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"How does this relate to you & the adults & students you work with?"

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"How does this relate to you & the adults & students you work with?"

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Steve Seward

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What Can I Say to Myself?Poster by Lorinda Kline

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What Can I Say to Myself?Poster by Lorinda Kline

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Here's the "Growing list" of pbks that support #GrowthMindset http://t.co/Xq0BKxiB4S #nerdybookclub http://t.co/dygip5XdGM

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Here's the "Growing list" of pbks that support #GrowthMindset http://t.co/Xq0BKxiB4S #nerdybookclub http://t.co/dygip5XdGM

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Here's the "Growing list" of pbks that support #GrowthMindset http://t.co/Xq0BKxiB4S #nerdybookclub pic.twitter.com/dygip5XdGM
— JoEllen McCarthy (@JoEllenMcCarthy) September 25, 2014

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Here's the "Growing list" of pbks that support #GrowthMindset http://t.co/Xq0BKxiB4S #nerdybookclub http://t.co/dygip5XdGM

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Here's the "Growing list" of pbks that support #GrowthMindset http://t.co/Xq0BKxiB4S #nerdybookclub http://t.co/dygip5XdGM

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Here's the "Growing list" of pbks that support #GrowthMindset http://t.co/Xq0BKxiB4S #nerdybookclub http://t.co/dygip5XdGM

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Psychologist Carol Dweck has given the educational community one of the most positive educational concepts yet to be developed - mindset. Like many good ideas it is deceptively simple - but the implications for schools are profound. Quite simply, mindset is the belief that ability is not fixed - that people can acquire new skills through targeted effort and practice. Simple.

We accept this belief in sport all the time - we are all familiar with the story of basketball hero Michael Jordan who was dropped from his high school varsity team and wasn't recruited by his first choice basketball college. So he practised ... and practised...and practised...until he became Michael Jordan - rated on the NBA website as the greatest basketball player of all time. The history of sport abounds with such stories. Not everyone becomes a Michael Jordan - but all can improve beyond their initial modest abilities. We expect our athletes to spend hours in training and practice in order to improve. Yet when it comes to mental potential and abilities we adopt a different view.

Despite the fact that I.Q. is a largely discredited concept, many children are labelled with a number or evaluation term - often the result of a single test. This label tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy . That score dictates the way we see the student - and, worse, often comes to be seen as an accurate reflection by the student himself. This attitude is often expressed by students as "I'm smart" or "I'm not as clever as...". According to Dweck this attitude is simply wrong. Within reason, mental ability is not fixed - just like sporting abilities and physical skills, mental aptitude can be improved.

"People are, to a large extent, in charge of their own intelligence. Being smart - and staying smart - is not just a gift, not just a product of their genetic good fortune. It is very much a product of what they put into it." - Carol Dweck. (To see a brief interview with Dweck who explains the theory and provides some of the evidence for it click .) Dweck contrasts "growth" mindset with "fixed" mindset. The two world views differ significantly in the way that they respond to the world. This unattributed graphic provides a quick overview:

The notion that intelligence itself is not fixed, that it can be improved by effective teaching and that a growth mindset can result in significant improvement in performance by students, should be celebrated by both educators and students. Central to Dweck's concept is that schools should stop concentrating on achievement (ignoring the huge side issue of exactly how that achievement should be measured in the first placed) and concentrate on identifying the actual learning that has taken place - and then attributing that learning, not to genetics, but to effort. (So, you scored 87% on the maths test? Did you work hard? No? Well, where is the credit in that? So you scored 58% on the maths test - when you often fail such tests. Great - you must have worked hard. Where specifically do you think you can continue to improve?) According to Dweck teachers need to emphasise the effort made by students and concentrate on the improvements that they make rather than their grades if we want to promote self-motivated learners with resilience and self-confidence. (This echoes the writing of the iconoclastic Alfie Kohn who is scathing about the inappropriate measures of success endorsed by schools- usually done with good intentions. Kohn maintains that traditional "grading" of student work actually limits student performance - including that of the high achievers. See the article section of his website for further readings http://www.alfiekohn.org/index.php

For teachers in the classroom it is reasonably easy to implement the "growth mindset" approach in the classroom. Dweck's book and website ( http://www.mindsetonline.com/index.html ) offer ideas on how this can be done - but really, it isn't that difficult - once you are in the right mindset yourself.

