The Runaway Mindset

When I was in fourth grade, you know this story better go somewhere fast if it starts like this, I wrote a story called “The Runaway Lima Bean” starring an adorable bean named Ferdinand who escapes the table and has a series of madcap adventures. It was an immediate hit and even published in a children’s magazine. My writing career was launched and just as quickly, ended. I was a one hit wonder like Bow Wow Wow and Vanilla Ice.

According to Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, I had a fixed mindset. I had some ability in writing, but didn’t want to risk losing my fame, if you call it that, so I shut down and, despite everyone’s urgings, never wrote again. This guaranteed that I would not fail and have to face the fact that I did not have as much talent as I thought I did. The same thing is happening day-in and day-out in our classrooms. Teachers have mastered Hamlet and Dickens, quadratic equations and Pythagorean theorems, but don’t have the growth mindset that Dweck argues leads to even greater success.

In the world of literature, a growth mindset makes you’re a dynamic character while a fixed mindset makes you static. Dweck states, “ In one world—the world of fixed traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.” Her research reflected these differences most clearly when individuals faced setbacks. In the fixed mindset, if I submitted another story and was rejected it would prove to me that I was a failure with no talent: People may even be laughing at me. But in the growth mindset, while I would still be disappointed, I would seek information from others on what I could revise and how I could work to be better at writing: the growth mindset is about the challenge of solving the problem.

Malcom Gladwell in his May 11th New Yorker article titled, “How David Beats Goliath” takes this theory even further. While explaining how a less-talented team of twelve-year-olds could make it all the way to the championships, he states” The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort.” When speculating on why other teams aren’t quick to pick up on the benefit of the full-court press he adds, “because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.” It is just easier to have the talent than to hustle. Clearly Gladwell is suggesting that the growth mindset allows the underdog to beat the favorite with a fixed mindset.

Teachers’ approaches to technology in the classroom seem to fit perfectly into these two mindsets. The fixed mindset teachers who feel that they have full command of their material and their classrooms bristle at the thought of taking a risk that may counter this understanding. Planning a lesson with technology that fails would send the message that they were in fact not good at teaching. Growth mindset teachers thrive on the constant learning that educational technology provides. Trying something new and failing only offers them more information for improvement. Growth mindsets are about effort and constant learning: exactly what technology provides teachers and students alike. Educational technology offers a unique opportunity for all of us to build our growth mindsets.

While this may seem like an indictment, it should be thought of optimistically. Changing mindsets is a paradigm shift that does require work, but it opens up the world of possibilities. It also gives those of us with fixed mindsets permission to be imperfect, to try and fail, and go on with the number one reason we all became teachers: our love of learning. Dweck quotes a CEO in her book as saying, “I never stopped trying to be qualified for the job.” This is the life of the teacher in the 21st Century. While we will never have full command of all the possibilities Educational Technology experts and Web 2.0 provide, it is our responsibility to keep up our efforts to learn and try new things. Isn’t this what we hope our students do?

Even with my new understanding , I haven’t rekindled my writing career, but I plan on using my newfound growth mindset to take on other tasks like surfing. A fixed mindset, and maybe even a practical one, might say that a Midwestern woman nearing forty should not be taking on the task of learning how to surf. A growth mindset simply says, just try.