The Journey of Carol Dweck
As a young researcher, Ms Dweck brought children into a room one at a time and gave them puzzles — easy ones first, then hard ones — to watch how they coped with failing.
She expected some children to cope better than others. That is not what she saw.
Confronted with the hard puzzles, one ten-year-old boy pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and cried out, “I love a challenge!”
What’s wrong with them? she wondered.
I always thought you coped with failure or you didn’t cope with failure. I never thought anyone loved failure.
These children were my role models.
Ms Dweck wanted to know
what makes one student quit and another lean in.
Two students. The same ability. The same hard problem. Why does one of them give up?
The problem:
a belief that ability is fixed.
Ms Dweck found that people carry one of two quiet beliefs about ability, and that the belief shapes everything that follows.
In a fixed mindset, ability is a fixed quantity you either have or don’t. Effort is evidence you lack it, and every hard problem is a test you might fail.
In a growth mindset, ability is something that can be developed. Effort is how it happens, and a hard problem is where the growing gets done.
In a classroom, the belief the educator holds matters just as much:
Teachers with the fixed mindset create an atmosphere of judging. These teachers look at students’ beginning performance and decide who’s smart and who’s dumb.
These teachers don’t believe in improvement, so they don’t try to create it.
So teachers with the fixed mindset know which students to give up on before they’ve even met them.
This is not a failing of the people who teach. It is what a system built to impart knowledge on a schedule quietly trains everyone in it to believe.
Guidance from many,
including Binet, Rheinberg — and Marva Collins.
Alfred Binet
the inventor of the IQ test
The test was never meant to fix a child’s intelligence in place. Binet built it to find the children the Paris schools were failing, so that something could be done for them. On the idea that intelligence is a fixed quantity, he wrote:
We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism….With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.
Falko Rheinberg
a researcher in Germany
Mr Rheinberg tracked schoolteachers by the belief they held, then followed their students through the year. In the classrooms of teachers who believed ability was fixed:
the students who started the year in the high-ability group ended the year there, and those who started the year in the low-ability group ended the year there.
In the classrooms of teachers who believed ability could be grown:
It didn’t matter whether students started the year in the high-or the low-ability group. Both groups ended the year way up high.
The group differences had simply disappeared under the guidance of teachers who taught for improvement.
Read that again. The gap closed — because of what the educator believed was possible.
Marva Collins
and the classroom Ms Dweck chose as her example
When Ms Dweck needed to show what this looks like in a real room, she reached for a teacher on the South Side of Chicago whose classroom was, for many of her students, their last stop.
Marva Collins took inner-city Chicago kids who had failed in the public schools and treated them like geniuses.
These children hadn’t learned much in school, but everyone knew it was their own fault. Everyone but Collins.
Ms Dweck reports what followed: four-year-olds reading by Christmas, seven-year-olds reading The Wall Street Journal, and grade-schoolers working through Chekhov, Chaucer and always Shakespeare. Her verdict is a scientist’s, not a fan’s:
Whether you measure these children by the breadth of their knowledge or by their performance on standardized tests, their minds had been transformed.
Steps to success
1. Followed the children who loved the hard puzzles — instead of dismissing them as odd — and spent a career finding out what they knew.
2. Named the two beliefs — fixed and growth — and showed, in study after study, that the belief changes the outcome.
3. Wrote Mindset in 2006, putting thirty years of research into language an educator or a parent could actually use.
4. Put it to the hardest possible test. In 2019 she and her colleagues ran a national randomised experiment across a representative sample of U.S. high schools and published the results in Nature. Note what the title claims — and what it doesn’t:
A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement.
Yeager, D.S., Hanselman, P., … & Dweck, C.S. (2019). Nature, 573, 364–369.
5. Corrected her own readers. When she saw her work being misapplied, she added a section to Mindset called “False Growth Mindset” and said so plainly:
Some parents, teachers, and coaches were indeed misunderstanding the mindset ideas.
Many people take what they like about themselves and call it a “growth mindset.”
We should never think that praising a process that is not there will bring good results.
That is what a careful scientist looks like — and it is why the rest of her work can be trusted.
The stakes
IF Ms Dweck succeeded
THEN we would know that a student written off at seven is not finished — and that what an educator believes about a child changes what that child becomes.
IF Ms Dweck failed
THEN sorting children early by measured ability would be sound practice, and Ms Collins’s classroom would have to be explained away as a miracle.
Did Ms Dweck succeed?
Yes.
Mindset has sold in the millions and been translated into more than 40 languages. Ms Dweck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. She has received the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the National Academy of Sciences’ Atkinson Prize, and the inaugural Yidan Prize for Research in Education. She has addressed the United Nations.
She is, by any measure available, a credible witness.
And here is what she witnessed.
Ms Dweck set out to find what separates the educators who reach every child from the ones who don’t. She did not find better lesson delivery. Of the ones who don’t reach them, she writes:
Fixed-minded teachers often think of themselves as finished products. Their role is simply to impart their knowledge.
And of the ones who do:
It starts with the growth mindset—about yourself and about children. Not just lip service to the idea that all children can learn, but a deep desire to reach in and ignite the mind of every child.
That is the whole distinction this site is built on, arrived at independently by a Stanford professor who has never heard of us.
Imparting knowledge is Learning — Column 2. Necessary, and not sufficient.
Reaching in to ignite a mind is Educating — Column 1. It is what Ms Collins did every morning before a book was opened, and it is what makes Column 2 possible.
Great teachers are not great because they impart better. They are great because they educate — leading out what is already in the student.
Have districts put it to work?
Not yet.
Twenty years after Mindset, the school system still sorts children by measured ability and still moves the whole room at one pace, ready or not. Ms Dweck showed that the gap between ability groups can close. The system is not built to let it.
This is a matter of how the school system is run — not of how hard teachers work.
Putting it to work would require the school system to shift its priority away from follow the schedule, next lesson — and that means the new priority of the Lead Out Method:
Getting students inside what they need to succeed.
Quotations from Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, updated edition (New York: Random House, 2006/2016). Honours as listed on Ms Dweck’s curriculum vitae, Department of Psychology, Stanford University.