So, it seems that it doesn't matter if it is on the basketball court or in the classroom - student performance level is NOT fixed - students can all get better at virtually anything - with effort, persistence and self belief. As the saying goes... "The harder I practice the luckier I get."

Postscript:

The quotation used as a title for this blog is attributed to many people - but, after a little research, it seems most often attributed to champion golfer Gary Player. However, there is an even earlier attribution, ironically to another golfer - to 1961 PGA golf tournament winner Gerry Barber.

Infographic: http://mindmapblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Mindsets.jpg

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"The more I practice the luckier I get." Mindset - Carol Dweck

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Psychologist Carol Dweck has given the educational community one of the most positive educational concepts yet to be developed - mindset. Like many good ideas it is deceptively simple - but the implications for schools are profound. Quite simply, mindset is the belief that ability is not fixed - that people can acquire new skills through targeted effort and practice.

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What?

So what?

Now what?

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Change Your Words - Change Your Mindset by Alicia Hunter

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Change Your Words - Change Your Mindset by Alicia Hunter

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Change ur words- change ur mindset- great words 2 live by 2 start a new school year! #edchat #paedchat #whatisschool http://t.co/0G2fd8F2q9

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Change ur words- change ur mindset- great words 2 live by 2 start a new school year! #edchat #paedchat #whatisschool http://t.co/0G2fd8F2q9

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Change ur words- change ur mindset- great words 2 live by 2 start a new school year! #edchat #paedchat #whatisschool pic.twitter.com/0G2fd8F2q9
— Tammy Bennick (@Stavenski) August 16, 2014

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Change ur words- change ur mindset- great words 2 live by 2 start a new school year! #edchat #paedchat #whatisschool http://t.co/0G2fd8F2q9

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Change ur words- change ur mindset- great words 2 live by 2 start a new school year! #edchat #paedchat #whatisschool http://t.co/0G2fd8F2q9

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Change ur words- change ur mindset- great words 2 live by 2 start a new school year! #edchat #paedchat #whatisschool http://t.co/0G2fd8F2q9

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Hmmm. This is interesting! #satchat #satchatwc http://t.co/4iSQIYYyck

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Hmmm. This is interesting! #satchat #satchatwc http://t.co/4iSQIYYyck

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Hmmm. This is interesting! #satchat #satchatwc pic.twitter.com/4iSQIYYyck
— Ashley Nesbit (@AGoTeach) August 23, 2014

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Hmmm. This is interesting! #satchat #satchatwc http://t.co/4iSQIYYyck

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Hmmm. This is interesting! #satchat #satchatwc http://t.co/4iSQIYYyck

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Hmmm. This is interesting! #satchat #satchatwc http://t.co/4iSQIYYyck

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Choice Words by Peter Johnston

Opening Minds by Peter Johnston

Mindset by Carol Dweck

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Connection:

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Article: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart

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Article: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart

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My 5-year-old son has just started reading. Every night, we lay on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he'll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was "gratefully." He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, "Dad, aren't you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing." I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell-tale signs of a 'growth mindset.' But this wasn't by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years, and I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it the more it grows. They've found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones. What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed: and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.

However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people's mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not; that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually.

The good news is that mindsets can be taught; they're malleable. What's really fascinating is that Dweck and others have developed techniques that they call 'growth mindset interventions' which have shown that even small changes in communication or seemingly innocuous comments can have fairly long-lasting implications for a person's mindset. For instance, praising someone's process ("I really like how you struggled with that problem") versus praising an innate trait or talent ("You're so clever!") is one way to reinforce a growth mindset with someone. Process praise acknowledges the effort; talent praise reinforces the notion that one only succeeds (or doesn't) based on a fixed trait. And we've seen this on Khan Academy as well: students are spending more time learning on Khan Academy after being exposed to messages which praise their tenacity and grit and that underscore that the brain is like a muscle.

