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The Mindset Kit is a free set of online lessons and practices designed to help you teach and foster adaptive beliefs about learning.

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Mindset Kit - Resources for growth and learning mindsets

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A free resource for educators and parents who want to foster learning mindsets such as growth mindset. Follow lessons and practices from experts and members of our community.

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Mindset Works Website- Science Behind Growth Mindset

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The Growth Mindset - What is Growth Mindset - Mindset Works

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Brainology is an online interactive program in which middle school students learn about how the brain works, how to strengthen their own brains, and how to better approach their own learning. In the process they develop a growth mindset whereby they think of their intelligence as something they can…

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Our mindsets exist on a continuum from fixed to growth, and although we'd like to always have a growth mindset, the reality is that we can only be on a journey to a growth mindset. The goal is to recognize fixed mindset elements in ourselves and then reflect on feedback and strategies for how to improve.

The Mindset Assessment is a quick diagnostic tool drawn from research-validated measures for people age 12 and over to use to assess their mindsets. It has been used in many studies to show how mindsets can change, and can be used by you and your students to identify areas in which you can work toward a growth mindset. You will be delivered personalized feedback after you submit the assessment.

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Our mindsets exist on a continuum from fixed to growth, and although we'd like to always have a growth mindset, the reality is that we can only be on a journey to a growth mindset. The goal is to recognize fixed mindset elements in ourselves and then reflect on feedback and strategies for how to improve.

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Middle School Math Poster

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Bulletin Board Starter

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10 What Questions to Develop Growth Mindset

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The power of believing that you can improve | Carol Dweck

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A school that keeps learning - Part 3: Growth mindset

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Sesame Street: Janelle Monae - Power of Yet

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RSA ANIMATE: How To Help Every Child Fulfil Their Potential

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Young Adult Novels That Teach a Growth Mindset

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Use these novels to teach learning from loss and overcoming adversity to your middle schoolers and high school freshmen.

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Stanford Carol Dweck Interview

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"You're so talented!", "You are gifted - a natural!", "You're doing so well in school, you must be really smart!" - children receive these messages (or their negative counterparts), along with many other messages on a daily basis from their peers, parents and teachers. Are these just words or do they mean more? How are children affected by the words we use to praise, coach and criticize them?

I recently met with Stanford University's Carol S. Dweck (Department of Psychology - Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor) to learn more about her fascinating research into "self-conceptions (or mindsets) people use to structure the self and guide their behavior". I reached out to Dr. Dweck after reading her book " Mindset: The New Psychology of Success " which challenged my belief system about intelligence. While I believed hard work can make the difference between two intelligent people, I also believed intelligence to be more of a fixed trait - something you are born with, rather than something you can develop.

Dr. Dweck's research, compelling and thorough, challenges this widely held belief, or 'fixed mindset', by demonstrating how powerful a 'growth mindset' can be in achieving success and happiness.
OneDublin.org: What sparked your interest in the field of psychology?

Carol Dweck: "I was always interested in people and why they do what they do, and that crystallized in college. Psychology combined many of my interests: I loved the scientific method - putting your ideas to the test - and I liked the human subject matter of psychology.

"We're always being told nowadays to 'find your passion'. I say 'build your passion' - find or create a topic, and a way of studying it, that will become your passion. What I do in psychology didn't exist - I had to build it."

OneDublin.org: What was your trigger to pursue research into mindsets?

Dweck: "I was fascinated by how people cope with failure or obstacles. I was curious about why some students love challenge, and others who may be equally talented, shy away from challenges - play it safe. I just wanted to figure that out.

"Later on I also realized that this interest was fed by a past experience of mine. My 6th grade teacher seated us around the room in I.Q. order, and although I did well in that metric it created this fear of falling from grace, of making the mistake of not being as perfect as I needed to be. I wanted to unlock that psychology and maybe bottle it, find out the underlying reasons people are afraid of challenges or crumbling in the face of setbacks, and ultimately help kids."

OneDublin.org: When you started your research did you have much to draw from?

Dweck: "There were inklings of research. There was work on learned helplessness in animals, where animals would stop trying to do things that were within their power to do, because of their past experiences. There started to be work in attribution theory, showing how people's interpretations of their successes and failures could really influence their motivation. In my work I started to put those things together - I started to ask if children's interpretation of their mistakes or setbacks could create their responses."

OneDublin.org: What is your definition of fixed and growth mindsets?

Dweck: "In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb.

"In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it."

OneDublin.org: Is there a widely held belief in the fixed mindset and what is the source of mindsets?

Dweck: "Both mindsets are widely held. Generally we find about 40% of people, students and adults, endorse the growth mindset, 40% the fixed and the remainder are in the middle - they can't make up their minds.

"I think both mindsets are rampant in our culture. We've always had the message that practice makes perfect, anyone can do anything if they put their minds to it, but we also have this worship of genius and talent. When we look at tremendous performers, like Michael Jordan, when we look at superstars, when we look at geniuses, we assume they were born that way because we don't see what went into their accomplishments.

"I teach a freshman seminar here at Stanford every year on mindsets. For one assignment I have the students do research on their hero and find out whether the hero was so famous or successful because they were naturally talented or whether they in fact they had to overcome a lot of adversity and work really hard. Not once has it ever been the case that their hero coasted."

OneDublin.org: With all that's been written about the success of Apple, and the role Steve Jobs played in that success, how would you classify Steve Jobs?

Dweck: "I've thought about it a lot when I read Steve Job's biography and I think Job's had a real growth mindset about himself. He was constantly experimenting, using the feedback and creating new things from it. But I don't think he necessarily had a growth mindset about other people. He wanted them to be perfect and they lived in fear of coming to him and getting his disapproval, instead of his approval. You can have a different mindset about yourself and other people."

OneDublin.org: What are the downsides for parents using phrases like this with their children - 'You are so smart!' and 'You are so talented!'

Dweck: "I think the self-esteem movement really trained our society's intuitions about how to create happy and successful kids. The idea was you could hand kids self-esteem on a silver platter by praising them, by telling them how smart and special they are, and this would set them for life and everything else good would follow. But I had already been doing research on vulnerable and resilient kids for decades and I knew it was the vulnerable ones that were focused on being smart and I worried that praising intelligence and practices like that put a spotlight on intelligence and also told kids that's what we value you for, that's why we admire you.

"We've done a long series of studies now with all ages of kids and we've seen that praising intelligence backfires. It puts them in a fixed mindset and not want challenges. They don't want to risk looking stupid or risk making mistakes. Kids praised for intelligence curtail their learning in order to never make a mistake, in order to preserve the label you gave to them.

"Students praised for the process they engaged in - their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance - these kids take on hard tasks and stick with them, even if they make lots of mistakes. They learn more in the long run."

OneDublin.org: Discuss one of the many studies you've performed on mindsets in more detail.

Dweck: "We brought students, 5th graders, one at a time into a room from their school and we gave them ten problems from a non-verbal I.Q. test. After they completed the ten problems we gave each child one kind of praise. Some kids were praised for their intelligence: 'That's a really good score, you must be smart.', some were praised for the process - in this case effort: 'Boy, that's a really good score, you must have worked hard.', and some kids were just told: 'That's a really good score.' for purposes of comparison.

"We then asked students, 'So, what do you want to work on now?' and we described either tasks in their comfort zone (where they wouldn't make mistakes) or challenging tasks (where they would make mistakes but learn something important).

"The majority of kids who were praised for their intelligence wanted the easy task in their comfort zone whereas the overwhelming majority of kids praised for the process wanted the hard task they could learn from.

"Later we gave everyone really hard problems and we saw that the kids praised for intelligence lost their confidence because if success meant they were smart, struggle meant they weren't, and they lost their enjoyment of the task. Even when we went back to the easier task their performance suffered, and later on they lied about their score.

"The kids who had been praised for the process stayed confident, saw the problems were harder and worked at it, and remained engaged. When we went back to the easier problems their score on the I.Q. test was higher than it had been before. They didn't lie when asked about how they'd done on the hard problems - they told the truth, there was nothing undermining or humiliating about struggling with something new or difficult.

"We did the study six times because the results were so powerful: we wanted to make sure the results were real."

OneDublin.org: Have you done any studies on the proclivity to cheat as it related to the mindsets?

Dweck: "Yes we have. We've shown with a large sample of middle school students that after a poor score on a test the students with a fixed mindset say yes, they would seriously consider cheating. A TV show in Korea recreated our praise studies and they showed that children and adults who were told they were brilliant for a task cheated substantially more than those praised for their process, for their effort."

OneDublin.org: Have there been longitudinal studies that have tracked performance over time by mindset?

Dweck: "We've tracked students over two years, students making a transition to junior high (7th grade), and we saw their math grades pull apart. The only difference between the two groups was their mindset."

OneDublin.org: What steps do you recommend parents and teachers take in response to your research on mindsets?

Dweck: "I think the way we praise, the way we talk to kids, all of these messages are conveying a value system. So when we say to someone 'Oh, you're so smart', it says that's what we value. When we say to a kid 'Oh, you did that so quickly, you're really good at it', we're telling them doing something quickly and easily means you're good at it, and if you have to work hard you aren't good at it. Or if we say 'Wow, I'm really impressed', and they haven't really worked hard, then we're saying that's what impresses me - that if you make a mistake, if you struggle, it doesn't impress me.

"We have to really send the right messages, that taking on a challenging task is what I admire. Sticking to something and trying many strategies, that's what I admire. That struggling means you're committed to something and are willing to work hard. Parents around the dinner table and teachers in the classroom should ask, 'Who had a fabulous struggle today?'"

