Personal Resilience

Growth Mindset Concept Introduction

Hello, my name is Dr. Diana Brecher. And I’m going to be talking to you today about growth mindset and fixed mindset, and how it can impact the learning experience of our students.

I want to start off by introducing the work of Carol Dweck. She’s a psychologist at Stanford, who wrote the book Mindset. It’s a very accessible book, and really interesting in which she describes two different types of mindsets that most people hold and the impact on our learning and approaches to life and our successes can be directly linked back to the attitudes we bring to things.

So one way to think about it is as a false dichotomy. So in this cartoon with Calvin and Hobbes, we have Suzy and Calvin, and Suzy says, “What happened to you?” And Calvin goes, “Hobbes and I had a frank exchange of ideas”. “What are you doing, homework?” She says, “I wasn’t sure I understood this chapter, so I reviewed my notes from the last chapter, and now I’m rereading this.” “You do all that work?” “Well, now I understand it,” she says. “Huh, I used to think you were smart.” And in this cartoon, they have captured the distinctions between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

So, with a fixed mindset, you operate from the belief that you have the ability, or you expend effort. And effort is only for those without the ability. Whereas with a growth mindset, you operate from the belief that we all need to expend effort in order to improve.

So, what are the kinds of things that people say to themselves with these two different mindsets? With a fixed mindset the person might say things like, I’m either good at it, or I’m not. When I’m frustrated, I give up and don’t like to be challenged. When I fail, I’m no good. I need you to tell me I’m smart. If you succeed, then I feel threatened, and my abilities determine everything.

And if you have students who have expressed these types of attitudes, you may in fact, be wondering, are they operating from a fixed mindset? But in the growth mindset, the narrative is very different. “I can learn anything I want to,” is what they walk with. When I’m frustrated, I persevere, and we know perseverance has such an important role in academic success. I want to challenge myself. When I fail, I learn. I need you to tell me that I try hard. If you succeed, then I’m inspired. And my effort and attitude determine everything. So, the forward momentum of this kind of open mind, open heart to learning is really what we want to cultivate in our students.

So, Carol Dweck in her website, Mindset Works says, “In a growth mindset, people believe they can develop their brain abilities and talents. This view creates a love of learning a drive for growth, and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishments. Whereas people in a fixed mindset believe that basic qualities such as intelligence and abilities are fixed and can’t be developed. They also believe that talent alone creates success, and therefore see effort as a sign of weakness, rather than as an effective strategy needed to reach one’s potential.”

You can think about growth mindset and fixed mindset as having two discrete areas of focus with an overlap. The overlap is in the belief in intelligence, creativity, and talent. But someone with a fixed mindset, actually believes that their talents and intelligence are fixed at birth. And so their attitude is very static. They actually believe that there’s no room for improvement, because it’s the way things have always been done. And they’re really struggling to realize change. Whereas someone with a growth mindset, believes that with effort, talent and intelligence can be developed over time. And then everything is kind of evolving—a work in progress. They thrive on challenges, and they’re willing to try new things. They embrace failure as a mechanism for learning and development. And so it makes sense to think about what are our students doing, what kind of mindsets are they walking with and how can we influence that?

So, the research tells us that there are four key things that cultivate a growth mindset: Praise for effort, strategies, focus and perseverance. And that’s praise that others give us and that we can give ourselves. There’s this notion of “not yet”, that we are works in progress. Carol Dweck has a marvelous TED Talk in which she’s titled it Not Yet where she talks about how that attitude that we’re simply on a journey and with effort we can move along that journey is critical to a growth mindset. Understanding that effort and deliberate practice lead to rewiring the brain to become smarter. The whole notion of “cells that fire together, wire together”, and that we can through this effort and deliberate practice over time, change our capacity to learn and to accomplish. And that finally, mistakes are an essential part of the learning process. And I’ll be digging into these a little bit more in depth.

So Dweck says in her TED talk, “If you get a failing grade, you think I’m nothing, I’m nowhere. But if you get the grade, ‘not yet’, you understand that you’re on a learning curve, and it gives you a path into the future.” What she’s referring to here is a high school in Chicago, that gives the grade “not yet” to a student who has perhaps failed the course at that point in time. And that conveys a message that with time and effort, they will pass or perhaps even do better than passing.

So the two different kinds of praise actually entrench either fixed or growth mindset. So, if you want to entrench a fixed mindset, these are the kinds of things you say you’re really praising the person. So “you are so smart,” “you’re so talented,” “you’re the strongest, you’re the fastest, the most, the best.” Those types of statements, although they sound like they’re really positive, they’re actually entrenching this notion of, “this is where you are today, but don’t do anything to risk that status or title.” And it makes a person much less likely to have an open mind and put in more effort because they don’t want to give up the status they have. Whereas with process praise, we’re praising things like, “you studied hard, and your improvement shows,” “you’ve incorporated feedback from your last assignment to deepen your learning,” “you tried different strategies until you got it,” “you tried something challenging and got out of your comfort zone.”

