In this revised look into having a lifestyle of a growth mindset, I believe that having real and lasting change requires consistency.  In this article I am using the words “growth mindset” and “habit” interchangeably because I believe that having a growth mindset requires an idea that may be better understood using the word “habit.”

 

My view of having a growth mindset had always revolved around setting a goal, being positive, and problem-solving as issues arose. Recently, in my revised thinking, having a growth mindset is centered around the idea that having a growth mindset is not just a feel-good positive outlook but a daily habit we must employ.  Carl Hendrick (2019) states that Carol Dweck's idea of a growth mindset is being poorly implemented. One reason for this, Hendrick proposes, might be the over-generalised picture of the growth mindset: it tends to be talked about as a global or general skill as opposed to a domain-specific one.  Dweck herself argues that, “A lot of teachers are saying ‘yes I have a growth mindset’, without doing the work and without making a journey to deeply understand it and to know how to apply it.”  As facilitators in learner’s development  we must use consistent growth and rigor in our instruction to ensure that young people become successful. “In many cases, growth mindset theory has been misrepresented and miscast as simply a means of motivating the unmotivated through pithy slogans and posters” (Hendrick, 2019).

 

Making students learn the importance of having a goal is only the first step.  In his book, Clear makes the point that too often, we assume having a goal along with a growth mindset will ensure success. 

We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed. Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, 2018 p. 24-25)

 

Having a goal is important for anyone to set your direction, but a consistent growth mindset will give you small daily steps that will compound to a dramatic change.  Clear (2019) illustrates this point with the example that, “the impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.”  Creating a learning environment where daily habits are directly correlated to a growth mindset will ensure that learners can make vast improvements. Moreover, modeling a consistent growth mindset in your teaching and being committed to the daily 1 percent improvements can compound the growth you are seeking in your instruction.  

One of the greatest impediments to successfully implementing a growth mindset is the education system itself. A key characteristic of a fixed mindset is a focus on performance and an avoidance of any situation where testing might lead to a confirmation of fixed beliefs about ability. Yet we are currently in a school climate obsessed with performance in the form of constant summative testing, analysing and ranking of students. Schools create a certain cognitive dissonance when they proselytise the benefits of a growth mindset in assemblies but then hand out fixed target grades in lessons based on performance. (The growth mindset problem, para. 5)

 

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