OneDublin.org: You've seen a lot of students in your time at Columbia and now at Stanford - what advice do you have for the Class of 2012 as they leave high school and transition to college?

Dweck: "Two things. One is to remember that the brain grows new connections when you learn and that you are going to have to grow a lot of new connections in college. College is not like high school and it really requires that you hunker down, dig in and get all the help that you need to figure out this new game. And the other thing, which is related, is figure out how to use all of the resources in the environment to help you choose the right courses, to help you navigate the system, to make it as good an experience for yourself as you can.

"A lot of people come from high schools where they've been spoon-fed or they've gotten a lot of attention, where they know the ropes, and they feel kind of lost in college. It's not just about feeling that you have the brain power to tackle the academic material, it really is about finding your way around, and making the environment work for you."

Related Articles

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Stanford University's Carol Dweck on the Growth Mindset and Education

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"You're so talented!", "You are gifted - a natural!", "You're doing so well in school, you must be really smart!" - children receive these messages (or their negative counterparts), along with many other messages on a daily basis from their peers, parents and teachers. Are these just words or do they mean more?

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A body of research has shown that telling children that they're smart and implying that their success depends on it fosters fixed mindsets. When these children later experience struggle, they tend to conclude that their ability is not high after all, and as a result they lose confidence, so our praise has the opposite effect of what we intended. On the other hand, praising hard work or strategies used, things that children control, has been shown to support a growth mindset.

This research was designed to learn more about one of the ways to support a growth mindset, not to identify all there is to fostering a growth mindset. When people newer to the growth mindset framework initially learn about this research, they sometimes conclude that we should simply praise children for working hard. But this is a nascent level of understanding. First, exhorting students to work hard would be an attempt to directly change behaviors without changing the underlying belief about the nature of abilities.

Second, students often haven't learned that working hard involves thinking hard, which involves reflecting on and changing our strategies so we become more and more effective learners over time, and we need to guide them to come to understand this. For example, a novice teacher who sees a student trying very hard but not making any progress may think "well, at least she's working hard, so I'll praise her effort," but if the student continues to do what she's doing, or even more of it, it's unlikely to lead to success. Instead, the teacher can coach the student to try different approaches to working, studying, and learning, so that she is thinking more deeply (i.e. mentally working harder) to become a better learner, and of course the teacher should do the same: reflect on how to adjust instruction. "It's not just about effort. You also need to learn skills that let you use your brain in a smarter way. . . to get better at something." ( Yeager & Dweck, 2012.)

Third, cultivating growth mindsets involves a gradual process of releasing responsibility to students for them to become more self-sufficient learners, and praise is a communications technique that tends to be more helpful earlier in that process of building agency. Later on, adults can ask students questions that prompt them to reflect, so that they're progressing down the path toward independence.

Fourth, praise and coaching are not the only, or most powerful, ways to foster growth mindsets. For example, another method is modeling lifelong learning and making it visible, which gets us to the next confusion.
Confusion #3: Growth mindset is about changing young people, not adults
Some recent criticisms paint growth mindset work as solely focused on the students and not the adults. This is a misunderstanding of what growth mindset efforts are about. In our work with educators, we encourage the adults to start with themselves. If we don't work to shift our own mindset about ourselves and our students, then we won't work to change many other important things in the system necessary to improve education. Furthermore, our efforts to foster growth mindsets in students are likely to fail because we will say and do things that reflect our fixed mindset beliefs, which students will notice. We must deeply explore mindsets within ourselves and then gradually work to develop our own growth mindsets and our habits as learners. This means authentically working to become better at what we do throughout our lives, including how we teach and how we create contexts that help students thrive, and making our learning process visible to one another and to students.

We encourage the schools we serve to train teachers early in their growth mindset efforts, involving reflections and discussions on adult beliefs and continuous improvement practices. We provide professional learning resources to help them do so. Dr. Dweck and other mindset researchers speak about the importance of fostering a growth mindset in adults and have researched the mindsets of educators, managers, leaders, and other grownups. Growth mindset research is about learning how we humans can all become more motivated and effective learners, not about how we can change students but not ourselves.
Confusion #4: All that matters is what's in the mind
Another confusion about mindset is that the only determinant of success is our mindset. But that's not the case. Context, culture, environment, and systems matter. For one thing, people's mindsets (as well as other beliefs and behaviors) are strongly shaped by the people around them. Beyond that, people's destiny is not only a function of what's within them, but also of what's around them. A lot of the early mindset research studies focused on individual's minds because they were seeking to understand how humans work. But mindset researchers recognize, research, and speak about the importance of shifting culture, context, and systems, and both researchers and practitioners actively work on that aspect of change efforts.
Confusion #5: Improvement is all about changing beliefs and not doing anything else
Related to that, another confusion we see, also reflected in recent commentaries, is that growth mindset work is solely about fostering the belief that we can improve, but not about changing the educational system or actually doing anything about that belief. Carol Dweck has talked extensively about changing learning tasks, testing practices, and grading systems. Too many tasks and teaching approaches are superficial, irrelevant, unengaging, and not learner-centered. We do need to change these tasks, the curriculum, and the pedagogy. We need to change the idea that school is about testing rather than about learning. We also need to better tackle broader issues such as childhood trauma and lack of exposure to early reading. People who dive deeper into growth mindsets learn about how important these issues are and how we might begin to address them, and a growth mindset helps them take on the challenges. As David Yeager and Gregory Walton point out:
[Mindset] interventions complement-and do not replace-traditional educational reforms. They do not teach students academic content or skills, restructure schools, or improve teacher training. Instead, they allow students to take better advantage of learning opportunities that are present in schools and tap into existing recursive processes to generate long-lasting effects . . . Indeed, [Mindset] interventions may make the effects of high-quality educational reforms such as improved instruction or curricula more apparent (Deepening our understanding over time Yeager & Walton, 2011 Growth Mindset Enables Change ). Let's Learn Together
As with anything else, the deeper we go into mindsets, the deeper our understanding becomes. Over time, more nuanced questions arise, such as about the relationship between mindset and performance, results, failure, potential, assessments, mistakes, and many other things. For example, early on a teacher who is learning about mindset may start oversimplifying mistakes as always being 'good', but this can confuse learners, as mistakes are not always something we should seek to do. With time we start distinguishing stretch mistakes, sloppy mistakes, aha-moment mistakes, and high-stakes mistakes.

Research has shown that developing a growth mindset is beneficial in a variety of contexts, from education to the workplace to interpersonal relationships to sports to health. It leads people to take on challenges they can learn from, to find more effective ways to improve, to persevere in the face of setbacks, and to make greater progress, all of which we need to further cultivate in education. Furthermore, there is evidence that its benefits are most pronounced for people who face negative stereotypes, such as underserved minorities and females in STEM, and as a result growth mindset efforts can narrow the achievement gap.

Growth mindset is a seemingly simple concept, but there is a lot of nuance to the framework and its applications. I hope that this article helps clarify common misconceptions. We invite people to continue diving deeper into this body of work and engage in explorations together. We welcome further feedback because it takes a village, or more precisely, all of us, to foster better learning.

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Growth Mindset: Clearing up Some Common Confusions | KQED

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A body of research has shown that telling children that they're smart and implying that their success depends on it fosters fixed mindsets. When these children later experience struggle, they tend to conclude that their ability is not high after all, and as a result they lose confidence, so our praise has the opposite effect of what we intended.

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Carol Dweck on Performance Assessment (Teaching Channel)

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See the entire Deeper Learning video series at http://www.TeachingChannel.org. Carol Dweck, psychologist and growth mindset researcher, shares her insights on the approach of Envision Education. See all the Envision Education videos in this series: https://www.TeachingChannel.org/envision-education-video-library-eed

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Inspiring video on persevering no matter how many times you have failed in life.\n\nThis video mentions well known people who had failed, but kept pressing on until they became successful.

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Good Thinking! - Attack the Knack | PBS LearningMedia

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Attack the Knack investigates student motivation in science, and explores how the types of feedback students receive can influence self-perception, effort, persistence and learning.

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Helping children confront challenges requires a more nuanced understanding of the "growth mindset."

As a young researcher, Carol Dweck was fascinated by how some children faced challenges and failures with aplomb while others shrunk back. Dweck, now a psychologist at Stanford University, eventually identified two core mindsets, or beliefs, about one's own traits that shape how people approach challenges: "fixed mindset," the belief that one's abilities were carved in stone and predetermined at birth, and "growth mindset," the belief that one's skills and qualities could be cultivated through effort and perseverance. Her findings brought the concepts of fixed and growth mindsets to the fore for educators and parents, inspiring the implementation of her ideas among teachers-and even companies -across the country.

But Dweck recently noticed a trend: a widespread embrace of what she refers to as "false growth mindset"-a misunderstanding of the idea's core message. Growth mindset's popularity was leading some educators to believe that it was simpler than it was, that it was only about putting forth effort or that a teacher could foster growth mindset merely by telling kids to try hard. A teacher might applaud a child for making an effort on a science test even if he'd failed it, for instance, believing that doing so would promote growth mindset in that student regardless of the outcome. But such empty praise can exacerbate some of the very problems that growth mindset is intended to counter. A new edition of Dweck's book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, updated to address false growth mindset, comes out at the end of this month. I recently spoke with Dweck about how she wants her ideas to be applied. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Christine Gross-Loh: Could you tell me about the development of the idea of growth mindset? What was it intended to correct? What were you seeing that you felt growth mindset would help improve?

Carol Dweck: I've always been interested, since graduate school, in why some children wilt and shrink back from challenges and give up in the face of obstacles, while others avidly seek challenges and become even more invested in the face of obstacles. So this has been my primary question for over 40 years. At some point, my graduate students and I realized that a student's mindset was at the foundation of whether [he or she] loved challenges and persisted in the face of failure.