All of these are acknowledging focus, strategies, concentration, purpose, all of these things that help us understand that we are works in progress. And that tends to cultivate a growth mindset, even in someone who started off with a fixed mindset.

Based on the research of Blackwell, Dweck and others, she created this chart, which is really interesting, the belief “I can get smarter” leads to higher achievement, because we think about, “learning is my goal, and effort makes me stronger, and so I spend more time and work harder.” And that leads to higher achievement. So that’s an interesting kind of notion that we may know intuitively, but we may not be willing to put in the effort because it threatens our self-esteem and our sense that we are smart enough to do it without any work. Jo Boaler is a professor of Mathematics at Stanford. And this is a brief clip where she talks about what happens when we make mistakes when doing math.

Jo Boaler: Welcome to lesson three, one of the most exciting things I’ve learned in recent years that shocks most people I meet is this. When you make a mistake in math, your brain grows. Synapses fire in your brain. In fact, your brain grows when you make a mistake, but when you get work right, no brain growth happens.

A woman appears on screen and speaks:

When you make a mistake, you don’t need to get the right answer. You just need to struggle and think about the mistake for synapses to fire.

A man appears on screen and speaks:

“That is because struggle and hard thinking are times when your brain grows the most.

Jo Boaler: This is why it’s important in math class to work on hard problems that encourage you to struggle and even make mistakes. As these are the most important times for your brain.

Dr. Brecher: So, this is a little bit longer, but I just thought I would share this short clip. Her book, Limitless Mind is filled with research on the learning of math and what happens in our brains.

So, what’s the narrative? So when someone who is in a fixed mindset is struggling, they say things like “I’m not good enough,” “I give up,” “I can’t make this any better,” “This is too hard,” “I made a mistake,” “I’ll never be that smart,” “My friend can do it,” “Plan A didn’t work.” And so that kind of, it has like, a defeatist stance in it. It’s “I’m giving up, and I don’t think ever it’ll make a difference, really.” What if the person started to think about things differently? Like, “what am I missing?” “I’ll use a different strategy” “I can always improve,” “Mistakes help me learn,” “I’m going to train my brain,” “There’s always plan B.” And so that kind of thinking is what we really want to cultivate in our students. So when they approach challenges, the fixed mindset person might say to themselves, “Will I look smart or stupid while doing this?” “I’m not smart enough to do this.” Whereas someone with a growth mindset might say, “How might I learn and grow?” “I’m not smart enough to do this yet.”

(A slide comes up that says “These two brain images from the study are voltage maps showing the activity in the brains of those with a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. The orange colour of the growth mindsets brains reflects the greater activity in the brain with more intensity and attention to error.” There is an image of two brains. The fixed mindset brain is mostly green with some slight yellow towards the middle. The growth mindset brain is only green around the edges, the rest is red.)

So, there’s an interesting study, done around brain electrical activity, where people who had already been determined to have a growth or a fixed mindset respectively, they did a task and then they received feedback. And while they were receiving the feedback on the task, they went through this study, and they had their brains scanned. Someone with a growth mindset, you can see the color kind of orange reflecting the activity in the brain, they are deeply engaging in the feedback, thinking about it, processing, etc. Whereas someone with a fixed mindset is simply not taking it in. And so if I were to translate that into student behaviour, it would be the difference between someone who gets back an assignment or an exam and yes, they look at the final grade, but then they go back, and they check out all the feedback along the way so if they can learn from their mistakes, where someone with a fixed mindset might just look at their grade, and put it down, and not really want to process where they went wrong or right, and so the learning is really limited.

So, there’s a real self-fulfilling prophecy with these mindsets. Within a fixed mindset, if you have the belief, “I’m bad at this,” you’re much more likely to give up trying to improve. And the result is a lack of progress on assignments, projects, whatever it is that you’re working on. Whereas with a growth mindset, if you have the belief that doing these things are skills, writing a lab report, doing calculations, whatever. So, the behaviour is “With practice and support, I’ll learn the skills I need.” And the result is making progress, completing things with time, etc.

So, strategies to cultivate a growth mindset are really about if you could almost make an invitation to your students and say, picture your brain forming new connections as you meet a challenge and learn. Encouraging people to seek out constructive criticism that can actually help them improve. Encouraging our students to pose the question, “What can I learn from my failures?” To think about effort as a positive, constructive force and to plan to do something they’re afraid to do because they might not be good at it.

