Growth Mindset: What can I learn this semester?

For my Growth Mindset blog post, I'm going to focus on the articles by Carol Dweck's critics and my thoughts about them. Adding these articles to the assignment is something new for this semester; even though I personally find Dweck's work very persuasive, there are also problems to consider, and these three articles address very real problems. I personally don't consider these to be problems with Dweck's work per se, but rather with the educational system in which her work is being applied. Anyway, I'm curious to see if people do read some/all of these articles and what they might say about them in their posts this semester!

Alfie Kohn: What We Miss By Focusing on Kids’ Attitudes
I'll confess this article made me feel terrible when it came out: Alfie Kohn is a personal hero of mine, and seeing him attack growth mindset like this was hard for me. What he is attacking here is the misuse of Carol Dweck's ideas to wrongly label students, blaming them for a failure to learn, as opposed to the way growth mindset challenges ALL of us, teachers and students (and administrators, and parents, and everybody) to learn things we didn't think we could learn and to do things we find it hard to do. But I have to admit: I have seen some really sloppy and misguided interpretations of Carol Dweck's work, and I am also troubled by consultants making money off superficial growth mindset interventions. I read here that with the $4 million dollar Yidan Prize for Education Research that she won, Carol Dweck is going to develop even more materials for educators, turning that prize money into something of value for us all: Founder of growth mindset plans to use $4 million from global education prize to pursue 'real-world implementation' of theory So I am very excited to see what we will see from Carol Dweck in the next few years as a result.

Rick Wormell: Grit and Growth Mindset: Deficit Thinking?
I see this article more as a criticism of Angela Duckworth's work on grit (and I am not a fan of that at all), and I am honestly not interested in growth mindset being able to raise test scores and grades (I'm against grades and tests, as you might have guessed from the design of this class). I really appreciate the emphasis on equity in this article, but I disagree about the opposition between equity and growth mindset. To my way of thinking, growth mindset is a way to promote educational equity. I also disagree with the way that the author claims that Dweck is saying growth mindset is the sufficient and only cause of learning success. She simply does not say that; many factors contribute to learning success. What I like about growth mindset is that it tells me my BELIEFS about my success are an important factor, a dimension of success that I can work on to help myself move towards my own goals.

J. Luke Wood (audio interview): SDSU Professor Challenges Concept Widely Embraced By Educators
Luke Wood makes really important points about equity here too, and he raises one of the most difficult aspects of growth mindset for me as a teacher: how do I incorporate praise and positive encouragement into my feedback, while also identifying mistakes and problems for students to work on? I really want to encourage students in ways that promote their self-confidence without imposing my own agenda on them. This year, my main focus in this class is on improving feedback processes, so I will make sure to read some more from Luke Wood and add that to my Diigo library of feedback resources. Of these three authors, Luke Wood is the one who is raising questions that are the most relevant to how I try to use growth mindset as a teacher, and I'm looking forward to learning more about his work. I'm following him at Twitter now... as are thousands of other educators. :-)

And here's a growth mindset cat for learning more:

You can always learn more.