When students had more of a fixed mindset-the idea that abilities are carved in stone, that you have a certain amount and that's that-they saw challenges as risky. They could fail, and their basic abilities would be called into question. When they hit obstacles, setbacks, or criticism, this was just more proof that they didn't have the abilities that they cherished.

In contrast, when students had more of a growth mindset, they held the view that talents and abilities could be developed and that challenges were the way to do it. Learning something new, something hard, sticking to things-that's how you get smarter. Setbacks and feedback weren't about your abilities, they were information you could use to help yourself learn. With a growth mindset, kids don't necessarily think that there's no such thing as talent or that everyone is the same, but they believe everyone can develop their abilities through hard work, strategies, and lots of help and mentoring from others.

Gross-Loh: When I first interviewed you about growth mindset a few years ago, I remember that it was a relatively unknown idea. But growth mindset is now so popular that I'll hear people who aren't steeped in educational theory say, "Praise the effort, not the child (or the outcome)." Why do you think this idea struck such a chord, and how did you find out there were people misunderstanding it?
"Nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time."
Dweck: Many educators were dissatisfied with drilling for high-stakes tests. They understood that student motivation had been a neglected area, especially of late. So many educators, as well as many parents, were excited to implement something that might reenergize kids to focus on learning again, not just memorization and test taking, but on deeper, more joyful learning.

But a colleague of mine, Susan Mackie, was doing workshops with educators in Australia and observed that many of them were saying they got growth mindset and were running with it, but did not understand it deeply. She told me, "I'm seeing a lot of false growth mindset." I just did not get it initially-growth mindset is a very straightforward concept, and besides, why would people settle for a false growth mindset if they could have a real one? But I started keeping a list of all the ways people were misunderstanding growth mindset. When the list got long enough, I started speaking and writing about it.

Gross-Loh: Could you elaborate on false growth mindset?

Dweck: False growth mindset is saying you have growth mindset when you don't really have it or you don't really understand [what it is]. It's also false in the sense that nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time. Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait. Something really challenging and outside your comfort zone can trigger it, or, if you encounter someone who is much better than you at something you pride yourself on, you can think "Oh, that person has ability, not me." So I think we all, students and adults, have to look for our fixed-mindset triggers and understand when we are falling into that mindset.

I think a lot of what happened [with false growth mindset among educators] is that instead of taking this long and difficult journey, where you work on understanding your triggers, working with them, and over time being able to stay in a growth mindset more and more, many educators just said, "Oh yeah, I have a growth mindset" because either they know it's the right mindset to have or they understood it in a way that made it seem easy.

Gross-Loh: Why do you think these misunderstandings occurred?

Dweck: Many people understood growth mindset deeply and implemented it in a very sophisticated and effective way. However, there were many others who understood it in a way that wasn't quite accurate, or distilled it down to something that wasn't quite effective, or assimilated it into something they already knew.

Often when we see kids who aren't learning well, we might feel frustrated or defensive, thinking it reflects on us as educators. It's often tempting to not feel it is our fault. So we might say the child has a fixed mindset, without understanding instead that, as educators, it is our responsibility to create a context in which a growth mindset can flourish.

Gross-Loh: So it seems that the danger is that some teachers think they have growth mindset and believe it will transfer to their students, even though they themselves don't really understand it. How about this: Are there educators who do understand the idea that abilities can be developed but don't understand how to pass it on to students? Are there certain children who are more vulnerable to this sort of misunderstanding of growth mindset?

Dweck: Yes, another misunderstanding [of growth mindset] that might apply to lower-achieving children is the oversimplification of growth mindset into just [being about] effort. Teachers were just praising effort that was not effective, saying "Wow, you tried really hard!" But students know that if they didn't make progress and you're praising them, it's a consolation prize. They also know you think they can't do any better. So this kind of growth-mindset idea was misappropriated to try to make kids feel good when they were not achieving.

The mindset ideas were developed as a counter to the self-esteem movement of blanketing everyone with praise, whether deserved or not. To find out that teachers were using it in the same way was of great concern to me. The whole idea of growth-mindset praise is to focus on the learning process. When you focus on effort, [you have to] show how effort created learning progress or success.

Gross-Loh: What should people do to avoid falling into this trap?

Dweck: A lot of parents or teachers say praise the effort, not the outcome. I say [that's] wrong: Praise the effort that led to the outcome or learning progress; tie the praise to it. It's not just effort, but strategy ... so support the student in finding another strategy. Effective teachers who actually have classrooms full of children with a growth mindset are always supporting children's learning strategies and showing how strategies created that success.

Students need to know that if they're stuck, they don't need just effort. You don't want them redoubling their efforts with the same ineffective strategies. You want them to know when to ask for help and when to use resources that are available.

All of this is part of the process that needs to be taught and tied to learning.
"Focus on the learning process and show how hard work, good strategies, and good use of resources lead to better learning."
Gross-Loh: Is there a right way to praise kids and encourage them to do well?

Dweck: Many parents and teachers who themselves have growth mindset aren't passing it on because they are trying to protect the child's confidence, focus on the child's ability, and kind of boost the child's view or protect the child from a failure. They're conveying anxiety about ability.

But we have a new line of research (with my former graduate student, Kyla Haimovitz) showing that the way a parent reacts to a child's failure conveys a mindset to a child regardless of the parent's mindset. If parents react to their child's failures as though there is something negative, if they rush in, are anxious, reassure the child, "Oh not everyone can be good at math, don't worry, you're good at other things," the child gets it that no, this is important, and it's fixed. That child is developing a fixed mindset, even if the parent has a growth mindset.

But if the parent reacts to a child's failure as though it's something that enhances learning, asking, "Okay, what is this teaching us? Where should we go next? Should we talk to the teacher about how we can learn this better?" that child comes to understand that abilities can be developed.

So, with praise, focus on "process praise"-focus on the learning process and show how hard work, good strategies, and good use of resources lead to better learning. Be matter-of-fact, with not too strong or too passive a reaction.

You can see evidence of fixed mindset as young as 3.5 or 4 years old; that's when mindsets can start becoming evident, where some kids are very upset when they make a mistake or get criticized and fall into a helpless place. That's when children become able to evaluate themselves. We collaborated ... with researchers from the University of Chicago who had a longitudinal project with videotape of mother-child interactions. What we found was the more praise was process-oriented-not a ton, just where the greater proportion of the praise was process praise [versus outcome praise]-the more those children had a growth mindset and a high desire for challenge five years later, when they were in second grade.

Gross-Loh: That's very helpful to know for parents of young children. But what about older kids who might feel discouraged and worn-down after years of feeling that they weren't smart enough or a fear that they would never be able to be successful? Is it ever too late to foster a growth mindset in students?

Dweck: No-we've developed a number of online workshops addressed at adolescents and shown that when we teach [those] students a growth mindset, many of them regain their motivation to learn and achieve higher grades, especially students who have been struggling or students who have been laboring under a negative stereotype about [their own] abilities.

Research conducted last year by my former graduate student, David Yeager [now a professor at the University of Texas], on 18,000 students entering ninth grade, shows us that students who took growth-mindset workshops are seeking more challenges.

You can't tell adolescents, "We're adults, we have the answer, and we're going to tell you what it is." So we said, "We're scientists from Stanford University and the University of Texas, and we need your help. We're experts on the brain and how students learn, but you're the experts on being a freshman in high school and we'd like your input for a program we're developing for future freshmen."

We then taught them about how the teenage brain is especially open to learning. We talked about how it's a time of great plasticity, a time they need to take advantage of, and that they can grow their brains through taking on hard tasks in school and sticking to them. We had the students write a letter to a struggling freshman, counseling that person in terms of the growth-mindset principle, which is often very persuasive. We had testimonials from some public figures, talking about how a growth mindset got them to where they were.

Finally we talked about why someone would want a growth mindset. We realized that some kids would be overjoyed to hear you can develop your intellectual abilities, but others might not think it was the most exciting thing. So we then had a whole section on why you might want to develop your mind. Teenagers are really excited about the idea that they can do something to make the world a better place. So we asked them what they want to make their contribution to in the future-family, community, or societal problems-and then talked about how having a strong mind could help them make their future contribution.

We're excited about this because we know the world of the future is going to be about taking on ill-defined, hard jobs that keep changing. It's going to favor people who relish those challenges and know how to fix them. We are committed to creating a nation of learners.

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development of the idea of growth mindset

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Don't Let Praise Become a Consolation Prize

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Helping children confront challenges requires a more nuanced understanding of the "growth mindset," says the psychologist Carol Dweck.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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ClassDojo and Stanford's PERTS Research Center teamed up to create the the first season of The Mojo Show. The five-episode video series (along with a few incredible activities) highlight the power of having a growth mindset, and how any student can learn this skill!

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ClassDojo and Stanford's PERTS Research Center teamed up to create the the first season of The Mojo Show. The five-episode video series (along with a few incredible activities) highlight the power of having a growth mindset, and how any student can learn this skill!

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Learning Problem Solving and Growth Mindset in a Makerspace

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This is How Your Brain Grows | BrainCraft | PBS LearningMedia

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Follow the progress of the growth of your brain from early pregnancy through birth, childhood, and into adulthood.

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Growth Mindset Video

curriculum on August 13 2018

Having a growth mindset means that you know you can train your brain to get smarter.

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Fixed vs Growth Mindset Activity for Younger Kids

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C.J. Luckey (@cjluckeydope) - The Power of Yet - Offical Music Video - Dire

curriculum on August 14 2018

C.J. Luckey releases the official music video for his single "The Power of Yet" from album C.A.P.S. (Celebrating All Persevering Students). This music video was directed and shot by Andre Kahmeyer of Fiction Media.

