them while often hurting the self-esteem and pride of those who don't get a certificate.

The school cites the work of Alfie Kohn, the author of Punished by Rewards and No Contest: The Case Against Competition.

"There's a difference between what psychologists call intrinsic motivation to learn, which is where kids are excited about the learning itself, and extrinsic motivation, which is where they do something to get a goodie - a trophy, a pat on the head, a dollar, a grade," Kohn told Day 6 host Brent Bambury.

"It's not just that those two things are different. It's that they move in opposite directions, so the more you reward people for doing something the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward."

'Everyone loses in a race to win'

Kohn dismisses the argument that rewards and certificates help motivate students to perform well in school.

"It may motivate them to get rewards, but that's likely to be at the expense of engagement with the learning itself," Kohn said.

"I don't care how motivated students are. I care about how students are motivated. Awards are even worse than rewards because an award is a reward that has been made artificially scarce, so if I get one you probably can't."

But Kohn doesn't stop there. He says grading students at all is counter-productive.

"Grades are a perfect example of extrinsic inducement," he said.

"The research shows very clearly that three things tend to happen when students are encouraged to focus on getting good grades. The first is that they become less excited about the learning itself. The second is that they tend to become less likely to think deeply ... The third thing that happens is when you get kids focused on grades they pick the easiest possible task when given a choice - not because they're lazy, because they're rational."

Kohn says teachers and schools should instead be providing feedback aimed at helping students succeed.

"If a kid clearly isn't getting it in math, the last thing you want to do is say to this kid publicly, 'You're a loser,' or put an F or a low mark on the paper. For most kids that almost guarantees continued failure in the future," he said.

"[But] you don't just get rid of awards assemblies because they make the kids that don't get rewards feel bad. You get rid of awards assemblies because they're not useful for any kids. Everyone loses in a race to win."

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Let's drop school grades altogether, author says | CBC News

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A Calgary school's decision to axe all certificates and ceremonies honouring academic and athletic achievement is garnering the support of a controversial author and education critic who says rewards aren't at all useful to students. St.

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Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.

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The Power of belief -- mindset and success | Eduardo Briceno | TEDxManhattanBeach

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TED.com, home of TED Talks, is a global initiative about ideas worth spreading via TEDx, the TED Prize, TED Books, TED Conferences, TED-Ed and more.

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Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

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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.

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Carol Dweck offers a theory of Mindset. People can be classified into either Fixed or Growth Mindset states. People that possess a growth Mindset rise to challenges and learn from feedback on their mistakes. People's Mindsets can be changed, and it is possible to support people in the transition to a growth Mindset.

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Mindsets and math/science achievement by Dweck

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Mindsets and math/science achievement by Dweck

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Blog post on the best resources for change mindset in students

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Blog post on the best resources for change mindset in students

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Photo Credit: Antoine Gady via Compfight
'Growth Mindset Starts With Us, Not With Them' is the first post in a two-part series at my Education Week Teacher column. Also check out Here Are The Movie Scenes That Readers Have Said Demonstrate A Growth Mindset - & I'm Still Looking For More My Growth Mindset Lesson s Usually Go Well, But What I Did Today Was The Best Yet (Student Hand-Outs Included)
The "question of the week" at my Education Week Teacher column this week is " How Can We Help Our Students Develop a Growth Mindset?" (NOTE: You can now read Carol Dweck's guest response to that question here). As part of the response, which will be published on Tuesday, I thought a "The Best..." list would be useful.

Carol Dweck, who identified the concept, will be one of the guests responding to that question, and several readers have already shared their ideas. There's still time to contribute yours....

You can find a specific lesson in my book, Helping Students Motivate Themselves, on how I incorporate the idea of a growth mindset in my classroom, and some of my other related ideas in my article in this month's edition of ASCD Educational Leadership, Eight Things Skilled Teachers Think, Say, and Do.

Here are my choices for The Best Resources On Helping Our Students Develop A "Growth Mindset":

I've got to start with Professor Dweck's own website, Mindset Online. Other resources by her are included in all "The Best..." lists in this post.

Here are a few previous related "The Best..." lists:
The Best Posts, Articles & Videos About Learning From Mistakes & Failures The Best Resources For Showing Students That They Make Their Brain Stronger By Learning The Best Resources For Learning How To Best Give Feedback To Students The Best Resources For Learning About The Importance Of "Grit"
Here is a fabulous infographic on the concept.

The Pajaro Valley School District has an excellent collection of resources, Carol Dweck's Important Work on Mindsets.

Montgomery Schools also have a useful online packet.

Eduardo Briceño is the Co-Founder, with Dr. Carol Dweck, of Mindset Works:
Here's The "Growth Mindset" Article & Prompt We're Using As Part Of Our Semester Final Useful "Fixed" vs. "Growth" Mindset Worksheet For Students
read two excellent posts today on giving effective feedback, and I'm adding both of them to The Best Resources For Learning How To Best Give Feedback To Students:

How To Give Good Feedback is by Annie Murphy Paul.

Here's an excellent interview with Carol Dweck. I learn from all of her work, but I found this one particularly interesting because she shared some thoughts I hadn't heard her say before. Here's one particularly useful excerpt:
Our Students Are Not Supermen & Superwomen
Changing Teens' Mindsets on Social Aggression is a useful Ed Week article.