I really want to start a national conversation that examines how we as a society can help people develop a growth mindset. In fact, the Internet is a dream for someone with a growth mindset. Between Khan Academy, MOOCs and others, there is unprecedented access to endless content to help you grow your mind. However, society isn't going to fully take advantage of this without growth mindsets being more prevalent. So what if we actively tried to change that? What if we began using whatever means are at our disposal to start performing growth mindset interventions on everyone we cared about? This is much bigger than Khan Academy or algebra it applies to how you communicate with your children, how you manage your team at work, how you learn a new language or instrument. If society as a whole begins to embrace the struggle of learning, there is no end to what that could mean for global human potential.

And now here's a surprise for you. By reading this article itself, you've just undergone the first half of a growth-mindset intervention. The research shows that just being exposed to the research itself for example knowing that brain grows most by getting questions wrong, not right can begin to change a person's mindset. The second half of the intervention is for you to communicate the research with others. We've made a video (above) that celebrates the struggle of learning that will help you do this. After all, when my son, or for that matter, anyone else asks me about learning, I only want them to know one thing. As long as they embrace struggle and mistakes, they can learn anything.

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The Learning Myth: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart

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My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lay on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he'll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was "gratefully." He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute.

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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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Article: How to Teach Students About the Brain

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Article: How to Teach Students About the Brain

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December 2009/January 2010 | Volume 67 | Number 4
Health and Learning

Judy Willis

If we want to empower students, we must show them how they can control their own cognitive and emotional health and their own learning. Teaching students how the brain operates is a huge step. Even young students can learn strategies for priming their brains to learn more efficiently; I know, because I've taught both 5th graders and 7th graders about how their brains learn.

I was a practicing neurologist before I became a teacher. Once I entered the classroom and observed how my students learned, the connections between my two professions became clear. I began to write about brain-based teaching strategies. It took a few years, though, before I realized that my students could also understand how their brains learn.

When I began incorporating basic instruction about the brain into my classes and teaching simple activities to improve brain processing, students not only became more engaged and confident, but they also began changing their study practices in ways that paid off in higher achievement. Consider these typical comments from my 7th graders:

I imagine neurons making connections in my brain when I study. I feel like I'm changing my brain when I learn something, understand it, and review it.

If I use my prefrontal cortex to mentally manipulate what I learn, my dendrites and synapses grow, and I will own that learning for a long, long time. I won't have to learn fractions all over again each year.

Explaining how the brain works is especially important for students who believe that they are "not smart" and that nothing they do can change that. Many children, and even some parents and teachers, think that intelligence is determined at birth and that even intense effort will not budge their academic abilities. The realization that they can literally change their brains by improving how they approach learning and how they study is liberating.

Brain Filters: Let the Right Stuff In

I have taught both upper elementary and middle school students about filters in the brain that determine what information reaches their prefrontal cortex, which I call their thinking brains. We discuss three key elements of this filtering system: the reticular activating system, the limbic system, and dopamine. Students realize that their physical health, their emotions, and how well they focus their attention affects whether new information even reaches their thinking brains or gets filtered out because of negative emotions.

I guide students in activities that help them focus and achieve positive moods to prime themselves for learning. We practice techniques to increase mindfulness. For example, students learn to do visualizations, deliberately recalling in detail a place where they felt happy, calm, and safe. The more learners practice visualizing their particular calming place, the stronger the neural network holding that memory becomes; eventually, the students can easily return to that memory whenever they feel stressed. Returning to that safe place enables learners to let new information that someone is presenting flow into their thinking brain rather than being filtered out.