Launched as a beta version in 2009, SafeShare.tv has gained popularity as the safest way to Watch and Share YouTube and Vimeo videos, and is widely used all around the globe by educators so their students can watch educational material without the fear of inappropriate videos showing up.

Are you sure you want to do this?

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C.J. Luckey (@cjluckeydope) - The Power of... - SafeShare.tv

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add-color add-playlist-dark add-playlist-green add-playlists add-safeview-green add-safeview add-white arrow-down-white arrow-down icon /arrow-left-lila Created with Sketch. arrow-yellow birthday book books browser calendar-small calendar cards-white icon /checkmark-small Created with Sketch. checkmark-white checkmark circles-add circles-remove circles-unlimited-2 circles-unlimited circles cissors close-white close coin-gold coin-purple icon /confetti Created with Sketch. cross-gray-small cross-yellow-small cut dashboard icon / deactivated-mark Created with Sketch.

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Growth Mindset Info passage for students

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Growth Mindset Info passage for students

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Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset

curriculum on August 14 2018

There are two types of mindsets we can cultivate. One that embraces problems as opportunities to learn, and one that avoids them, often out of fear to fail. People that avoid conflicts can be described as having a fixed mindset. Those who see problems as interesting challenges have a growth mindset. Sometimes we like to switch from one to the other. Support our channel with a small donation at http://www.patreon.com/sprouts Links: https://characterlab.org/ https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-71zdXCMU6A Books: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck (http://a.co/4GE24OG)

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Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset... - SafeShare.tv

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There are two types of mindsets we can cultivate. One that embraces problems as opportunities to learn, and one that avoids them, often out of fear to fail. People that avoid conflicts can be described as having a fixed mindset. Those who see problems as interesting challenges have a growth mindset.

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I can do this worksheet for older students

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I can do this worksheet for older students

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Elementary and middle school activities | Growth mindset | Khan Academy

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Neuroplasticity

curriculum on August 16 2018

The Sentis Brain Animation Series takes you on a tour of the brain through a series of short and sharp animations. The fourth in the series explains how our most complex organ is capable of changing throughout our lives. This inspiring animation demonstrates how we all have the ability to learn and change by rewiring our brains. Who is Sentis? We are a global team assisting individuals and organisations change their lives for the better. The human mind is our focus and we believe the mind is an individual's most important performance tool. We are the world leaders in the application of psychology and neuroscience to safety, leadership development, and wellbeing in the workplace. Find out more at http://www.sentis.com.au/ If you could like to discuss how we can create animation and video as part of a tailored training program for your organisation contact us today. http://www.sentis.com.au/contact/

Launched as a beta version in 2009, SafeShare.tv has gained popularity as the safest way to Watch and Share YouTube and Vimeo videos, and is widely used all around the globe by educators so their students can watch educational material without the fear of inappropriate videos showing up.

Are you sure you want to do this?

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The Sentis Brain Animation Series takes you on a tour of the brain through a series of short and sharp animations. The fourth in the series explains how our most complex organ is capable of changing throughout our lives. This inspiring animation demonstrates how we all have the ability to learn and change by rewiring our brains.

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A new study in the scientific journal Child Development shows that if you teach students that their intelligence can grow and increase, they do better in school.

All children develop a belief about their own intelligence, according to research psychologist Carol Dweck from Stanford University.

"Some students start thinking of their intelligence as something fixed, as carved in stone," Dweck says. "They worry about, 'Do I have enough? Don't I have enough?'"

Dweck calls this a "fixed mindset" of intelligence.

"Other children think intelligence is something you can develop your whole life," she says. "You can learn. You can stretch. You can keep mastering new things."

She calls this a "growth mindset" of intelligence.

Dweck wondered whether a child's belief about intelligence has anything to do with academic success. So, first, she looked at several hundred students going into seventh grade, and assessed which students believed their intelligence was unchangeable, and which children believed their intelligence could grow. Then she looked at their math grades over the next two years.

"We saw among those with the growth mindset steadily increasing math grades over the two years," she says. But that wasn't the case for those with the so-called "fixed mindset." They showed a decrease in their math grades.

This led Dweck and her colleague, Lisa Blackwell, from Columbia University to ask another question.

"If we gave students a growth mindset, if we taught them how to think about their intelligence, would that benefit their grades?" Dweck wondered.

So, about 100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the expanding nature of intelligence and the brain.

The students in the latter group "learned that the brain actually forms new connections every time you learn something new, and that over time, this makes you smarter."

Basically, the students were given a mini-neuroscience course on how the brain works. By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter, had significantly better math grades than the other group.

"When they studied, they thought about those neurons forming new connections," Dweck says. "When they worked hard in school, they actually visualized how their brain was growing."

Dweck says this new mindset changed the kids' attitude toward learning and their willingness to put forth effort. Duke University psychologist, Steven Asher, agrees. Teaching children that they're in charge of their own intellectual growth motivates a child to work hard, he says.

"If you think about a child who's coping with an especially challenging task, I don't think there's anything better in the world than that child hearing from a parent or from a teacher the words, 'You'll get there.' And that, I think, is the spirit of what this is about."

Dweck's latest book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, gives parents and teachers specific ways to teach the growth mindset of intelligence to children.

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Students' View of Intelligence Can Help Grades

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A new study in the scientific journal Child Development shows that if you teach students that their intelligence can grow and increase, they do better in school. All children develop a belief about their own intelligence, according to research psychologist Carol Dweck from Stanford University.

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World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea-the power of our mindset. Dweck explains why it's not just our abilities and talent that bring us success-but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset.

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Create the right conditions for a growth mindset to flourish in your school and your students Mindset doesn't matter when things are easy; it is only when faced with challenges that working from a growth mindset influences learning. But what is a 'growth mindset'? Why are mindset interventions not working in schools (yet)?

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A complete and easy-to-follow guide for inspiring every student with the power of growth mindset Created by teachers for teachers, this is the ultimate guide for unleashing students' potential through creative lessons, empowering messages and innovative teaching.

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Your Fantastic Elastic Brain: A Growth Mindset Book for Kids to Stretch and Shape Their Brains

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Your Fantastic Elastic Brain: A Growth Mindset Book for Kids to Stretch and Shape Their Brains [Deak Ph.D., JoAnn, Ackerley, Sarah] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Your Fantastic Elastic Brain: A Growth Mindset Book for Kids to Stretch and Shape Their Brains

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The Growth Mindset Playbook: A Teacher's Guide to Promoting Student Success

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An easy-to-implement collection of creative ideas and new strategies that inspire students with the power of growth mindsetStudents who harness the power of growth mindset can succeed beyond their wildest imagination. The key is having a growth-mindset teacher who provides support, guidance, and ...

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How Parents Help Child in Growth Mindset

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"Gripping...how can teachers snatch back their critical role and give children the necessary space to fail? They could start by making parents read Lahey." - New York Times Book Review

In the tradition of Paul Tough's How Children Succeed and Wendy Mogel's The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, this groundbreaking manifesto focuses on the critical school years when parents must learn to allow their children to experience the disappointment and frustration that occur from life's inevitable problems so that they can grow up to be successful, resilient, and self-reliant adults.

Modern parenting is defined by an unprecedented level of overprotectiveness: parents who rush to school at the whim of a phone call to deliver forgotten assignments, who challenge teachers on report card disappointments, mastermind children's friendships, and interfere on the playing field. As teacher and writer Jessica Lahey explains, even though these parents see themselves as being highly responsive to their children's well being, they aren't giving them the chance to experience failure-or the opportunity to learn to solve their own problems.

Overparenting has the potential to ruin a child's confidence and undermine their education, Lahey reminds us. Teachers don't just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. They teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight-important life skills children carry with them long after they leave the classroom.

Providing a path toward solutions, Lahey lays out a blueprint with targeted advice for handling homework, report cards, social dynamics, and sports. Most importantly, she sets forth a plan to help parents learn to step back and embrace their children's failures. Hard-hitting yet warm and wise, The Gift of Failure is essential reading for parents, educators, and psychologists nationwide who want to help children succeed.

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The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed

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The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed [Jessica Lahey] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education/teaching methods & materials - general

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From encouraging perseverance, to teaching students about how their brains work, to quotes about learning from failure, the Mindsets in the Classroom Poster Set is perfect for schools looking to implement the ideas in the New York Times Education Bestseller Mindsets in the Classroom quickly, easi...

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Growth Mindset as a Buffer Against Demotivation

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Growth Mindset as a Buffer Against Demotivation

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Reading Interventions with a Growth Mindset improves skills

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Reading Interventions with a Growth Mindset improves skills

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Neural evidence for enhanced attention to mistakes among school-aged children with a growth mindset

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Neural evidence for enhanced attention to mistakes among school-aged children with a growth mindset

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Neural evidence for enhanced attention to mistakes among school-aged children with a growth mindset

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Individuals who believe intelligence is malleable (a growth mindset) are better able to bounce back from failures than those who believe intelligence ...

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When kids make a mistake, it can be hard for them to look past the frustration and see the rewards that lie ahead. One way to keep your child from getting discouraged is to remind him or her that some of the world's most successful people made big mistakes. In fact, it's important that kids learn that the only way to succeed is by failing (sometimes more than once!). These famous failures can help your child understand that failure is a common pitfall on the path to success.