Promoting Equity Through Teaching For A Growth Mindset

Quote Of The Day AND Video: "We'll Score Goals When We Grow Old"
Interesting New Study By Carol Dweck

Quote Of The Day: "Your Thoughts Can Release Abilities Beyond Normal Limits"

'Growth Mindset' Gaining Traction as School Improvement Strategy is from Education Week.

Daniel Coyle shared this video on Twitter. Even though it has a sports focus, it can very easily be applied to any area of learning:

Studies Offer Practical Ways to Bring 'Growth Mindset' Research to Schools is an Ed Week post about some recent studies. One of them featured having students read about the struggles experienced by famous scientists, as opposed by focusing solely on their achievements, and resulted in higher student motivation and academic achievement. Here's an earlier study done by the same researchers with Taiwanese students (the most recent research was with classes in New York) that reached similar conclusions and has a lot of interesting background information.

Teachers told: use 'not yet' in place of 'fail' when marking is from The Telegraph. It's about a new guide for UK teachers on how to help students develop a growth mindset.
Two Good Videos On How We Learn & How I Plan To Use Them In Class
New Research: Students Benefit from Learning That Intelligence Is Not Fixed is from MindShift.
Two New Sesame Street Videos On Social Emotional Learning Researchers See What A Growth Mindset Does To The Brain

Growth mindset and the educator. pic.twitter.com/6cn6JA3VmZ #Satchat #sunchat #edchat #edtech

- Teacher (@Primary_Ed) November 9, 2014

Video: New TEDx Talk By Carol Dweck Study Finds That Bilingualism Supports A Growth Mindset Quote Of The Day: I Think This Is The Best Article Carol Dweck Has Written Good Videos On A Growth Mindset, The Importance Of Learning From Mistakes & A Lot More Khan Develops Decent Lesson On Growth Mindset But, Come On, Can't They Create An Engaging Video? New Study Shows That Teaching About "Growth Mindset" Works At Large Scale - Or Does It? Three Useful Growth Mindset Resources The Limits To The Power Of A Growth Mindset (& The Dangers When We Don't Recognize Them)
The Educator and the Growth Mindset is from Jackie Gerstein and Metacognition Curriculum is an older post from Frank Noschese.

Test Your Mindset is an online interactive from Carol Dweck that I think would be useful to offer to students.

Helping Students Reach Their Full Potential with the Growth Mindset is by Dan Winkler and provides a pretty good, and short, definition of a growth mindset.

Here's a TED-Ed lesson using the above video.

Growth Mindset - More Evidence is from Alex Quigley.

There was a recent conference in the UK which featured Carol Dweck. It sounds like she made some interesting points, particularly around what she called a "False Growth Mindset." Here are some reports on that talk, along with other resources:

Praise the taking on of challenge, perseverance, new strategies, recovery from setbacks, says Dweck. Also praise improvement and learning.

- David Weston (@informed_edu) June 19, 2015

Why the 'false growth mindset' explains so much is from The Learning Spy. The Mindset Journey is from Drowning in the Shallow.

Very useful for anyone interested in Growth Mindsets https://t.co/h0YJpu8WcY

- Carl Hendrick (@C_Hendrick) June 14, 2015

Math educators! @joboaler has developed a week of math lessons and #growthmindset videos: https://t.co/3mrdndn0pB https://t.co/S5HaESKAZ6 - PERTS (@pertslab) June 1, 2015

- David Dockterman (@dockterman) May 11, 2015

Quote Of The Day: Carol Dweck On "Nagging"

5 tips for instilling a growth mindset culture in your classroom. #growthmindset pic.twitter.com/lL1OrhmaKT #edchat #edtech #EYTalking #SLTchat - Teacher (@Primary_Ed) June 23, 2015

Guest Post: Growth Mindset Memes
Shaun Allison has written an exceptional post and created a great slideshow about the growth mindset. He graciously gave me permission to share his slideshow here:

Carol Dweck and Growth Mindset is a well-done and interesting thirty minute BBC interview with Carol Dweck and her associates

Why a 'Growth Mindset' Won't Work is a very good column by Peter DeWitt.

Growth Mindset and Testing/The Hunger Games. http://t.co/eVcabNJYjG #hungergames #mindsets #PBIS #charactered #SEL #schoolclimate #climate

- Learning Solutions (@CollabLearnSol) July 22, 2015

Quote Of The Day: "What Does This Experience Make Possible?" Growth Mindset - Don't Throw The Baby Out With The Bathwater Research Study On Humility Perfect For Students (& Useful For All Of Us)
When Pupils Talk in Absolutes: Understanding Mindset though Self-Narrative is by Sarah Donarski.

Four questions that encourage growth mindset among students https://t.co/5yABKYoEIG < well worth a read

- Guardian Education (@GuardianEdu) November 15, 2015

Carol Dweck: "Keep trying, you can do it" is nagging, Instead ask "What have you tried, what strategy shall we try next?" #ewaMotivation - Stanford Education (@StanfordEd) November 11, 2015

The Golden State Warriors & Social Emotional Learning
Be a Mirror: Give Readers Feedback That Fosters a Growth Mindset is from The International Literacy Association.

