| Having done a lot of applied work in this area, I think growth mindset training was incorrectly seen as a change in knowledge rather than a change in behavior. The original framing was about knowledge. Some kids were taught the concept of brain plasticity and then later scored higher on tests. But what concrete actions did these kids take in between the lesson and the test? That's what's missing. I helped my mom adopt this training for her third grade class and thus got a closer look. She trained the class with a three part YouTube series. The first was a Steph Curry video about practice. That was for motivation. The second was a cartoon about brain plasticity. That was the knowledge. The last was Janelle Monae on Sesame Street singing about the power of the word Yet. "I'm not good at math, YET." So then for the rest of the year, the kids practiced saying the word yet. I don't know how to do X, yet. So essentially, my mom instituted a year long behavior change toward positive self talk, training these kids to be open to the idea that practice could make them better. Presumably they did also practice more, although nothing in this story is really A/B testable. But I'm pretty confident that this is closer to the true story about growth mindset. Also, the kids did end up with huge improvements in their standardized test scores (which sadly mattered to the district). I wrote this up on Medium. Here's the free version:
https://medium.com/better-humans/growth-mindset-is-a-habit-y... I'd never quite made the connection before, but growth mindset is the same sort of good-news/bad-news as steroids. It's not primarily that steroids make you directly stronger, it's that for the most part they help you train more and recover faster. The good news is that you'll get stronger. The bad news is that you end up working even more than if you weren't on steroids. It's the same with growth mindset. The good news is that you will get smarter, better, more skilled. The bad news is that the way those improvements happen is still through hard work. In fact, a lot of growth mindset is about having an open mind to do even more work. |