Here are eight stories to share with your child about famous people who kept trying and learned from their failures:

1. Rihanna, the R&B superstar, has achieved phenomenal success in the music world but has had her share of struggles, too, including a childhood affected by her father's addiction to crack cocaine. Rihanna's view of mistakes is reflected in a tattoo, which reads "Never a failure, always a lesson." She says it reflects her personal philosophy: "It's kind of my motto in life for everything. Instead of considering things to be mistakes, consider them lessons."

2. The Wright Brothers are known as the inventors of the airplane, but their big success came after lots of mistakes: The brothers built seven flying machines and crashed all of them more than once. (Fun fact: One of their early models would turn in the opposite direction they wanted it to!) But they learned from these setbacks. Each time they rebuilt an airplane, they were able to fix something that had gone wrong before.

3. Michael Jordan, a basketball legend, didn't make the cut when he was a sophomore in high school. "It was embarrassing not making that team," he said, but he used that failure to motivate him. "Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I'd close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it, and that usually got me going again."

4. Abraham Lincoln, one of the most famous and accomplished U.S. presidents, experienced plenty of failures before he was elected to the nation's highest office. When he was young, he opened a general store in Illinois, but the business failed and he had to declare bankruptcy. He also failed twice to get elected to the U.S. Senate.

5. Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka were the cofounders of the Sony Corporation, the electronics giant that makes popular products like PlayStation. The Sony partners made plenty of mistakes with one of their first products: an electric rice cooker that burned the rice instead of cooking it.

6. Katie Couric was the first woman to anchor a U.S. network news program. Although she is a very successful journalist now, things didn't look promising for her when she was younger. The president of CNN banned her from the air because of her high-pitched voice.

7. Babe Ruth is regarded as one of our greatest baseball players. He hit 714 home runs during his career, but he struck out even more: 1,330 times, to be exact. Ruth viewed his mistakes in a positive light, though: "Every strike brings me closer to the next home run."

To read more about these successful "failures," check out:

"Rihanna Inks Her New Motto Onto Her Chest," OK magazine

"Famous Failures,'" The Wall Street Journal

"Michael Jordan Transcends Hoops,"
Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company

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8 famous "failures" your child can learn from

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Think successful people - like Rihanna and Abe Lincoln - never make mistakes? Think again. Here are 8 famous failures kids can learn from.

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Don't be afraid to fail. In fact, failures often lead to success. Take inspiration from both the famous failures and the lesser known failures below. All of these failures were followed by perseverance and enormous successes.

I originally compiled this list of famous failures for my entrepreneurship class. The class curriculum consists of each student starting a businesses. These famous failures were meant to give the class some comfort about failures related to their businesses and the challenges they faced as teenagers.
I hope you also find these famous failures helpful.
When he was 15, Jack Andraka had a crazy idea. He would create a diagnostic test for Pancreatic Cancer that was better than the tests developed by scientists, research labs and billion dollar pharmaceutical companies.

Jack wrote a proposal to develop a better test. 199 research labs rejected him. I'll repeat that - 199 labs REJECTED him. Good thing he didn't give up and good thing a lab finally said "Yes". The 200th research lab - at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore - accepted him. At the lab Jack Andraka developed a Pancreatic Cancer test 100 times better and 26,000 times less expensive than the current test. Jack's invention will save tens of thousands of lives.

More of Jack Andraka's story, as well as dozens of other inspiring stories about when a small act (in Jack's case a "yes") transforms a life, can be found in the national bestseller HumanKind: Changing the World One Small Act At a Time. "The most uplifting and life-affirming book in years."- Forbes. Check out .

Michael Jordan, considered by many to be the greatest basketball player of all time, was devastated when he was cut from his high school varsity basketball team sophomore year. Good thing failure only inspired him to work harder.

Here's what he said about failure:
"I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

Steve Jobs was fired from the company he founded - Apple. He also failed with NeXT computer company and the Lisa computer. When Jobs returned to Apple, he led the business to become the most profitable company in the US.

Elizabeth Blackwell was rejected from 29 medical schools. So, she went to visit the schools in person. She was told she should pretend to be a man, because women weren't fit to receive medical schooling.

She refused.

Blackwell was accepted by mistake by Hobart College (then Geneva Medical College), and she matriculated. Many MD's refused to work with her, but she persevered and graduated.

Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the U.S. (1849). She then built a medical practice, created a place where women could have medical internships (since many healthcare facilities didn't welcome women), served impoverished families, and established the first medical college for women.

Walt Disney forged his birth certificate, so he would appear old enough to join the army during World War II. Joining the military was a way for him to escape a bad family life. After the military, he was laid off from his job at an ad agency. Walt's first animation studio went bankrupt. When he finally developed a hit character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, he lost all rights to his creation due to a poorly constructed contract with Universal. None of those stopped him. Walt went on to co-found The Walt Disney Company, which had $50.1 billion in 2017 revenue.

Walt said, "All the adversity I've had in my life, all the troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me. You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa, wasn't supposed to be leaning, but if it were straight it probably wouldn't be such a popular tourist attraction.

Steven Spielberg was rejected both times he applied to attend film school at University of Southern California (USC). That didn't stop him. Spielberg has grossed $8.5 billion from films he directed.

Oh, and after Spielberg became famous, USC awarded him an honorary degree, and Spielberg later became a trustee of the university.

Charles Schultz's drawings were rejected by his high school yearbook. Schultz went on to create Peanuts (featuring Snoopy and Charlie Brown). The cartoon and licensing/product revenue from Peanuts generated over $1 billion a year. The high school eventually put a statue of snoopy in the main office.

Want more positivity and inspiration? Check out my National Bestseller, , which is filled with true stories about how one small deed can make a world of difference. "Elegant and wise" (Deepak Chopra). "The most uplifting and life-affirming book in years" (Forbes). "You're going to love this book" (NPR). Learn more about HumanKind.

The Beatles were rejected by numerous record labels including Decca Records, which said, "guitar groups are on the way out" and "the Beatles have no future in show business." The Beatles did wind up getting signed by a record label. The Beatles sold more singles in the UK than anyone else, and the Beatles have moved more units in the US (more than 177 million) than any other group.

Colonel Harland Sanders was a 6th grade dropout. When he was 65, a new interstate highway diverted traffic away from his restaurant leaving Sanders with only his secret fried chicken recipe and a Social Security check. So he began selling his recipe and franchise idea. According to the news, he was rejected over 1,000 times. Then he found a partner with whom he build the KFC franchise powerhouse (over 15,000 restaurants).

Mary Kay Ash sold books door to door while her husband served in the military. When her husband returned from duty, they divorced. Ash was left with three children at a time when divorce wasn't acceptable.

Ash was frustrated when passed over for a promotion because she was a woman. So, she and her second husband planned a business, Mary Kay Cosmetics. One month prior to launch her husband died.

With a $5,000 investment from her oldest son, Ash launched her business. Forbes reported 2014 revenue as over $3.5 billion.

"I've learned that it doesn't matter how many times you failed. You only have to be right once. I tried to sell powdered milk. I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all." Mark Cuban, Billionaire Entrepreneur. Check out these 10 important business lessons from Mark Cuban.

After only seven and a half months, Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job co-anchoring the 6pm news at Baltimore's WJZ. Something about not being the right fit.

About another news job Oprah said:
"I once went back ... after covering a family that had been burned out and brought them some of my blankets and stuff. And the assistant news director ... told me ... that if I did that again and they found out about it, I could be fired, because I was involving myself in other people's stories. Which is true, you're there to cover the story, not get involved in it..."

Oprah became a media billionaire, hosted the highest ranked TV show of it's kind in history, and is an incredible philanthropist - getting involved in other people's stories to help them.

Elizabeth Arden (real name - Florence Nightingale Graham) dropped out of nursing school. Then her first business failed. She didn't give up. Instead, she borrowed $6,000 to start her next beauty company, Elizabeth Arden, Inc. Last year Elizabeth Arden, Inc. had over $1 billion in sales.

Jack Canfield was rejected 144 times before he found a publisher for his book, Chicken Soup for the Soul. When Jack told the publisher he wanted to sell 1.5 million books in the first 18 months, the publisher laughed and said he'd be lucky to sell 20,000.

That first book sold more than 8 million copies in America and 10 million copies around the world. Canfield's book brand is now a $1 Billion brand.

Canfield's advice:
"So the reality is that you just have to say, 'I'm more committed to my vision than I'm committed to your doubt or my fear,' and just go for it..." (From Conversations with Top Achievers by Woody Woodward)

It took 5 years and 5,126 failed prototypes for James Dyson to develop the world's first bagless vacuum cleaner. 10 years later Dyson setup his own manufacturing facility, because other manufacturers wouldn't produce his vacuum. Now he has the best selling vacuum in the world. According to The Sunday Times, in 2017 his net worth was 7.8 Billion Pounds.

Milton Hershey's chocolate business was his third. The first two went bankrupt. His perseverance led to enormous wealth and philanthropy. Hershey established the Milton Hershey School for at-risk children, and a foundation to provide opportunities to residents of Hershey, PA.

Speaking at Harvard's graduation, J.K. Rowling spoke about failures:
"You might never fail on the scale I did," Rowling told the new graduates. "But it is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all-in which case, you fail by default."

When Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book, she was divorced, bankrupt and on welfare.

After a dozen publishers rejected her manuscript one finally agreed to publish it. But the publisher told Rowling that she needed to get a job because there's no money in children's books.

She's now a billionaire.

Stan wasn't able to secure a spot as a ball boy for a Davis Cup tennis match because he was deemed too clumsy and uncoordinated. Smith went on to demonstrate his lack of coordination by winning Wimbledon, U.S. Open and eight Davis Cups.