Positive Mindset May Prime Students' Brains for Math is from Ed Week.

Why Growth Mindsets Are Necessary to Save Math Class is from The Atlantic.

Carol Dweck has recently written several pieces on the dangers of a "false growth mindset." Here are a few:

Recognizing and Overcoming False Growth Mindset is from Edutopia.

What Having a "Growth Mindset" Actually Means appeared in the Harvard Business Review.

The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we've totally missed the point is from Quartz.

I Did My Best Job Teaching A "Growth Mindset" Today - Here's The Lesson Plan

Here's What My Students Think Of A Growth Mindset
Study: Learning About Failures Of Famous Scientists Improves Student Achievement
Amazon, Ed. Organizations Launch Blitz for "Growth Mindset" in Math is from Ed Week.

What I Learned About Growth Mindset When Students Taught Me is from Ed Week.

Grow Your Mindset! is an accessible article with audio support.

- Brainology (@Brainology) February 13, 2016

New Study Finds A New Twist On Growth Mindset - Overconfident People Don't Have It Carol Dweck Makes Strongest Statement Yet On Growth Mindset Misuse
Nurturing Growth Mindsets: Six Tips From Carol Dweck is from Ed Week.
Quote Of The Day: "Effort Is Not The Only Thing" - Carol Dweck On A Growth Mindset Mindset Scholars Network Website Is Key New Resource For Social Emotional Learning Does Your Principal Support Teachers Developing A Growth Mindset?
Carol Dweck talks about a growth mindset. You can read her contribution to my Ed Week column at Classroom Strategies to Foster a Growth Mindset
Quote Of The Day: LeBron James On A Growth Mindset We Did A Great 'Growth Mindset' Lesson With Our ELLs This Week - Here's The Lesson Plan Study: "you want to speak to the brilliance, but you also need to speak to the struggle"
3 Myths of Mindset is by Dan Haesler.
Opportunities & Dangers Of Big New Growth Mindset Study
Mindset Works has a great list of feedback examples that promote a growth mindset.

Teaching kids to struggle #GrowthMindset is an excellent and simple lesson from Class Creator.

Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset: An Introduction is a useful TED-Ed lesson.

Mindset Works has unveiled a redesigned website and lots of free resources.

I love this! We talked about using the word "yet" at our teacher in service last week too! pic.twitter.com/OgTUv0CTqN

- Stacy Sedory (@SedoryAP) September 4, 2016

Seven Common Growth Mindset Scenarios and Responses is from The Mindset Kit.

Ed Week has published a special report on a growth mindset:
Mindset in the Classroom: A National Study of K-12 Teachers Teachers Seize On 'Growth Mindset,' But Crave More Training Quiz Yourself: Does This Classroom Feedback Promote a Growth Mindset?
Introducing Growth Mindset in Math is from Runde's Room.

How Microsoft Uses a Growth Mindset to Develop Leaders is by Carol Dweck.

How to Integrate Growth Mindset Messages Into Every Part of Math Class is from MindShift.
New Carol Dweck Interview On Having A "False Growth Mindset"
Growth mindset: practical tips you may not have tried yet is from The Guardian.
New Study Connects Growth Mindset & "Bouncing Back" From Mistakes
PERTS from Stanford is offering a free two-hour online program to promote a growth mindset to all ninth-graders. It's definitely worth a look.

Growth mindset is on a firm foundation, but we're still building the house is by Carol Dweck.

Is Mindset Theory Really In Trouble? is from New York Magazine.

Young Adult Novels That Teach a Growth Mindset is by Robert Ward.

Four Teaching Moves That Promote A Growth Mindset In All Readers is from MindShift.

Growth mindset, performance avoidance, and academic behaviors in Clark County School District is a long report worth a quick review.

Growth mindset: teaching panacea or classroom pitfall? is from TES.

I Want to get Better at... Growth Mindset Next Year is from The Teaching Channel.

Are You Getting Growth Mindset Wrong? is from The HuffPost.

I love this poster on developing a growth mindset community from @joboaler, @FeldsteinShelah, and @mathschristine.
https://t.co/9BuR6JURF9 pic.twitter.com/GA3nO8PKLG

- Robert Kaplinsky (@robertkaplinsky) June 17, 2017

Misinterpreting the Growth Mindset: Why We're Doing Students a Disservice is by John Hattie.

An Introduction to Growth Mindset from Character Lab on Vimeo.

What If Students Have More Confidence in Growth Mindsets Than Their Teachers? is from Ed Surge.
New Study Suggests That Motivation & Growth Mindset Are Most Important Factors For Student Success
Reduce Bullying by Cultivating Growth Mindsets is from Mindset Works.

Research every teacher should know: growth mindset is from The Guardian.

Praise the effort, not the outcome? Think again is by Carol Dweck.

Bruce Lee is a cult hero to many students, so the article Bruce Lee Used This Ancient Philosophy to Break Through His Limits (and Find Remarkable Success) could be a hit. It appears in Inc., and focuses his having a growth mindset.
Elmo Teaches The Power Of "Yet"
What Do Schools Fostering A Teacher "Growth Mindset" Look Like? is from The Shanker Institute.