Students discover that when I guide them to visualize historic events, to picture vocabulary words with images that depict their meaning, or to see math procedures acted out in their mind's eye with "dancing numbers," they can better recall history, vocabulary, or math lessons.

I have students do relaxation breathing before we begin a test or challenging lesson. Students report that they feel calmer, more alert, and more focused-and they do understand and remember more.

To help students realize that brains and intelligence can change, I discuss neuroplasticity -the fact that the brain can grow new connections between neurons as we learn something by having new experiences. We can then strengthen these connections by remembering, practicing, visualizing, or using the new information. I show them brain scans, and we make diagrams and clay models of connections forming between neurons through cellular projections called dendrites. More dendrites grow when a person learns something new and then gets adequate sleep, I explain.

I send home photos of growing dendrites taken through an electron microscope and assign students to explain to family members the neuroanatomy behind these photos. (See the Neuroscience for Kids Web site for sample photographs).

Students' Most Powerful Tool

The more students practice, the sharper their brain-already their most powerful tool-becomes. Students know that the more they practice a basketball shot or rehearse a ballet performance, the more their skills improve. In my class, they learn that brains respond the same way. When a learner goes over multiplication facts or rereads confusing parts of a book, the brain gets better at processing this information because, with such repetition, more neurons grow and connect to other neurons, and neurons get more efficient at sending one another signals.

I talk directly with students about why strategies like taking scheduled short breaks or connecting learning to something pleasurable enhance brain function because of the role of dopamine and the emotion-monitoring amygdala. Students hypothesize about what strategies (such as taking too-frequent snack breaks and interrupting their focus with texting versus creating a homework schedule or turning off the television) will help-or hinder-their learning. They experiment with studying under different conditions (with and without music, working in bed or at a desk, and so on), collect their own data about what works best, and compare data. Students also chart the relationship between their level of effort and the achievement of their goals.

When my students started telling other teachers about how they had learned to "make my brain work the way I want it to," colleagues began asking me for my brain lessons. I have shared with fellow teachers a brief overview of what I think students should know about their brains. In the interest of helping more teachers gain and share this information, I present that overview here as a downloadable pdf document. I invite readers to use this document (" What You Should Know About Your Brain") with students as they wish.

During the first four weeks of school, I present about three 15-minute sessions focused on this material each week. Each time, I explain a section of the material in my own words and demonstrate on models, with sketches, or with actual images of brain structures. Questions prompt discussion that deepens students' understanding of brain function. For example, asking, "Why don't neurons (nerve cells in the brain) replace themselves like skin and blood cells do?" reinforces the fact that neurons store memories; if brains continually replaced neurons, learned information would be lost.

As we learn about brain function, students write about how this new information influences their attitude toward school, their study habits, and their ability to change their own intelligence. Throughout the year, I incorporate reminders about brain function into my instructional strategies. For example, I explain how growing more dendrites connects new information that a person learns into neural networks, solidifying the knowledge. Rehearsing newly learned material stimulates dendrites. After we discuss a new concept, I have students write summaries of the new information in their own words in their learning journals; we call these summaries dend-writes.

Students Take Charge

I have seen direct discussions of brain functioning yield wonderful results in terms of students taking charge of their own learning. One 10-year-old student told me,

Now I know about growing dendrites when I study and get a good night's sleep. Now when I'm deciding whether to watch TV or review my notes, I tell myself that I have the power to grow brain cells if I review. I'd still rather watch TV, but I do the review because I want my brain to grow smarter. It's already working and feels really good.

Having seen how interested my students are in learning about their brains and how they respond to that learning with increased motivation and better study habits, I've come to believe that instruction about how the brain processes information should be included in the curriculum. Whether as part of health classor class, or in a separate course, students should receive direct instruction in how best to use their most powerful tool.

Teaching students the mechanism behind how the brain operates and teaching them approaches they can use to work that mechanism more effectively helps students believe they can create a more intelligent, creative, and powerful brain. It also shows them that striving for emotional awareness and physical health is part of keeping an optimally functioning brain. Thus, instruction in brain function will lead to healthier learners as well as wiser ones.

