Will growth mindset become a case of another educational “magic bullet” from academia that was hailed, hyped and then devalued?

I believe not. I believe it will be something different: a case of teachers feeding back their valuable experiences (positive and negative) and researchers responding. I believe growth mindset can be the first approach to chart a different relationship between academics and teachers.

I want us to create a new paradigm based on the idea that every concept and its implementation represents a work in progress, a long-term collaboration between researchers and practitioners, all aiming at the same thing: helping students. I hope that we are already proving this is possible.

By 2006, research was showing that children’s mindsets about their abilities could play a role in their motivation and achievement. Students who believed that intellectual abilities could be developed (a growth mindset) often showed greater motivation and better grades than those who believed that intellectual abilities were fixed (a fixed mindset), particularly when they were facing challenges in school. And, when fixed-mindset students were taught a growth mindset, through a carefully constructed programme, they too showed these benefits.

Today, researchers have seen these effects in dozens of studies with thousands of students. In one recent study with nearly all the 10th grade public school students in Chile (about 168,000), young people’s mindsets predicted their achievement scores at every level of family income.

Will growth mindset be hailed, hyped and then devalued? I believe not

Another recent study, led by David Yeager, involved a representative sample of 14,000 9th grade students across the US making the transition to high school. Those students who received a growth mindset programme showed a greater desire for challenging tasks than those in the control group, who received a different programme - and this was true at every level of the maths curriculum. The data on their grades will be available soon (see references box, below).

Of course, as the researchers behind growth mindset, we were excited about these findings and so were educators. Mindsets provided a new lens for understanding students’ motivation and achievement, and it was one of the first systematic programmes of research to provide a basis for educational practice. What’s more, we could influence mindsets through direct-to-student initiatives.

However, neither researchers nor teachers anticipated the difficulty of applying these concepts in the classroom. Perhaps as researchers we were naive. Perhaps we heard more about the successful applications than the unsuccessful ones. But as soon as we did realise the difficulty, we were the ones who sounded the alarm, both in Tes and in other publications.

Actually, we’ve done a lot more than sound the alarm. We’ve rolled up our sleeves and committed ourselves to finding answers. We have listened and reacted. What, specifically, are we doing?

Transforming educators’ mindsets

We realised that many educators who endorsed a growth mindset did not fully understand it. Some equated it with being open-minded or believing in effort - rather than believing that intellectual abilities can be developed. To address this, my colleague in Australia, educational analyst Susan Mackie, has been developing a growth mindset exercise for educators.

It begins by legitimising a fixed mindset. That is, it starts with the premise that we are all a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, that we need to learn how to recognise our fixed-mindset triggers (challenge, struggle, criticism, failure), to recognise how we think, feel, and act when our fixed mindset is triggered and, if we desire to, find our way back to a growth mindset.

I have seen her working with educators and business leaders, who actually give their fixed mindset personas a name and make friends with them, inviting them to come on board with their growth mindset goals. They also talk with their colleagues about their triggers and personas. When the programme is completed, it will be tested and validated as a vehicle for mindset change in educators.

Learning more about the adult-to-child transmission process

Many educators believed that by telling students to try hard or that “You can do anything” (or by hiding differences in current abilities) they were fostering a growth mindset. This is not the case. The teacher-to-student transmission of mindsets is now a vigorous research area, and researchers are finding that when teachers focus on the learning process, the children in their classrooms develop growth mindsets.

What does this mean? It means, for example, that when a child is stuck, the teacher says, “Let’s sit together and figure out how you’re thinking about this, and then let’s work out some new strategies you can try.” It makes difficulty into an occasion for problem-solving together rather than discouragement. In other words, we don’t just bestow either praise or criticism; it needs to illuminate the learning process.

Developing a growth mindset curriculum for the classroom

Many educators give a lecture on growth mindset or put up posters around the room and then expect the students to embody a growth mindset. Professors Stephanie Fryberg and Mary Murphy, as well as Mackie are collaborating with educators to create an explicit, step-by-step curriculum for teachers.

These materials are currently being developed, evaluated, and improved, and will be available to educators in the future.

Tools for monitoring effectiveness

Dave Paunesku (creator of perts.net) is pioneering a way for teachers to monitor whether a new teaching technique is working for their students. He is creating very brief surveys that can be administered each week to students (and collated and graphed by computer) to see whether such things as students’ engagement with their classwork or their sense of academic progress has increased over time as a result of introducing the technique. If not, then teachers know that their innovation is not succeeding. This programme will be released free of charge when it has been validated.

Online programme

Finally, we will be releasing the two-session online growth mindset programme that we developed for the nationwide study in the US (the Yeager study mentioned above). Schools will soon be able to request the programme from perts.net and receive it free of charge.

In conclusion

The bottom line here is that where research and education is concerned, there are no magic bullets, only works in progress. Every practice, even a practice based on well-established research, needs to be studied and validated when it is introduced into the classroom. Then we can find out: does it work here? For whom does it not work? What can we change to make it work better?

We’ve demonstrated in our research that mindsets can be changed. Now we are focused on understanding what educators can do that will work for their students. Have we solved this problem? Not yet, as I am fond of saying. But we are determined to help students love challenges and thrive in the face of difficulty, so that they are ready for the jobs of the future. Our societies may depend on it. I believe that researchers and educators from all different perspectives can work together to make this happen.

Carol Dweck is Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and the author of Mindset: how you can achieve your potential