So, as we move into the case scenarios, these are four questions that we would like you to consider as you kind of unpack the scenarios. The first is, can you invite the student to show you the process that they used to get their answers. You can pose the question, “What methods do you use to study?” “What campus resources have you used to build effective study habits?” And can you direct them to the appropriate resources? “What motivated you to enter the program and what motivates you about the program currently?” Sometimes a student ends up in a particular program, because they’re fulfilling someone else’s dream or agenda, and it really isn’t their passion. And so there may be a mismatch there, or that they’re ambivalent at best. And so, understanding what motivates them now can be really helpful in guiding the student to greater success.

So just to kind of remind you, examples of process praise, which is really what cultivates growth mindset, are the types of things that have been written on this slide like, “You studied hard,” “You tested yourself on this material,” “You tried all kinds of strategies until you got it,” “You stuck to it and got it done, “You took on a challenging project. It will take hard work and you will learn a lot.” So, all of these types of statements really convey the message to the student that they are a work in progress, that if they have an open mind and if they’re willing to put in the effort, they’re very likely to succeed in their course.

So, the next steps in the series are three case studies that we created. You can explore them independently or in small groups if you’re looking at this in a group, and then we follow that up with a debrief video where that kind of questions and answers that I provide around implementing growth mindsets into these specific case studies and things to consider in cultivating growth mindset.

If you have any questions about growth mindset, please feel free to contact me, my information is on the slide. And any questions about the video and the whole program that we’re creating here, please contact my colleague from Fenella and her contact information is here as well.

Contact information: Diana Brecher, Clinical Psychologist, Adjunct Faculty, Ryerson University, dbrecher@ryerson.ca

Fenella Amarasinghe, Senior Manager, Education Planning and Development, famarasinghe@ryerson.ca

Thank you so much.

Growth Mindset Case Study 1

Dr. Brecher: We’re going to be doing a bit of a debrief on the three case studies, we’ll be looking at how can growth mindset be cultivated in our students in these types of situations. So going to the first case study, kind of as a brief summary is you have a third-year student who comes to you during office hours. The student is frustrated because they received a D on their midterm but from their perspective, they had done everything they needed to do; they attended all the lectures, they completed the practice problems. And they ask the prof if their grade is a reflection of their ability to succeed in the course or the program.

[A webinar participant speaks up.]

I’d like to pose a question to you based on this case study: how can an instructor foster a growth mindset in a student when the student has demonstrated effort?

Dr. Brecher: Right, so really I think the thing to explore first with the student is if they’ve attended all the lectures and completed all the practice problems. Perhaps there’s something in their method or approach that is not the best method of approach to learning this particular material. So what kind of notes are they taking, how often are they reviewing their notes and doing the readings before class? When they’re working on practice problems, are they getting them right or they’re just doing them getting them wrong and not figuring out what is missing? So doing some exploration with the student around that kind of information could be very helpful. Are they going to studying groups or talking to TAs or coming to office hours? What is the student doing or not doing that could help them in their approach to being a student? Asking a student, “what’s your process in solving the actual problems?” It may be that there’s a fundamental flaw that the student is not aware of that perhaps might be the kind of key to understanding why they’re doing so poorly when they’re putting in so much effort because here, we have a student who is putting in the effort, that’s not the issue, they’re just not getting the results that they would want. Are they tapping into on-campus resources, for example, going to tutoring sessions or structured studying groups that are sometimes facilitated? Are they getting the help they need and are there actually specific constraints or barriers that the student is experiencing outside of the classroom that are impacting their ability to study? So it could be all kinds of different things. An inordinate number of hours for commuting, perhaps, which interferes with their study time. Are they working part-time or full-time? And that too becomes something that’s taking them away from their studies. Do they have family responsibilities that are demanding their time and again interfering with their capacity to learn? Are they an international student who is struggling with all of the package of being an international student: missing home, being isolated, perhaps not being familiar with the culture or having a community on and so forth? Is it possible that, particularly in an engineering context, that they’re a female student in a male-dominated class and one of the very few women in the class and feeling really intimidated or uncomfortable to speak up or ask for their needs? So there could be a whole set of different things that are actually at play here but again we want to think about the effort, the strategies, the focus and the perseverance the student is engaging in, are they feeling defeated? Will it help them to start to think about what they can do to change to be much more successful in their goals for their studies?