New Stanford Study: A Positive Attitude Literally Makes Your Brain Work Better is from Inc.
Results Just Unveiled Of Big New Growth Mindset Study Co-Authored By A Ton Of Well-Known SEL Researchers
How to Integrate Growth Mindset Messages Into Every Part of Math Class is from MindShift.
Important Reminder That We Need To Praise Process To Support A Growth Mindset Carol Dweck's New Response To Critiques Of Growth Mindset New Study Shows Learning About Growth Mindset At Start Of Ninth-Grade Increases Resilience New Study Finds A Growth Mindset Intervention Effective When It Highlights Impact On Brain
Got Growth Mindset? 5 Pinterest-worthy Ways to Make It Visible in Your Classroom is from Teach Learn Grow.

Study: Promoting growth mindset in teachers may pay dividends for students is from Education Dive.

Growth Mindset In Learning Neglects "Fixed" Mindset In K-12 Math Curriculum Design is from Sunil Singh.

A growth mindset will help you handle setbacks - of any size is from The Seattle Times.

Is Growth Mindset the Missing Piece in the Equity Discussion? is from Ed Surge.

#Teachers, are you looking for #growthmindset videos to share with your #students? Check out @MindsetWorks video library at https://t.co/f4eHYISGY1 #BackToSchool2018 #educators #learn #edchat #edchatie pic.twitter.com/9GRujK5fyL

- Mindset Works (@MindsetWorks) August 29, 2018

Having a Growth Mindset Makes It Easier to Develop New Interests is from The Harvard Business Review.

But as the authors themselves point out, small effects may be educationally important if they cost little to achieve. Moreover, the meta-analysis did not consider important moderators of effect such as age, and the sensitivity of outcome measures to the effects of instruction...

- Dylan Wiliam (@dylanwiliam) November 8, 2018

STUDENT-WRITTEN GROWTH MINDSET STORIES HERE ARE EXAMPLES OF WHAT STUDENTS WROTE ABOUT A GROWTH MINDSET GROWTH MINDSET IN ACTION
STEM faculty who believe ability is fixed have larger racial achievement gaps and inspire less student motivation in their classes is from Science Magazine.
THIS QUOTE IS A GREAT ONE FOR SHOWING THE IMPORTANCE OF A GROWTH MINDSET

When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don't risk making mistakes.

- willunfollowforfood (@iunfollowanyway) April 2, 2019

Nurturing a Culture of Growth is from Psychology Today.

Building Growth Mindset in the Classroom: Assignments From Carol Dweck is from Ed Week.
TWO FREE ONLINE PROGRAMS FOR TEACHERS & STUDENTS - ONE ON STUDENT ENGAGEMENT & THE OTHER ON GROWTH MINDSET
If you've found this list helpful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

Great way to show the differences in a short and sweet display! Thanks for contributing to the growth mindset community! https://t.co/luTSUru1sc

- Mindset Works (@MindsetWorks) July 11, 2019

RESULTS OF BIGGEST MINDSET STUDY FINDS POSITIVE IMPACT

IN DEFENSE OF CAROL DWECK (a thread):

Given the current discussion about Carol Dweck and growth mindsets, I'd like to add my two cents. Of course, I'm COMPLETELY unbiased, since she has been my mentor and friend for almost 15 years. (1/12) pic.twitter.com/8UVpEytDZk

- Dr. Allison Master (@AllisonMaster) August 9, 2019

A Proof Point for the Value of Growth Mindsets is from FutureEd.
VERY INTERESTING VIDEO: "HOW TO STAY MOTIVATED - THE LOCUS RULE" THIS IS PROBABLY THE BEST & MOST ACCESSIBLE REVIEW OF GROWTH MINDSET RESEARCH THAT YOU'RE GOING TO FIND
Growth Mindset for Mentors is from Mindset Kit.

MindsetWorks offers a number of useful free resources.

Psychologist Carol Dweck: 'Everyone is a work in progress' is from The Financial Times.

Here's how a new study titled "False growth mindsets" is described:
This research snapshot summarizes a project led by Nicholas Buttrick as part of the National Study of Learning Mindsets Early Career Fellowship. In a sample of 9th grade mathematics teachers, the project explores the concept of false growth mindset - a belief that effort alone can lead to improvement regardless of other factors like effective learning strategies and help-seeking. NOT ONLY CAN IT BE MOTIVATING TO HAVE A GROWTH MINDSET, BUT NEW STUDIES FIND LEARNING ABOUT OTHERS WHO HAVE IT CAN BE MOTIVATING, TOO
Growth Mindset vs. Fixed + Key Takeaways From Dweck's Book is from Positive Psychology.
HIGHLIGHTING SCIENTISTS WHO SUCCEEDED MORE THROUGH EFFORT THAN BRILLIANCE ENHANCES STUDENT MOTIVATION IN SCIENCE YOU WON'T FIND A BETTER GROWTH MINDSET QUOTE THAN THIS ONE FROM A RUGBY STAR
6 Ways a Crisis Can Help You Cultivate a Growth Mindset is from the Harvard Business Review.

You might want to also view the over nine hundred other "The Best..." lists.

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The Best Resources On Helping Our Students Develop A "Growth Mindset"

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Photo Credit: Antoine Gady via Compfight 'Growth Mindset Starts With Us, Not With Them' is the first post in a two-part series at my Education Week Teacher column.