Lady Gaga was dropped by Def Jam records after only 3 months. She went on to become one of the best selling artists of all time with 6 Grammy Awards and 13 MTV Video Music Awards. She is also an activist donating money and support for natural disaster victims, LGBT rights and vulnerable youth.

Madonna dropped out of college, moved to NYC and quickly lost jobs at Dunkin Donuts and as a hat check woman at the Russian Tea Room. She wound up supporting herself through $7 per hour nude modeling gigs.

Madonna still pushed for a career as an artist, and she succeeded. She has sold more than 300 million albums worldwide. Madonna is the best-selling female recording artist of all time.

Nick Woodman's startup, Funbug, was backed with $3.9 million from investors. Funbug failed. The $3.9 million was lost. Woodman was devastated and took an extended surfing trip.

Woodman wanted to take videos while he was surfing. That led to his next idea - cameras that made it easy for people to video while participating in activities.

Woodman and his girlfriend sold shell necklaces out of the trunk of their car to raise money for Nick's business. They also borrowed money from Woodman's parents. GoPro launched in 2002, and Forbes estimates Nick's net worth is now close to $5 billion.

Richie Ashburn was chosen to play in the Esquire Game in New York City with other teens who had baseball talent. Richie and his family travelled from their Nebraskan town of 950 people to play. Branch Rickey, who was considered the premiere judge of baseball talent, shook Ashburn's hand after the game and said, "Son, you should go back and do whatever it was you were going to do before you decided to be a ballplayer."

One Hall of Fame career later, Ashburn demonstrated that it's important to persevere. Ashburn did so well that each year the Phillies present the Richie Ashburn Special Achievement Award to "a member of the Phillies organization, and an area at the Phillies' stadium, is named "Ashburn Alley" in his honor.

Want to be inspired by people whose lives were transformed by a single act of kindness? Check out my book, HumanKind. It's full of heartwarming, true stories about when a small act of kindness transforms a life or has a ripple effect changing thousands of lives. (And all proceeds go to nonprofit Big Brothers Big Sisters.)

If you enjoyed this article about famous failures, you should check out this inspiring poem - Don't be Afraid to Fail. You might also want to check out this great advice about how to achieve your goals faster.

If you enjoyed this post about Famous Failures, please share:

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Famous Failures: 23 Stories to Inspire You to Succeed

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Don't be afraid to fail. In fact, failures often lead to success. Take inspiration from both the famous failures and the lesser known failures below. All of these failures were followed by perseverance and enormous successes. I originally compiled this list of famous failures for my entrepreneurship class.

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Failure occurs everyday, in school, jobs, housework, and within families. It is unavoidable, irritating and causes pessimism.

While the thought of flinging your hands in the air and walking away is all too appealing, take a second to connect with the people who have been there and survived. In fact, if you have learned some of the famous familures to success stories, you may change your perspective on failure.

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. - Henry Ford

10 Famous Failures to Success Stories That Will Inspire You

Here are 10 famous failures to success stories around the world that will inspire you to keep going and achieve greatness:

1. J.K. Rowling

During a Harvard commencement speech, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling outlined the importance and value of failure.

Why? Simply because she was once a failure too.

A few short years after her graduation from college, her worst nightmares were realized. In her words,

"I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew."

Coming out of this failure stronger and more determined was the key to her success.

2. Steve Jobs

The now revolutionary Applestarted off with two men in a garage. Years later we all know it as a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

Yet, almost unbelievably, Steve Jobs was fired from the very company he began.

The dismissal made him realize that his passion for his work exceeded the disappointment of failure. Further ventures such as NeXT and Pixar eventually led Jobs back to the CEO position at Apple. Jobs said in 2005:

"I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me."

Lost your job today? Keep kicking and you could be just like this guy!

3. Bill Gates

Bill Gates was a Harvard dropout. He co-owned a business called Traf-O-Data, which was a true failure.

However, skill and a passion for computer programming turned this failure into the pioneer of famous software company Microsoft, and the then 31-year-old into the world's youngest self-made billionaire.

In his own words:

"It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."

This isn't to say that dropping out of Harvard will make you into a billionaire, but maybe that shiny degree isn't worth as much as the drive and passion to succeed.

If you haven't found your passion like Bill Gates, this will help you: What Is Motivation And How To Get Motivated (Your Ultimate Guide)

4. Albert Einstein

The word 'Einstein' is associated with intelligence and synonymous with genius. Yet it is a famous fact that the pioneer of the theory of general relativity, Albert Einstein himself, could not speak fluently until the age of nine. His rebellious nature led to expulsion from school, and he was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School.

His earlier setbacks did not stop him from winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. After all, he believed that:

"Success is failure in progress."

To this day, his research has influenced various aspects of life including culture, religion, art, and even late night TV.

Just because you haven't achieved anything great yet, doesn't mean you can't be an Einstein yourself.

5. Abraham Lincoln

Failing in business in 1831, suffering a nervous breakdown in 1836, defeated in his run for president in 1856, Abraham Lincoln was no stranger to rejection and failure. Rather than taking these signs as a motivation for surrender, he refused to stop trying his best.

In this great man's words:

"My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure."

Lincoln was elected in 1861 as the 16th President of the United States of America.

The amount of rejection you receive is not a defining factor. Success is still within your reach.

6. Michael Jordan

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

This quote by retired basketball legend Michael Jordan in a Nike advertisement speaks for itself.

It would be an easy misconception that Jordan's basketball skills revolve around natural talent. In fact, in his earlier years, basketball coaches had trouble looking past the fact that Jordan didn't reach the minimum height. It was years of effort, practice, and failure that made the star we know today.

Michael Jordan's success all came down to his Intrinsic Motivation, one of the most invincible types of motivation that drives people to succeed.

7. Steven Spielberg

Regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time, Steven Spielberg is a familiar household name. It is surprising to realize therefore that the genius behind Jaws and E.T. had poor grades in high school, getting him rejected from the University of Southern California three times.

While he was in college, he caught the eye of executives at Universal, who signed him as a television director in 1969. This meant that he would not finish his college degree for another 33 years.

Perseverance and acceptance of failure is the key to success, after all.

"Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that's what I think keeps me hungry."

Bad grades in high school aside, there is no questioning the genius involved.

To date, Spielberg has directed 51 films and has been awarded three Oscars.

8. Walt Disney

Mickey Mouse creator Walt Disney dropped out of school at a young age in a failed attempt at joining the army. One of his earlier ventures, Laugh-o-Gram Studios, went bankrupt due to his lack of ability to run a successful business. He was once fired from a Missouri newspaper for "not being creative enough."

Yet today, The genius behind Disney studios is responsible for generations of childhood memories and dreams. From Snow White to Frozen, Disney will continue to entertain the world for generations to come.

The logic behind this is simple:

"We don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious... and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."

9. Vincent Van Gogh

During his lifetime, Vincent Van Gogh suffered mental illness, failed relationships, and committed suicide at the age of 37.

He only ever sold one painting in his life, pinning him a failure as an artist. However that did not put a damper on his enthusiasm and passion for art.

He would never know that years and years after his death he would become known as a key figure in the world of post-impressionism, and ultimately, one of the greatest artist that ever lived.

He would never know that he became a hot topic in art classes and his image was going to be used in TV, books and other forms of popular culture.

In the words of this great, but tragic man:

"If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced."

10. Stephen King

As a paranoid, troubled child, tormented by nightmares and raised in poverty, it is no surprise that Stephen King grew up to the title: "Master of Horror".

An addiction to drugs and alcohol were his mechanisms to cope with the unhappiness he felt with his life. The frustration he felt towards multiple rejections by publishers in combination with illicit substances caused him to mentally contemplate violence towards his own children.

These intense emotions were those that he focused onto his writing. And that's why he said:

"We make up horros to help us cope with the real ones."

Writing became his new coping mechanism, and this is how the master author we know today grew to success.

Fail More Often in Order to Succeed

Like Albert Einstein said, failure really is just success in progress. If you'd rather not to fail, you will probably never succeed.

Success comes from moments of frustrations when you'll be most uncomfortable with. But after you've gone through all those bitter times, you'll become stronger and you'll get closer to success.

If you feel like a failure and think that you've failed all too many times, it's not too late to change things up! Here's how to turn your limitations into your opportunities:

Don't be afraid to fail. In fact, start failing, and start failing often; that's how you will succeed.

Featured photo credit: Unsplash via unsplash.com

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10 Famous Failures to Success Stories That Will Inspire You - LifeHack

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Failure occurs everyday, in school, jobs, housework, and within families. It is unavoidable, irritating and causes pessimism. While the thought of

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Our Schools Should Teach Kids to Fail | Keith Peters | TEDxWestBrowardHigh

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A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son's confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.

Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability-along with confidence in that ability-is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 35 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

Praising children's innate abilities, as Jonathan's parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a "growth mind-set," which encourages a focus on "process" (consisting of personal effort and effective strategies) rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

The Opportunity of Defeat
I first began to investigate the underpinnings of human motivation-and how people persevere after setbacks-as a psychology graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon, all then at the University of Pennsylvania, had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can effect change-a state they called learned helplessness.

People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people's beliefs about why they had failed.

In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. In 1972, when I taught a group of elementary and middle school children who displayed helpless behavior in school that a lack of effort (rather than lack of ability) led to their mistakes on math problems, the kids learned to keep trying when the problems got tough. They also solved many more problems even in the face of difficulty. Another group of helpless children who were simply rewarded for their success on easier problems did not improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These experiments were an early indication that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.

Subsequent studies revealed that the most persistent students do not ruminate about their own failure much at all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 1970s I, along with my then graduate student Carol Diener, asked 60 fifth graders to think out loud while they solved very difficult pattern-recognition problems. Some students reacted defensively to mistakes, denigrating their skills with comments such as "I never did have a good rememory," and their problem-solving strategies deteriorated.

