Dweck, Carol. Mindset – Updated Edition: Changing The Way You think To Fulfil Your Potential (pp. 77-224). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.
Here’s how students with the fixed mindset explained their poor grades. Many maligned their abilities: “I am the stupidest” or “I suck in math.” And many covered these feelings by blaming someone else: “[The math teacher] is a fat male slut . . . and [the English teacher] is a slob with a pink ass.”
Marva Collins
Most often when kids are behind—say, when they’re repeating a grade—they’re given dumbed-down material on the assumption that they can’t handle more. That idea comes from the fixed mindset: These students are dim-witted, so they need the same simple things drummed into them over and over. Well, the results are depressing. Students repeat the whole grade without learning any more than they knew before.
Instead, Marva Collins took inner-city Chicago kids who had failed in the public schools and treated them like geniuses. Many of them had been labeled “learning disabled,” “retarded,” or “emotionally disturbed.” Virtually all of them were apathetic. No light in the eyes, no hope in the face.
Collins’s second-grade public school class started out with the lowest-level reader there was. By June, they reached the middle of the fifth-grade reader, studying Aristotle, Aesop, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Poe, Frost, and Dickinson along the way.
Later when she started her own school, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Zay Smith dropped in. He saw four-year-olds writing sentences like “See the physician” and “Aesop wrote fables,” and talking about “diphthongs” and “diacritical marks.” He observed second graders reciting passages from Shakespeare, Longfellow, and Kipling. Shortly before, he had visited a rich suburban high school where many students had never heard of Shakespeare. “Shoot,” said one of Collins’s students, “you mean those rich high school kids don’t know Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616?”
Students read huge amounts, even over the summer. One student, who had entered as a “retarded” six-year-old, now four years later had read twenty-three books over the summer, including A Tale of Two Cities and Jane Eyre. The students read deeply and thoughtfully. As the three- and four-year-olds were reading about Daedalus and Icarus, one four-year-old exclaimed, “Mrs. Collins, if we do not learn and work hard, we will take an Icarian flight to nowhere.” Heated discussions of Macbeth were common.
Benjamin Bloom, an eminent educational researcher, studied 120 outstanding achievers. He concludes, “After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.” He’s not counting the 2 to 3 percent of children who have severe impairments, and he’s not counting the top 1 to 2 percent of children at the other extreme that include children like Michael. He is counting everybody else.
Ability Levels and Tracking
But aren’t students sorted into different ability levels for a reason? Haven’t their test scores and past achievement shown what their ability is? Remember, test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don’t tell you where a student could end up.
Falko Rheinberg, a researcher in Germany, studied schoolteachers with different mindsets. Some of the teachers had the fixed mindset. They believed that students entering their class with different achievement levels were deeply and permanently different:
“According to my experience students’ achievement mostly remains constant in the course of a year.”
“If I know students’ intelligence I can predict their school career quite well.”
“As a teacher I have no influence on students’ intellectual ability.”
Like my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson, these teachers preached and practiced the fixed mindset. In their classrooms, 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.
But some teachers preached and practiced a growth mindset. They focused on the idea that all children could develop their skills, and in their classrooms a weird thing happened. 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. It’s a powerful experience to see these findings. The group differences had simply disappeared under the guidance of teachers who taught for improvement, for these teachers had found a way to reach their “low-ability” students.
How teachers put a growth mindset into practice is the topic of a later chapter, but here’s a preview of how Marva Collins did it. On the first day of class, she approached Freddie, a left-back second grader, who wanted no part of school. “Come on, peach,” she said to him, cupping his face in her hands, “we have work to do. You can’t just sit in a seat and grow smart…. I promise, you are going to do, and you are going to produce. I am not going to let you fail.”
Summary
The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What’s more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies. Whether we’re talking about Darwin or college students, important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning. This is what the growth mindset gives people, and that’s why it helps their abilities grow and bear fruit.
Great Teachers
The great teachers believe in the growth of the intellect and talent, and they are fascinated with the process of learning. Marva Collins taught Chicago children who had been judged and discarded.
As Collins looks back on how she got started, she says, “I have always been fascinated with learning, with the process of discovering something new, and it was exciting to share in the discoveries made by my students.” On the first day of school, she always promised her students—all students—that they would learn. She forged a contract with them.
“I know most of you can’t spell your name. You don’t know the alphabet, you don’t know how to read, you don’t know homonyms or how to syllabicate. I promise you that you will. None of you has ever failed. School may have failed you. Well, goodbye to failure, children. Welcome to success. You will read hard books in here and understand what you read. You will write every day… . But you must help me to help you. If you don’t give anything, don’t expect anything. Success is not coming to you, you must come to it.”
Great teachers set high standards for all their students, not just the ones who are already achieving. Marva Collins set extremely high standards, right from the start. She introduced words and concepts that were, at first, way above what her students could grasp. Yet she established on Day One an atmosphere of genuine affection and concern as she promised students they would produce: “I’m gonna love you . . . I love you already, and I’m going to love you even when you don’t love yourself,” she said to the boy who wouldn’t try.
Do teachers have to love all of their students? No, but they have to care about every single student.
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. Then they give up on the “dumb” ones. “They’re not my responsibility.”
Students Who Don’t Care
What about students who won’t work, who don’t care to learn? Here is a shortened version of an interaction between Collins and Gary, a student who refused to work, ripped up his homework assignments, and would not participate in class. Collins is trying to get him to go to the blackboard to do some problems:
COLLINS: Sweetheart, what are you going to do? Use your life or throw it away?
GARY: I’m not gonna do any damn work.
COLLINS: I am not going to give up on you. I am not going to let you give up on yourself. If you sit there leaning against this wall all day, you are going to end up leaning on something or someone all your life. And all that brilliance bottled up inside you will go to waste.
At that, Gary agreed to go to the board, but then refused to address the work there. After a while Collins said:
“If you do not want to participate, go to the telephone and tell your mother, ‘Mother, in this school we have to learn, and Mrs. Collins says I can’t fool around, so will you please pick me up.’ ”
Gary started writing. Eventually, Gary became an eager participant and an avid writer. Later that year, the class was discussing Macbeth and how his misguided thinking led him to commit murder. “It’s sort of like Socrates says, isn’t it, Miss Collins?” Gary piped up. “Macbeth should have known that ‘Straight thinking leads to straight living.’”
When teachers are judging them, students will sabotage the teacher by not trying. But when students understand that school is for them—a way for them to grow their minds—they do not insist on sabotaging themselves.
How can growth-minded teachers be so selfless, devoting untold hours to the worst students? Are they just saints? Is it reasonable to expect that everyone can become a saint? The answer is that they’re not entirely selfless. They love to learn. And teaching is a wonderful way to learn. About people and how they tick. About what you teach. About yourself. And about life.
Fixed-minded teachers often think of themselves as finished products. Their role is simply to impart their knowledge. But doesn’t that get boring year after year? Standing before yet another crowd of faces and imparting. Now, that’s hard.
Seymour Sarason was a professor of mine when I was in graduate school. He was a wonderful educator, and he always told us to question assumptions. “There’s an assumption,” he said, “that schools are for students’ learning. Well, why aren’t they just as much for teachers’ learning?”