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Praise strategies to consider: Praising students' strategies, focus, effort, persistence, and improvement "takes the spotlight off fixed ability and puts it on the process of learning," 

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Praise strategies to consider: Praising students' strategies, focus, effort, persistence, and improvement "takes the spotlight off fixed ability and puts it on the process of learning," 

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“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

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READ THIS!: How not to talk to your kids. An article from the New York Times that introduces the idea of fixed vs. growth mindset

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READ THIS!: How not to talk to your kids. An article from the New York Times that introduces the idea of fixed vs. growth mindset

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What do we make of a boy like Thomas?

Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are "the smart kids." Thomas's one of them, and he likes belonging.

Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he's smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top one percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn't just score in the top one percent. He scored in the top one percent of the top one percent.

But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he's smart hasn't always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas's father noticed just the opposite. "Thomas didn't want to try things he wouldn't be successful at," his father says. "Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn't, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, 'I'm not good at this.' " With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two-things he was naturally good at and things he wasn't.

For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn't very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn't even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas's father tried to reason with him. "Look, just because you're smart doesn't mean you don't have to put out some effort." (Eventually, he mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.)

Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?

Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it's been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.

When parents praise their children's intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it's important to tell their kids that they're smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.

But a growing body of research-and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system-strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of "smart" does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she's now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work-a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders-paints the picture most clearly.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles-puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, "You must be smart at this." Other students were praised for their effort: "You must have worked really hard."

Why just a single line of praise? "We wanted to see how sensitive children were," Dweck explained. "We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect."

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they'd learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck's team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The "smart" kids took the cop-out.

Why did this happen? "When we praise children for their intelligence," Dweck wrote in her study summary, "we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don't risk making mistakes." And that's what the fifth-graders had done: They'd chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study's start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn't focused hard enough on this test. "They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles," Dweck recalled. "Many of them remarked, unprovoked, 'This is my favorite test.' " Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren't really smart at all. "Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable."

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck's researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score-by about 30 percent. Those who'd been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning-by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control," she explains. "They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure."

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids' reasoning goes; I don't need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized-it's public proof that you can't cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls-the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren't immune to the inverse power of praise.

Jill Abraham is a mother of three in Scarsdale, and her view is typical of those in my straw poll. I told her about Dweck's research on praise, and she flatly wasn't interested in brief tests without long-term follow-up. Abraham is one of the 85 percent who think praising her children's intelligence is important. Her kids are thriving, so she's proved that praise works in the real world. "I don't care what the experts say," Jill says defiantly. "I'm living it."

Even those who've accepted the new research on praise have trouble putting it into practice. Sue Needleman is both a mother of two and an elementary-school teacher with eleven years' experience. Last year, she was a fourth-grade teacher at Ridge Ranch Elementary in Paramus, New Jersey. She has never heard of Carol Dweck, but the gist of Dweck's research has trickled down to her school, and Needleman has learned to say, "I like how you keep trying." She tries to keep her praise specific, rather than general, so that a child knows exactly what she did to earn the praise (and thus can get more). She will occasionally tell a child, "You're good at math," but she'll never tell a child he's bad at math.

But that's at school, as a teacher. At home, old habits die hard. Her 8-year-old daughter and her 5-year-old son are indeed smart, and sometimes she hears herself saying, "You're great. You did it. You're smart." When I press her on this, Needleman says that what comes out of academia often feels artificial. "When I read the mock dialogues, my first thought is, Oh, please. How corny. "

No such qualms exist for teachers at the Life Sciences Secondary School in East Harlem, because they've seen Dweck's theories applied to their junior-high students. Last week, Dweck and her protégée, Lisa Blackwell, published a report in the academic journal Child Development about the effect of a semester-long intervention conducted to improve students' math scores.

Life Sciences is a health-science magnet school with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes are being predominantly minority and low achieving. Blackwell split her kids into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was taught study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how intelligence is not innate. These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the brain and acted out skits. "Even as I was teaching these ideas," Blackwell noted, "I would hear the students joking, calling one another 'dummy' or 'stupid.' " After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her students' grades to see if it had any effect.

It didn't take long. The teachers-who hadn't known which students had been assigned to which workshop-could pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the students' longtime trend of decreasing math grades.

The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.

"These are very persuasive findings," says Columbia's Dr. Geraldine Downey, a specialist in children's sensitivity to rejection. "They show how you can take a specific theory and develop a curriculum that works." Downey's comment is typical of what other scholars in the field are saying. Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist who is an expert in stereotyping, told me, "Carol Dweck is a flat-out genius. I hope the work is taken seriously. It scares people when they see these results."

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids' self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise.

Dweck and Blackwell's work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement's key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everything-from sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards.

I am smart, the kids' reasoning goes; I don't need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized-it's public proof that you can't cut it on your natural gifts.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn't improve grades or career achievement. It didn't even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were "the biggest disappointment of my career."

Now he's on Dweck's side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents' pride in their children's achievements: It's so strong that "when they praise their kids, it's not that far from praising themselves."