Others, meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing their skills. One advised himself: "I should slow down and try to figure this out." Two schoolchildren were particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, "I love a challenge!" The other, also confronting the hard problems, looked up at the experimenter and approvingly declared, "I was hoping this would be informative!" Predictably, the students with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these studies.

Two Views of Intelligence
Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners-helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different "theories" of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that's that. I call this a "fixed mind-set." Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort or acquirable skills, not fixed ability, they can be remedied by perseverance. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

We validated these expectations in a study published in early 2007. Psychologists Lisa Blackwell, then at Columbia University, and Kali H. Trzesniewski, then at Stanford University, and I monitored 373 students for two years during the transition to junior high school, when the work gets more difficult and the grading more stringent, to determine how their mind-sets might affect their math grades. At the beginning of seventh grade, we assessed the students' mind-sets by asking them to agree or disagree with statements such as "Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can't really change." We then assessed their beliefs about other aspects of learning and looked to see what happened to their grades.

As we had predicted, the students with a growth mind-set felt that learning was a more important goal in school than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard work in high regard, believing that the more you labored at something, the better you would become at it. They understood that even geniuses have to work hard for their great accomplishments. Confronted by a setback such as a disappointing test grade, students with a growth mind-set said they would study harder or try a different strategy for mastering the material.

The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with less regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.

Such divergent outlooks had a dramatic impact on performance. At the start of junior high, the math achievement test scores of the students with a growth mind-set were comparable to those of students who displayed a fixed mind-set. But as the work became more difficult, the students with a growth mind-set showed greater persistence. As a result, their math grades overtook those of the other students by the end of the first semester-and the gap between the two groups continued to widen during the two years we followed them.

Along with psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, now at Columbia, I found a similar relation between mind-set and achievement in a 2003 study of 128 Columbia freshman premed students who were enrolled in a challenging general chemistry course. Although all the students cared about grades, the ones who earned the best grades were those who placed a high premium on learning rather than on showing that they were smart in chemistry. The focus on learning strategies, effort and persistence paid off for these students.

Confronting Deficiencies
A belief in fixed intelligence also makes people less willing to admit to errors or to confront and remedy their deficiencies in school, at work and in their social relationships. In a study published in 1999 of 168 freshmen entering the University of Hong Kong, where all instruction and coursework are in English, three Hong Kong colleagues and I found that students with a growth mind-set who scored poorly on their English proficiency exam were far more inclined to take a remedial English course than were low-scoring students with a fixed mind-set. The students with a stagnant view of intelligence were presumably unwilling to admit to their deficit and thus passed up the opportunity to correct it.

A fixed mind-set can similarly hamper communication and progress in the workplace by leading managers and employees to discourage or ignore constructive criticism and advice. Research by psychologists Peter Heslin, now at the University of New South Wales in Australia, Don VandeWalle of Southern Methodist University and Gary Latham of the University of Toronto shows that managers who have a fixed mind-set are less likely to seek or welcome feedback from their employees than are managers with a growth mind-set. Presumably, managers with a growth mind-set see themselves as works-in-progress and understand that they need feedback to improve, whereas bosses with a fixed mind-set are more likely to see criticism as reflecting their underlying level of competence. Assuming that other people are not capable of changing either, executives with a fixed mind-set are also less likely to mentor their underlings. But after Heslin, VandeWalle and Latham gave managers a tutorial on the value and principles of the growth mind-set, supervisors became more willing to coach their employees and gave more useful advice.

Mind-set can affect the quality and longevity of personal relationships as well, through people's willingness-or unwillingness-to deal with difficulties. Those with a fixed mind-set are less likely than those with a growth mind-set to broach problems in their relationships and to try to solve them, according to a 2006 study I conducted with psychologist Lara Kammrath, now at Wake Forest University. After all, if you think that human personality traits are more or less fixed, relationship repair seems largely futile. Individuals who believe people can change and grow, however, are more confident that confronting concerns in their relationships will lead to resolutions.

Proper Praise
How do we transmit a growth mind-set to our children? One way is by telling stories about achievements that result from hard work. For instance, talking about mathematical geniuses who were more or less born that way puts students in a fixed mind-set, but descriptions of great mathematicians who fell in love with math and developed amazing skills engenders a growth mind-set, our studies have shown. People also communicate mind-sets through praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that they should build up children by telling them how brilliant and talented they are, our research suggests that this is misguided.

In studies involving several hundred fifth graders published in 1998, for example, psychologist Claudia M. Mueller, now at Stanford, and I gave children questions from a nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: "Wow ... that's a really good score. You must be smart at this." We commended others for their process: "Wow ... that's a really good score. You must have worked really hard."

We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed mind-set more often than did pats on the back for effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for example, shied away from a challenging assignment-they wanted an easy one instead-far more often than the kids applauded for their process. (Most of those lauded for their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard problems anyway, those praised for being smart became discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores, even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward, declined as compared with their previous results on equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for their hard work did not lose confidence when faced with the harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the easier problems that followed.

Making Up Your Mind-set
In addition to encouraging a growth mind-set through praise for effort, parents and teachers can help children by providing explicit instruction regarding the mind as a learning machine. Blackwell, Trzesniewski and I designed an eight-session workshop for 91 students whose math grades were declining in their first year of junior high. Forty-eight of the students received instruction in study skills only, whereas the others attended a combination of study skills sessions and classes in which they learned about the growth mind-set and how to apply it to schoolwork.

In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled "You Can Grow Your Brain." They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use and that learning prompts neurons in the brain to grow new connections. From such instruction, many students began to see themselves as agents of their own brain development. Students who had been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion and said, "You mean I don't have to be dumb?"

As the semester progressed, the math grades of the kids who learned only study skills continued to decline, whereas those of the students given the growth-mind-set training stopped falling and began to bounce back to their former levels. Despite being unaware that there were two types of instruction, teachers reported noticing significant motivational changes in 27 percent of the children in the growth mind-set workshop as compared with only 9 percent of students in the control group. One teacher wrote: "Your workshop has already had an effect. L [our unruly male student], who never puts in any extra effort and often doesn't turn in homework on time, actually stayed up late to finish an assignment early so I could review it and give him a chance to revise it. He earned a B+. (He had been getting Cs and lower.)"

Other researchers have replicated our results. Psychologists Catherine Good, now at Baruch College, Joshua Aronson of New York University and Michael Inzlicht, now at the University of Toronto, reported in 2003 that a growth mind-set workshop raised the math and English achievement test scores of seventh graders. In a 2002 study Aronson, Good (then a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin) and their colleagues found that college students began to enjoy their schoolwork more, value it more highly and get better grades as a result of training that fostered a growth mind-set.

We have now encapsulated such instruction in an interactive computer program called Brainology. Its five modules teach students about the brain-what it does and how to make it work better. In a virtual brain lab, users can click on brain regions to determine their functions or on nerve endings to see how connections form or strengthen when people learn. Users can also advise virtual students with problems as a way of practicing how to handle schoolwork difficulties; additionally, users keep an online journal of their study practices.

New York City seventh graders who tested Brainology told us that the program had changed their view of learning and how to promote it. One wrote: "My favorite thing from Brainology is the neurons part where when u [sic] learn something there are connections and they keep growing. I always picture them when I'm in school." A teacher said of the students who used the program: "They offer to practice, study, take notes, or pay attention to ensure that connections will be made."

Teaching children such information is not just a ploy to get them to study. People may well differ in intelligence, talent and ability. And yet research is converging on the conclusion that great accomplishment, and even what we call genius, is typically the result of years of passion and dedication and not something that flows naturally from a gift. Mozart, Edison, Curie, Darwin and Cézanne were not simply born with talent; they cultivated it through tremendous and sustained effort. Similarly, hard work and discipline contribute more to school achievement than IQ does.

Such lessons apply to almost every human endeavor. For instance, many young athletes value talent more than hard work and have consequently become unteachable. Similarly, many people accomplish little in their jobs without constant praise and encouragement to maintain their motivation. If we foster a growth mind-set in our homes and schools, however, we will give our children the tools to succeed in their pursuits and to become productive workers and citizens.
-Carol S. Dweck

A for Effort
According to a survey we conducted in the mid-1990s, 85 percent of parents believed that praising children's ability or intelligence when they perform well is important for making them feel smart. But our work shows that praising a child's intelligence makes a child fragile and defensive. So, too, does generic praise that suggests a stable trait, such as "You are a good artist." Praise can be very valuable, however, if it is carefully worded. Praise for the specific process a child used to accomplish something fosters motivation and confidence by focusing children on the actions that lead to success. Such process praise may involve commending effort, strategies, focus, persistence in the face of difficulty, and willingness to take on challenges. The following are examples of such communications:
You did a good job drawing. I like the detail you added to the people's faces. You really studied for your social studies test. You read the material over several times, outlined it and tested yourself on it. It really worked! I like the way you tried a lot of different strategies on that math problem until you finally got it. That was a hard English assignment, but you stuck with it until you got it done. You stayed at your desk and kept your concentration. That's great! I like that you took on that challenging project for your science class. It will take a lot of work-doing the research, designing the apparatus, making the parts and building it. You are going to learn a lot of great things.
Parents and teachers can also teach children to enjoy the process of learning by expressing positive views of challenges, effort and mistakes. Here are some examples:
Boy, this is hard-this is fun. Oh, sorry, that was too easy-no fun. Let's do something more challenging that you can learn from. Let's all talk about what we struggled with today and learned from. I'll go first. Mistakes are so interesting. Here's a wonderful mistake.
Let's see what we can learn from it.
-C.S.D.