Judy Willis, MD, practiced neurology for 20 years; she currently teaches at Santa Barbara Middle School in California and conducts professional development workshops. She is the author of Teaching the Brain to Read: Strategies for Improving Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension (ASCD, 2008); www.RADTeach.com; jwillisneuro@aol.com.

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December 2009/January 2010 | Volume 67 | Number 4 Health and Learning Judy Willis If we want to empower students, we must show them how they can control their own cognitive and emotional health and their own learning. Teaching students how the brain operates is a huge step.

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https://todaysmeet.com/EastOakviewStaff

How does the fixed vs. growth mindset relate to you, the staff you work with, and the students you teach?

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I have recently read a book that has rocked my world and I want to turn you onto it as well because I think it has HUGE implications for musicians. I am talking about Dr. Carol S. Dweck's book, Mindset. Run- don't walk-to the nearest bookstore and purchase it or log onto Amazon and order it today!

What if it wasn't our abilities or talent that bring us success, but whether we approach our goals with the most effective mindset?

Dr. Dweck is Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and one of the world's leading researchers in the field of motivation. Her research has focused on why people succeed and how to foster that success. She has spent years studying and researching how people cope with challenges, setbacks, and criticism. (things musicians know quite a bit about!) In Mindset, Dr. Dweck asks and answers a bold question, "How can a simple belief have the power to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life." Curious? What is this simple belief?

"For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value."

Dr. Dweck describes the two different views or mindsets we adopt. One leads to one way of thinking and behaving and the other leads to a totally different way of thinking and behaving. I have summarized the "voice" of the two mindsets in the following chart. See if you recognize your own voice in any of these statements:

Most likely you recognized statements from both mindsets, but which voice do you identify with the most- or ? Dr. Dweck calls Mindset #1 the fixed mindset and Mindset #2 the growth mindset. Performers acting out of the fixed mindset believe that their abilities or talent is carved in stone, or fixed. This creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over again. A frightening thought for the performer in the fixed mindset is playing or singing their best and still not succeeding and you know what "not succeeding" means to someone in this mindset? FAILURE. We're not talking "I just messed up." or "I really tanked in that audition." Performers with the fixed mindset identify with their failure and conclude, "I AM the failure."

Performers acting out of the growth mindset believe that every experience is an opportunity for growth, discovery, and learning. "The growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities-talent, abilities, and skills-are things you can cultivate through your efforts." Performers operating out of the growth mindset recognize that years of passion, hard work, and training will result in a lifetime of stretching, learning and developing into what they want to be. Their focus is definitely on the journey!

The great messages here are:

Effort is good and necessary!

Success through learning and discovering, is made, not born!

If you don't have the mindset you want, you can CHANGE!

What mindset do YOU have?

What kind of things do you hear yourself saying?

Things that keep you open to learning or things that mean you're trying to prove that you're really good enough?

No matter which mindset you are currently in, read this book! Although it is based on years of research, it is a wonderfully accessible read and chock full of great examples from music, sports, and the headlines. I really want to hear your response even if you have already read it! Please leave me a comment.

Sign up today to receive my monthly performance tips by downloading the free mp3 program, Mental Strategies for Peak Performance in Music: click here

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Which Mindset Do YOU have? | Peak Performance for Musicians

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I have recently read a book that has rocked my world and I want to turn you onto it as well because I think it has HUGE implications for musicians. I am talking about Dr. Carol S. Dweck's book, Mindset. Run- don't walk-to the nearest bookstore and purchase it or log onto Amazon and order it today!

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Article: What's Your Learning Disposition?

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Article: What's Your Learning Disposition?

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What's Your Learning Disposition? How to Foster Students' Mindsets | GROWTH MINDSET | MindShift | KQED News

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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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Minilessons are actually really easy to plan, and fun to teach. What? You don't believe me? Let me show you, right now, how to do it. First, take this little quiz to see if this post is for you: 1.