By and large, the literature on praise shows that it can be effective-a positive, motivating force. In one study, University of Notre Dame researchers tested praise's efficacy on a losing college hockey team. The experiment worked: The team got into the playoffs. But all praise is not equal-and, as Dweck demonstrated, the effects of praise can vary significantly depending on the praise given. To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The hockey players were specifically complimented on the number of times they checked an opponent.)

Sincerity of praise is also crucial. Just as we can sniff out the true meaning of a backhanded compliment or a disingenuous apology, children, too, scrutinize praise for hidden agendas. Only young children-under the age of 7-take praise at face value: Older children are just as suspicious of it as adults.

Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies where children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyer's findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well-it's actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it's a teacher's criticism-not praise at all-that really conveys a positive belief in a student's aptitude.

In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further.

New York University professor of psychiatry Judith Brook explains that the issue for parents is one of credibility. "Praise is important, but not vacuous praise," she says. "It has to be based on a real thing-some skill or talent they have." Once children hear praise they interpret as meritless, they discount not just the insincere praise, but sincere praise as well.

Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students' "shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions."

Dweck's research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concern-they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.

In one, students are given two puzzle tests. Between the first and the second, they are offered a choice between learning a new puzzle strategy for the second test or finding out how they did compared with other students on the first test: They have only enough time to do one or the other. Students praised for intelligence choose to find out their class rank, rather than use the time to prepare.

In another, students get a do-it-yourself report card and are told these forms will be mailed to students at another school-they'll never meet these students and don't know their names. Of the kids praised for their intelligence, 40 percent lie, inflating their scores. Of the kids praised for effort, few lie.

When students transition into junior high, some who'd done well in elementary school inevitably struggle in the larger and more demanding environment. Those who equated their earlier success with their innate ability surmise they've been dumb all along. Their grades never recover because the likely key to their recovery-increasing effort-they view as just further proof of their failure. In interviews many confess they would "seriously consider cheating."

Students turn to cheating because they haven't developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child's failures and insists he'll do better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family can't acknowledge its existence. A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can't learn from them.

My son, Luke, is in kindergarten. He seems supersensitive to the potential judgment of his peers. Luke justifies it by saying, "I'm shy," but he's not really shy. He has no fear of strange cities or talking to strangers, and at his school, he has sung in front of large audiences. Rather, I'd say he's proud and self-conscious. His school has simple uniforms (navy T-shirt, navy pants), and he loves that his choice of clothes can't be ridiculed, "because then they'd be teasing themselves too."

After reading Carol Dweck's research, I began to alter how I praised him, but not completely. I suppose my hesitation was that the mind-set Dweck wants students to have-a firm belief that the way to bounce back from failure is to work harder-sounds awfully clichéd: Try, try again.

But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort-instead of simply giving up-is a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. Delving into this research, I learned that persistence turns out to be more than a conscious act of will; it's also an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington University in St. Louis located the circuit in a part of the brain called the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex. It monitors the reward center of the brain, and like a switch, it intervenes when there's a lack of immediate reward. When it switches on, it's telling the rest of the brain, "Don't stop trying. There's dopa [the brain's chemical reward for success] on the horizon." While putting people through MRI scans, Cloninger could see this switch lighting up regularly in some. In others, barely at all.

What makes some people wired to have an active circuit?

Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have persistence by carefully not rewarding them when they get to the finish. "The key is intermittent reinforcement," says Cloninger. The brain has to learn that frustrating spells can be worked through. "A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they'll quit when the rewards disappear."

That sold me. I'd thought "praise junkie" was just an expression-but suddenly, it seemed as if I could be setting up my son's brain for an actual chemical need for constant reward.

What would it mean, to give up praising our children so often? Well, if I am one example, there are stages of withdrawal, each of them subtle. In the first stage, I fell off the wagon around other parents when they were busy praising their kids. I didn't want Luke to feel left out. I felt like a former alcoholic who continues to drink socially. I became a Social Praiser.

Then I tried to use the specific-type praise that Dweck recommends. I praised Luke, but I attempted to praise his "process." This was easier said than done. What are the processes that go on in a 5-year-old's mind? In my impression, 80 percent of his brain processes lengthy scenarios for his action figures.

But every night he has math homework and is supposed to read a phonics book aloud. Each takes about five minutes if he concentrates, but he's easily distracted. So I praised him for concentrating without asking to take a break. If he listened to instructions carefully, I praised him for that. After soccer games, I praised him for looking to pass, rather than just saying, "You played great." And if he worked hard to get to the ball, I praised the effort he applied.

Just as the research promised, this focused praise helped him see strategies he could apply the next day. It was remarkable how noticeably effective this new form of praise was.

Truth be told, while my son was getting along fine under the new praise regime, it was I who was suffering. It turns out that I was the real praise junkie in the family. Praising him for just a particular skill or task felt like I left other parts of him ignored and unappreciated. I recognized that praising him with the universal "You're great-I'm proud of you" was a way I expressed unconditional love.

Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. Out of our children's lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we can't say during the day- We are in your corner, we are here for you, we believe in you.

In a similar way, we put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments. We expect so much of them, but we hide our expectations behind constant glowing praise. The duplicity became glaring to me.

Eventually, in my final stage of praise withdrawal, I realized that not telling my son he was smart meant I was leaving it up to him to make his own conclusion about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer to a homework problem-it robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself.

