What we get wrong about Carol Dweck's mindsets

Your tennis game can always get better. But it sounds rude to say it like that. (Miss E. Moore, c. 1910. Library of Congress)

A friend of mine shared with me a document sent home by her child’s teacher. Amidst clip art and whimsical typefaces, the flyer listed the qualities and habits of a person with a fixed mindset followed by the qualities of a person with a growth mindset, then offered some tactics for helping your child “get out of a fixed mindset and into a growth mindset.”

These mindsets, developed by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford, were first described in her 2006 book Mindset. In recent years, they have been adopted by the mainstream educational community. Simply put, a fixed mindset means that you believe that your talent and intelligence are fixed traits; they cannot change. A growth mindset means that you believe that you can always get better.

Dweck’s research suggests that a person with a fixed mindset eschews challenges and looks for opportunities to prove their intelligence, while a person with a growth mindset seeks challenges and looks for opportunities to grow.

This construct is extremely useful to educators. It helps them to understand why struggling students don’t ask for help, don’t attend extra study sessions, and don’t raise their hand to ask questions. It also offers some context for why a student would quit an activity that they had been excited about. Moreover, the growth mindset gives us a framework for discussing the habits and attitudes we seek to lead students toward, helping us to identify what makes students successful.

Ironically, if we are too heavy-handed in our approach, we run the risk of reinforcing the exact tendencies we are seeking to eliminate in our students. If we teach the mindsets to students as two categories of people (i.e., “people with fixed mindsets” and “people with growth mindsets”) rather than two categories of beliefs, we are setting up a situation in which those who tend to fear being stupid or wrong or talentless will try to hide these tendencies. Those who tend toward fixed-mindset thinking are, by definition, the very people who are most likely to believe that they can’t change their fixed mindset.

Instead of seeing a path toward a more expansive understanding of aptitude and ability, a student who is afraid to mess up will be threatened by the idea of a growth mindset, eventually seeing the growth mindset as part of a family of school-related platitudes like “believe in yourself.”

The exhortation to “have a growth mindset,” while well-meaning, just adds more pressure for students who struggle with growth-oriented thinking. To prevent this, we can think of Dweck’s mindsets not as modes of thinking to adopt, but as patterns of thinking to be aware of. Teachers might discuss their own limiting beliefs about their ability and how they are working to shift them. Students might identify skills in which they have a growth mindset while also pinpointing areas where they discover more of a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset need not be a source of shame — in the context of developing growth-oriented thinking, fixed-mindset thinking is, itself, an opportunity for growth and self-discovery.

With any dichotomy, there is a tendency for us to want to be safely on the “good side.” However, reality is more nuanced. Letting go of our black-and-white thinking around mindsets helps us to be more honest with ourselves, more compassionate toward others, and sets up more authentic learning experiences as we tackle the day-to-day endeavor of systematically identifying and shifting limiting beliefs and seeking the support we need to grow. It’s never over — and that’s a truth not to avoid, but to embrace.