Growth Mindset Case Study 2

Dr. Brecher: In this context, it’s about the method used in the classroom: method of teaching and the method of learning. So we have a professor who implements an evidence-based active learning method in their thermodynamics courses of 130 students. The instructor designed three real-world problem cases to deepen their students’ learning. And so in teams, students were required to complete the projects at intervals throughout the semester and it was scaffolded so that they were getting feedback along the way. Early on in the semester, the instructor gathered feedback from the students about this particular kind of learning and the instructor found that 40% of the students stated they found working in groups to be very challenging because not all the students contributed in the same way. And in fact it’s a very common complaint in any kind of group or teamwork. And some students stated they preferred to learn by lecture-method alone and to be evaluated only through midterms and exams. So these are students who are essentially saying this kind of evidence-based active learning is not for them, for at least one stated reason, which is group work is really tough, but there may be other things at play here. So for example, if most of the courses that the student has taken are in the more traditional style of lecture and evaluation through midterms and exams, they may in fact find this very uncomfortable, possibly threatening. The idea that they’re much more in charge of their own learning process may not be something that they are ready for or that they’re comfortable with. And so the idea that they are interdependent in their grades and in their progress might be very frightening for someone who is, in particular, operating from a growth mindset. And so one of the things that we can do in a situation like that, as instructors, is to set the stage for learning in small chunks, getting feedback along the way so that you can correct course as need be. So if a team is kind of veering off into a non-productive destination or whatever it is that they’re learning, how can they get back on track? And so the regular feedback can do that. It’s also a wonderful way we know to learn new materials through this evidence-based active learning approach but it puts a different kind of pressure on the student. So we want to invite the students into this but what might be necessary is to set the stage earlier on before they actually are broken into these small groups and help them understand the issues pertaining to group-work, managing the dynamic, what the expectations are, how people need to work together in teams and to consider group work as part of the curriculum of the course. That they need to learn how to work in groups in order to get the most out of that experience.

[A webinar participant speaks up.]

I think that’s great thank you, Diana. I wonder then, based on what you’re saying, how might our pedagogy inadvertently foster a fixed mindset and what sorts of pedagogical approaches help to facilitate a growth mindset?

Growth Mindset Case Study 3

Dr. Brecher: So, in our third case, the idea was a class discussion. And what happens when you have a course of, let’s say, 150 students? And as an instructor, you pose these open-ended questions, and then same seven to ten students each week participate. But the rest, the other 140 are silent.

And while you want more students to participate, you don’t feel that it’s right to just pick on students to say you must respond to my question. You don’t want to put students on the spot. So you know, this idea that so many of your students are reluctant to speak up in class can really be a barrier to their education. And it’s something for us to be thinking about.

[A webinar participant speaks up.]

I have a question for you about this case study. How might our biases or assumptions foster fixed mindsets? And how might cultivating a growth mindset as instructors serve more inclusive teaching practices?

Dr. Brecher: You know, there’s a wonderful film that was done interviewing a whole set of Ryerson students. The film was called Passages. And it was done by my colleague, John Hannah. And in that film, they’re being interviewed, and they talk about how they’re reluctant to speak up in class. And they’ll say things like, “so often, the prof will ask a question, and I’ll have the answer, but not be a 100% certain that it’s the right answer. And so I’ll stay silent. Someone else answers the question. And it’s exactly what I would have said, they’re right. And I think to myself, what’s wrong with me that I didn’t say anything?” And I thought to myself, when I saw that clip, that’s probably what goes through the minds of a lot of our students that they often have the answer, but they aren’t quite ready to put themselves out there, to take that risk.

Because, and it may be that they have a fixed mindset about it’s either right or wrong, and I can’t afford to be wrong.

Now, when open-ended questions are asked, it’s even more complicated because there isn’t a right or wrong answer, you’re just gonna have to do your best. And so, the bias is that maybe the instructor is holding perhaps themselves with a fixed mindset that could be communicated to their students and that might be what makes it less comfortable for students to take those risks. So there is one study where they evaluated STEM professors who over a two-year period taught, I think, something like 15,000 students, in a whole host of different disciplines within STEM, and looked at the impact of the mindset of the instructor on the willingness of students to participate and how well they actually did. And it turns out that the mindset of the professor has an impact on the learning of the students, and the more growth mindset that the professors have, conveying this willingness to learn themselves, and that mistakes are not radioactive, and that you can suffer a mistake and still keep going and on and so forth. That either implicitly and possibly explicitly conveyed by the instructor can lead to an environment in the classroom that students will be more willing to speak up, particularly during open-ended questions. What I think we all want for our students is to get everything we put into the class.

So this idea that they’re going to learn all the material, they’re going to be enthusiastic and engaged and building momentum to their educational goals. And it always feels, I think, like we’ve missed the mark, when we can’t get the majority of the students to engage in this dialogue that’s all part of their education. So I think, again, praising students’ efforts, the strategies they’re using, the focus they brought to the work, the perseverance, getting something half right, is a step in the right direction. And if we create that kind of environment that allows for mistakes to happen and for you to be wrong and there’s nothing wrong with that. We may in fact, be inviting the less vocal students, less confident students to take a risk. And once they take a risk, and it doesn’t feel that scary, they will take the second and the third. So I think to some extent, it’s up to us to try to create that environment that makes it a welcoming environment to learn, not necessarily to just be right.