But what if he makes the wrong conclusion?

Can I really leave this up to him, at his age?

I'm still an anxious parent. This morning, I tested him on the way to school: "What happens to your brain, again, when it gets to think about something hard?"

"It gets bigger, like a muscle," he responded, having aced this one before.

Additional reporting by Ashley Merryman

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The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New York Magazine - Nymag

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What do we make of a boy like Thomas? Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber).

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Action Research: A teacher who has changed her kids' mindset

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Action Research: A teacher who has changed her kids' mindset

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Today I started my metacognition curriculum with my students by having them read and discuss the article, How Not to Talk to Your Kids, which is a wonderful introduction to Professor Carol Dweck's Mindset Research. It pays particular attention to describing the experiments that led to Dweck's conclusion, and breaking these experiments down in science...

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Link to Mindset Works and Brainology, a company that sells kits to schools to affect change in their students

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Link to Mindset Works and Brainology, a company that sells kits to schools to affect change in their students

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MindsetWorks | Growth Mindset | Growth Mindset Programs

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When people have a growth mindset they understand they can increase their intelligence through effective effort, deliberate practice, asking questions, and risking mistakes. A growth mindset causes people to persist in the face of setbacks, embrace challenges, and learn from criticism.

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Link to Education Week 'Growth Mindset' Gaining Traction as School Improvement Strategy Article with a quiz attached

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Link to Education Week 'Growth Mindset' Gaining Traction as School Improvement Strategy Article with a quiz attached

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It's one thing to say all students can learn, but making them believe it-and do it-can require a 180-degree shift in students' and teachers' sense of themselves and of one another.

While expressions like the "soft bigotry of low expectations" underscore the effects of teachers' and students' mindsets on academic success, it has proved difficult to pin down whether and how it's possible to change those attitudes once established.

Nonetheless, attempts to change that dynamic, from targeted interventions to restructured schools, are gaining traction as many states overhaul their curricula to match the Common Core State Standards and incorporate student-growth measures into accountability systems.

Three decades have passed since the Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck and others first linked students' motivation to the way they perceived intelligence. Students who believe intelligence or skill can be improved by effort and experimentation-what Ms. Dweck calls a "growth mindset"-seek challenges, learn from mistakes, and keep faith in themselves in the face of failure.

By contrast, those who believe intelligence and skill are traits you are born with-a "fixed mindset"-can be discouraged by failure and reluctant to challenge themselves.

Those mindsets are self-reinforcing, and Ms. Dweck, her colleagues, and other researchers have found in dozens of studies that students with a growth mindset improve more in academics and other skills, and can even be less aggressive and more socially engaged.

"When we understand that we can build our intelligence, rather than it being fixed, we take risks; we are interested in learning from mistakes rather than focusing on how people see us and wanting to do things perfectly and quickly," said Eduardo Briceño, a co-founder and the CEO of Mindset Works, a company based on the research by Ms. Dweck and Lisa S. Blackwell, the program's co-founders.

'Brainology' Approach

Mindset Works, based in San Carlos, Calif., won a small-business-innovation grant from the federal Institute of Education Sciences to scale up its "Brainology" curriculum, which provides six to 12 hours of online and in-person instruction and activities over five to 12 weeks.

The software targets grades 5-9, though the program as a whole can be implemented schoolwide. Lessons include brain development and learning, fixed-vs.-growth mindsets, and different strategies students can use when they hit difficulty in a particular subject or problem.

The program is being used in about 600 schools nationwide, and the District of Columbia school system is rolling it out this fall in middle school advisory classes.

It's also been integrated into Scholastic Inc.'s Math 180 curriculum this fall, so that students in grades 6-12 begin math instruction with two weeks of lessons explaining mindsets and neuroplasticity-the concept that the brain changes with experience-followed by periodic refreshers during the year, according to Tyler Reed, the corporate-communications director for the New York City-based publisher.

"The thing is, kids don't mind failing," said David Dockterman, Scholastic's chief architect of learning sciences and an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "When kids play video games, they fail 80 percent of the time. They look at failure there as an opportunity to learn."

However, students can find school mistakes humiliating, he said.

"How you set it up for kids matters; they hear you. There's a lot of implicit meaning for kids," Mr. Dockterman told 600 middle and high school math teachers at a professional-development seminar in the Baltimore County, Md., school district last month.

For example, a teacher setting out a problem from a new unit might say, "Let's start with an easy one," which can discourage students who struggle or get the problem wrong; but a teacher might set students more at ease by introducing the same problem with, "This might take a few tries."

Focus in New Orleans

At the SciAcademy Charter School here in New Orleans, Anthony McElligott's sophomore chemistry class is learning to pose hypotheses about the dispersion patterns of two drops of identical ink in two identical beakers of water. Strolling around the class, the teacher points to one furiously scribbling student: "Chris' paper has 'because,' which shows he's supporting his answers with evidence. If you think you are done, add more evidence, give an example."

After demonstrating the experiment, Mr. McElligott finds about half the class correctly predicted the ink would have different dispersion patterns even though the water and beakers were the same and the ink was dropped in the center of each beaker. When those who answered incorrectly mutter in frustration, he smiles: "We're going to see in this class really great scientists who were wrong again and again."