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A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests.

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I am a HUGE proponent of Carol Dweck's work around cultivating a growth mindset in schools. School cultures can benefit from a focused effort on this for students and adults. I have a growth mindset in many areas of my life. I am a lover of learning and I know there are always ways to grow. However, when it comes to one specific area in my life (dating back to my middle school years), I have a fixed mindset.

ART.

Since seventh grade, and a negative year-long experience in art class, I have believed that I have NO TALENT when it comes to art. A teacher not only demonstrated that through her actions, but she basically said that to me too. For a student who tolerated school, but loved learning, this was heartbreaking. I have carried around the belief that I am awful at all things artistic and creative ever since that time.

Over the last few years, thanks to growth mindset and adult coloring and technology and writing, I have taken creativity out of my fixed mindset box. I know that I am creative and I have a lot more room to grow in that fun area. But it wasn't until last week that I saw a glimmer of possibility for my artistic abilities.

My friend and I went to a painting class. She actually gifted me this experience months ago, but this month was the first time we both had a free afternoon on a day when the class was painting a picture we both actually liked. This was such a fun experience for me! Since then, I've been reflecting on what elements helped me be successful and what chipped away at my fixed mindset.
Location
When we arrived, I picked out seats for us near the back of the class, and then quickly realized the benefits of sitting right up front by the teacher. By sitting in the front, we had a good view of the teacher modeling each step of the process as well as a sample finished product (see above!). It was good to see our intended outcome as well as each phase along the way.
Modeling and Scaffolding
As mentioned above, the teacher modeled each step of the process for us. It was overwhelming to look at the completed sample at the beginning of class. I couldn't imagine how I would ever do anything similar. But the teacher gave clear instructions as well as modifications, while also encouraging us to make our piece unique in any way we felt comfortable. She never took away the scaffolds in this lesson (which was good for someone like me!), but now that I've experienced one class, I believe I could rely on the scaffolds a little less in the next class.
Praise & Feedback
Throughout the class, both the teacher and her assistant walked around the room providing us with praise for the work we were doing. At first, I thought it was generic, almost condescending praise. But when the teacher noticed I chose to paint one building a different color than her model, I realized she was truly getting to know my work as an individual and I appreciated the positive feedback. Both instructors were also willing to provide constructive feedback to anyone who wanted additional support.
Laughter
Even without partaking in the wine at this wine and palette class, my friend and I spent a lot of time laughing during class- laughing at ourselves, at the class as a whole, and just finding humor in the entire experience, which made 4 hours fly by!
Open-ended expectations
While we all signed up to paint a specific picture, the teacher and her assistant were very encouraging about our final product being whatever we wanted. They encourage us to experiment with colors and shapes and differentiated based on student requests. Two of the women sitting next to us painted their buildings teal with a bright purple background, which as you can see in the model above, is nothing like the original color palette. As a rule follower just discovering some creativity, I stuck to the teachers' model most of the time, but I enjoyed the encouragement to think outside of that box.

All of these elements make me reflect on a typical classroom. Do we provide students with a choice of where to sit? Do we model and scaffold when appropriate (I actual think we over scaffold too much!)? Do we provide students with praise and constructive feedback throughout the learning day? Do we hear laughter in our classrooms? Do we provide opportunities for learning with open-ended expectations?

If my middle school art classes had included more of these elements, I might have avoided 20 years of a fixed mindset when it comes to art.

Below is a video of my experience! Click to view it in Flipagram!

About Amy's Reflections

Director of Educational Services in Southern CA, taking time to reflect on leadership and learning

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I am a HUGE proponent of Carol Dweck's work around cultivating a growth mindset in schools. School cultures can benefit from a focused effort on this for students and adults. I have a growth mindset in many areas of my life. I am a lover of learning and I know there are always ways to...

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If you have kids in school, read parenting articles, or work in education, you've most definitely heard the buzz word - "growth mindset".

Growth mindset refers to people who think of intelligence as something that can improve and grow with effort and hard work. The term was coined by psychologist Carol Dweck in her best-selling book, Mindset, The New Psychology of Success.

People with a growth mindset, Dweck explains, tend to experience greater success in work, relationships, and life in general than those with a fixed mindset - or people who feel intelligence is set at birth, unmalleable, and impossible to change.

I remember when I first read Mindset a few years ago - the message in the book was revolutionary.

I began to see how much of a fixed mindset I had - placing limits on my abilities and not taking on challenges for fear of failure.

I also started to notice ways I would talk to my daughters that suggested a fixed mindset. Instead of praising their efforts I was praising their results and would caution them instead of encouraging them to take on risks.

Changing the way we talk to our kids is one step towards helping to reinforce the message of a growth mindset. Another is to read books to kids with stories that convey a similar message.

Below are fourteen books that let kids know it's OK to not at first succeed, that failure and challenges can be viewed as opportunities rather than dead ends, and that determination often results in a far better outcome than being perfect.

14 Children's Books That Promote a Growth Mindset

Michael feels the reason he isn't very good at basketball is because he's short. His mother suggests he put salt in his shoes and say a prayer to help him grow. But months go by and he still isn't any taller. Finally, while talking to his father, Michael learns that being taller isn't everything - it's practice, determination and giving your best that will that really make the difference. And the rest of Michael Jordan's story is history...

Beatrice is a girl who never makes mistakes - not ever. Until one day she comes close to dropping a few eggs (a mistake) and thereafter her life is governed by the fear of one day making a mistake. Beatrice begins limiting her activities so she will never make a mistake. But Beatrice learns an important lesson about making mistakes after something unexpected happens at the school talent show.

A young boy has a hypothetical problem and he doesn't know what to do with it. He's scared of his problem, tries to hide from it, and worries about his problem. Until one day, even though he's still afraid, the boy can't take it anymore and decides he must face his problem. He then discovers that his problem wasn't as bad as he had made it out to be and even contains something special...opportunity.

From the same author of What Do You Do with a Problem?, is a story of a boy with an idea. Despite having an idea and liking it, the boy brushes it aside and worries what other people will think of his idea. The idea sticks with him, however, and eventually the boy decides to share his idea with other people and some people DO say it's not a good idea and won't become of anything. Eventually, though the boy realizes that these other people may not know what they're talking about. The story ends with an empowering resolution of what can come from the pursuit of good ideas.

Hana Hashimoto has only taken three violin lessons yet she still signed up for the local talent show. Her brothers think she's crazy since she's just a beginner but Hana is determined...that is until just before her time to go on stage. But remembering advice from her grandfather - also a violinist - Hana performs her act, experiencing her own form of success.

This is the story of Nadia Comaneci, the famous women's gymnast who received seven perfect scores in the 1976 Olympic Games. While Nadia was always busy (couldn't sit still) and seemed to be a natural for gymnastics, her path to stardom wasn't without bumps along the way. When she was nine, Nadia fell three times on a beam exercise at the National Junior Championships competition and came in thirteenth place. While disappointed, Nadia continued to practice and try to perfect her routines - and the rest is history.

Not all artwork is perfect, and in fact, sometimes mistakes can turn into wonderful designs! Beautiful Oops is a fun, visually appealing book that shows the creative process isn't always perfect and making mistakes can turn out to be excellent opportunities. The companion book, My Beautiful Oops, is a hands-on journal that's sole purpose is to be torn up, folded, smudged and otherwise artistically wreaked.

This simply written book outlines a series of activities that the main character, a stick figure, is OK at - showing kids it's alright to just be OK at many things. The stick figure acknowledges that one day he'll grow up to be excellent at something, but he doesn't know what that is yet, and that too is OK.

Rosie has big dreams of becoming an engineer and spends most of her time tinkering and making machines. Until one day when the uncle she loves most giggles when she shows him a hat she made from parts of a fan and cheddar cheese spray. After that, Rosie begins to keep her dreams to herself. It's not until a great aunt comes to visit and tells Rosie about building airplanes that she helps Rosie see how failures can be turned into opportunities.

Vashti feels she's can't draw, so after art class, her piece of paper is still blank. With a little subtle encouragement from her teacher and a growing desire to improve, Vashti discovers that she can, in fact, draw and even comes to encourage another student to overcome his discouragement.

Ramon loves to draw - anytime and anywhere. But one day his older brother Leon makes fun of Ramon's work and then all of a sudden drawing is no longer the joy it used to be. Fortunately, Ramon's little sister Marisol sees things differently and lets Ramon see that sometimes art is more than getting things "just right". A valuable tale for any child who questions their artistic ability.

A boy has a dream to catch a star. He tries everything he can to catch a star - jump up and grab it, use a life preserver as a lasso, and then thinks of other possibilities like using a spaceship or getting a seagull to help. In the end, the boy's wish comes true in a somewhat unexpected way.

In this classic tale, Willie is determined to whistle. It's not easy and takes a lot of practice but Willie doesn't give up. He tries and tries until suddenly - he's whistling!

This story follows a boy named RJ as he does the things he enjoys - such as blowing bubbles, playing soccer, and spending time with friends. But when a few friends give him compliments, RJ isn't too sure how to respond. Later, he hears from his teacher and parents that there are a few things he needs to work on. In the end, RJ learns what it means to receive positive and negative feedback and what an appropriate response is in each situation.
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14 Children's Books that Promote a Growth Mindset

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Help reinforce a growth mindset in your kids with these fourteen children's books. If you have kids in school, read parenting articles, or work in education, you've most definitely heard the buzz word - 'growth mindset'. Growth mindset refers to people who think of intelligence as something that can improve and grow with effort and hard work.

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Growth Mindset Printables Kit - Big Life Journal.pdf