Recent studies have shown that for learning and personal development to be sustained outside the confines of academic institutions, teaching methods would have to serve as catalysts enhancing a growth mindset.
The view anyone adopts of themselves profoundly affects the way they lead their lives. There are two kinds of mindset with varying effects on learning: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The former makes the learner believe their qualities are carved in stone and creates an urgency to prove oneself over and over. The fixed mindset assumes that you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character and puts pressure on individuals to continually prove they possess a healthy dose of these qualities.
One manifestation of the fixed mindset is the tendency to believe that people’s Intelligence Quotient (IQ) scores told the whole story of who they were, unlike Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test. Binet, a Frenchman working in Paris in the early twentieth century, designed this test to identify children who were not profiting from the Paris public schools, so that new educational programmes could be designed to get them back on track.
“A few modern philosophers assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. 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” wrote Binet in one of his major books, Modern Ideas About Children.
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Carol S. Dweck, professor of psychology at Columbia University, USA and one of the leading researchers in fields of personality, social psychology, and developmental psychology, narrated an experience with her sixth-grade teacher, Mrs Wilson, who ran the classroom rigidly along a fixed mindset paradigm.
Leaners were seated around the room in IQ order, and only the highest-IQ students could be trusted to carry the flag, clap the erasers, or take a note to the principal. Aside from the daily stomach aches she provoked with her judgmental stance, she was creating a mindset in which everyone in the class had one consuming goal; look smart, do not look dumb. The emphasis was not placed on learning.
On the reverse side of the mindset coin is the growth mindset, which is based on the belief that one’s basic qualities are things they can cultivate through sustained effort and focus. People may differ in every which way, in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments; everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
People with the growth mindset do not necessarily believe anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven. But they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (an unknowable); that it is impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil and training.
Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution and Leo Tolstoy, a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time were considered ordinary children. Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, was completely uncoordinated and graceless as a child.
Growth mindset fosters the belief that cherished qualities can be developed, which creates passion for learning. The passion for stretching oneself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it is not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.
On one hand, people in growth mindset do not just seek challenge, they thrive on it. The bigger the challenge, the more they stretch. On the other hand, people with fixed mindset thrive when things are safely within their grasp. If things get too challenging, when they are not feeling smart or talented, they lose interest. People with fixed mindset expect ability to show up on its own, before any learning takes place. After all, if you have it you have it, and if you do not you do not.
Evidently, growth mindset leads to greater achievements. And sometimes people with growth mindset stretch themselves so far that they do the impossible.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
