My 5-year-old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie
on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that
he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it
after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I
struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my
son was now verbalizing the tell-tale signs of a “growth mindset.” But this
wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading
about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he
succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things
that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain
grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and
this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that
mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.
Researchers have known for some time
that the brain is like a muscle; that
the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing
difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones.
What this means is that our
intelligence is not fixed, and the best way that we can grow our intelligence
is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.
However,
not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been
studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that
most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets
mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is
fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability
and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found
that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where
they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had
to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset,
however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could
change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the
latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually.
The good news is that mindsets can be
taught; they’re malleable.
What’s really fascinating is that Dweck and others have developed techniques
that they call “growth mindset interventions,” which have shown that
even small changes in communication or seemingly innocuous comments can have
fairly long-lasting implications for a person’s mindset. For instance,
praising someone’s process (“I really like how you struggled with that
problem”) versus praising an innate trait or talent (“You’re so clever!”) is
one way to reinforce a growth mindset with someone. Process praise
acknowledges the effort; talent praise reinforces the notion that one only
succeeds (or doesn’t) based on a fixed trait. And we’ve seen this on Khan
Academy as well: students are spending more time learning on Khan Academy after
being exposed to messages that praise their tenacity and grit and that
underscore that the brain is like a muscle.
The
Internet is a dream for someone with a growth mindset. Between Khan Academy, MOOCs,
and others, there is unprecedented access to endless content to help you grow
your mind. However, society isn’t going to fully take advantage of this without
growth mindsets being more prevalent. So what if we actively tried to change
that? What if we began using whatever means are at our disposal to start
performing growth mindset interventions on everyone we cared about? This is
much bigger than Khan Academy or algebra — it applies to how you communicate
with your children, how you manage your team at work, how you learn a new
language or instrument. If society as a whole begins to embrace the struggle of
learning, there is no end to what that could mean for global human potential.
And
now here’s a surprise for you. By reading this article itself, you’ve just
undergone the first half of a growth-mindset intervention. The research shows
that just being exposed to the research itself (for example, knowing that the
brain grows most by getting questions wrong, not right) can begin to change a
person’s mindset. The second half of the intervention is for you to communicate
the research with others. We’ve made a video (above) that celebrates the
struggle of learning that will help you do this. After all, when my son, or for
that matter, anyone else asks me about learning, I only want them to know one
thing. As long as they embrace struggle and mistakes, they can learn anything.
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