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Trey Boden

The perils of "Growth Mindset" education: Why we're trying to fix our kids when we shou... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...the_harmful_lessons_it_imparts

mindset growth mindset carol dweck learning assessment leadership

shared by Trey Boden on 08 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The problem with sweeping, generic claims about the power of attitudes or beliefs isn’t just a risk of overstating the benefits but also a tendency to divert attention from the nature of the tasks themselves: How valuable are they, and who gets to decide whether they must be done?
  • Unfortunately, even some people who are educators would rather convince students they need to adopt a more positive attitude than address the quality of the curriculum (what the students are being taught) or the pedagogy (how they’re being taught it).
  • praise kids for their effort (“You tried really hard”) rather than for their ability (“You’re really smart”)
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • But the first problem with this seductively simple script change is that praising children for their effort carries problems of its own, as several studies have confirmed: It can communicate that they’re really not very capable and therefore unlikely to succeed at future tasks.
  • what’s really problematic is praise itself
  • It’s a verbal reward, an extrinsic inducement, and, like other rewards, is often construed by the recipient as manipulation
  • Moreover, praise communicates that our acceptance of a child comes with strings attached: Our approval is conditional on the child’s continuing to impress us or do what we say.
  • We need to attend to deeper differences: between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and between “doing to” and “working with” strategies.
  • If students are preoccupied with how well they’re doing in school, then their interest in what they’re doing may suffer.
  • A 2010 study found that when students whose self-worth hinges on their performance face the prospect of failure, it doesn’t help for them to adopt a growth mindset.
  • Even when a growth mindset doesn’t make things worse, it can help only so much if students have been led — by things like grades, tests, and, worst of all, competition — to become more focused on achievement than on the learning itself.
  • And this brings us to the biggest blind spot of all — the whole idea of focusing on the mindsets of individuals.
  • Ironically, the more we occupy ourselves with getting kids to attribute outcomes to their own effort, the more we communicate that the conditions they face are, well, fixed.
  • But why have so many educators who don’t share that sensibility endorsed a focus on mindset (or grit) whose premises and implications they’d likely find troubling on reflection?
  • I’m not suggesting we go back to promoting an innate, fixed, “entity” theory of intelligence and talent, which, as Dweck points out, can leave people feeling helpless and inclined to give up.
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