The three-school Collegiate Academies charter network, of which SciAcademy was the first, sees cultivating growth mindsets as its first and most important mission. Founder Ben A. Marcovitz launched SciAcademy six years ago as one of the first charter high schools to open after Hurricane Katrina.

SciAcademy, the neighboring George Washington Carver Collegiate Academy, and George Washington Carver Preparatory Academy high schools, hire teachers based on multiple classroom observations, not just interviews.

Typically, Mr. Marcovitz estimates, 60 percent of interviewees don't stick around for the classroom observations, in which they teach a lesson, receive feedback, and teach again a few weeks later.

"But the 40 percent who do have already made a commitment to growth," he said. "[The hiring process] allows us to weed out people evincing growth mindset who haven't internalized it."

That's common, Mr. Briceño of Mindset Works said. In professional-development sessions, he has found about a third of teachers have heard the terms "fixed" and "growth" mindsets, "but might not know exactly what it is."

Teachers often confuse "teaching a growth mindset and exhorting kids to try hard," Ms. Dweck said. "You can't just tell a child to try hard without giving them strategies and supporting their efforts."

As part of an ongoing series of studies of growth-mindset teaching practices, Ms. Dweck and other researchers tracked more than 250,000 students learning fractions via the online Khan Academy program. Minor changes to student feedback-such as providing improvement-related praise vs. general encouragement-improved student persistence and math achievement, they found.

Praising students' strategies, focus, effort, persistence, and improvement "takes the spotlight off fixed ability and puts it on the process of learning," Ms. Dweck said.

At SciAcademy, the approach means students' learning problems are discussed privately, after class, while improvements are always called out in public, and in detail-even for a student moving from a 62 percent on the last test to a 65 percent on the next.

"Students of the week" are not only recognized during Friday gatherings, but also are asked to describe the steps they used to reach the goal.

It's important for teachers to go into detail when citing a student's correct answer, Mr. Dockterman said.

"If you talk about what the kid did [to get the right answer], other students can model it," he said. "If you just say, 'You're so smart,' they can't learn anything from that."

SciAcademy went so far as to ban the word "smart" on campus.

"That sounds like it has a weird 1984 connotation but it's really important," said Spencer Sherman, the 12th grade dean and environmental science teacher. "You get in the habit of saying 'smart,' and you find yourself saying it to kids, and you give kids the expectation that [intelligence] is fixed. We'll call each other out on it, because adult culture very quickly becomes scholar culture."

'Designed to Fail'

It can be particularly challenging to focus on effort with students who do excel easily. While teachers often notice struggling students who think they are "no good" in a subject, it's easier for high-achieving students to slip under the radar, Mr. Dockterman said.

"You think you are good at math and so it comes easy for you, but you stick to the things that are easy, and if you get to something hard, you shut down," he added.

SciAcademy found that out the hard way.

The school initially enrolled students in Advanced Placement classes on the basis of their having received top grades in similar subjects, Mr. Sherman explained. Many previously high-achieving students who "hit the wall" in the harder classes grew demoralized and reluctant to tackle other challenging work.

In response, the school opened Advanced Placement to anyone, but pitched the courses differently-"This will be the hardest class, with the most homework, but you'll learn more," Mr. Sherman said-and required an entry essay based on text difficult for even advanced students."It is a task you're designed to fail, because we want students to figure out how to respond to that," he said. "We're trying to weed out for fixed mindset. Now the students in AP don't think they got there by being smarter than everyone else, but because they worked really hard for it."

Collegiate Academies staff see a growth mindset as a necessity for their campuses, which are made up of interlocking trailers, and located in a post-Katrina neighborhood still dotted with abandoned houses and shopping centers.

"We have to believe that a student who comes to us reading at a 2nd grade level can go to college in four years," said Margo Bouchie, Collegiate Academies' chief academic officer. "You can't come to work everyday if you don't believe that, and we have to be very honest with the scholars about where they are."

School leaders acknowledge there can be a fine line between realistic and pie-in-the-sky growth. But SciAcademy students like junior Eugene Thomas provide some support for optimism: He entered high school reading on a 5th grade level, and moved up to a 10th grade level by the end of the year.

Mr. Thomas said teachers noticed every time he read slightly better and pushed him harder, urging him to read 30 minutes every day on his own time. "It's not really difficult; you just have to work hard," he said.

Quiz: What's Your Mindset
In some schools, a "growth mindset," or the idea that people can improve by seeking challenges and learning from mistakes, has reformed how teachers approach their instruction. How do you approach learning? Are certain skills naturally born to students, or can they really improve by effort alone? Using questions from Mindset Works, we've put together an exercise (not a test!) for you to try out.

Published in Print: September 11, 2013, as 'Growth Mindset' Gaining Traction As Ed. Strategy

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'Growth Mindset' Gaining Traction as School Improvement Strategy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's one thing to say all students can learn, but making them believe it-and do it-can require a 180-degree shift in students' and teachers' sense of themselves and of one another. While expressions like the "soft bigotry of low expectations" underscore the effects of teachers' and students' mindsets on academic success, it has proved difficult to pin down whether and how it's possible to change those attitudes once established.