A Metaphor to Live By: Carol Dweck and a Growth Mindset. Carol Dweck, the noted Stanford psychologist, has developed a very simple and quick way to improve students’ academic performance. Through the delivery of short “interventions” or lessons, she merely introduced students to a powerful metaphor: intelligence is not something you’re born with (what she calls a “fixed mindset”), but rather it is a muscle that can be strengthened over time through regular exercise. The mind is malleable and “plastic.” If you can learn to internalize this notion, then you can develop a set of attitudes she calls a “growth mindset.”
To prove her theory, she would place elementary and middle school students into two groups: an experimental one that would be taught the physiology and “plasticity” of the brain (the mind-as-muscle-approach); and the other, a control group that learned about study skills. The result: a measurable increase in academic performance for the mind-as-a-muscle group.
What’s revealed through these mindset lessons? The most obvious answer is that the social and emotional well-being of children is a major blind spot in the world of school reform. As David Bornstein, a prominent advocate of social entrepreneurship, told this author, “The most important leverage point in all of school reform is the emotional and social wellbeing of the individual child.”
Carol Dweck focuses on a student’s sense of self, their identity. That’s the power of a subtle shift in cognition. Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist from the University of Virginia, says it best: “It can be as important to change people’s interpretation of the social world and their place in it as it is to change the objective environment of schools.” This is a “direct approach to change.”
To prove her theory, she would place elementary and middle school students into two groups: an experimental one that would be taught the physiology and “plasticity” of the brain (the mind-as-muscle-approach); and the other, a control group that learned about study skills. The result: a measurable increase in academic performance for the mind-as-a-muscle group.
What’s revealed through these mindset lessons? The most obvious answer is that the social and emotional well-being of children is a major blind spot in the world of school reform. As David Bornstein, a prominent advocate of social entrepreneurship, told this author, “The most important leverage point in all of school reform is the emotional and social wellbeing of the individual child.”
Carol Dweck focuses on a student’s sense of self, their identity. That’s the power of a subtle shift in cognition. Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist from the University of Virginia, says it best: “It can be as important to change people’s interpretation of the social world and their place in it as it is to change the objective environment of schools.” This is a “direct approach to change.”