My Thought On The "Growth Mindset"

 

(Photo from a classroom in Beacons Field Middle School, posted on the Beacons Field Twitter page.)

    Before watching the videos of Carol Dweck I had never heard of the term growth mindset. I definitely knew of the idea because my parents would kind of preach about how important effort was (even though they would praise results more than effort) but I think that comes from their upbringing and not because they watched Carol Dweck's Ted Talk. 

   

     I feel like personally, I have a fixed mindset, which I am only recently trying to grow from. I definitely had that mindset in my childhood. I coasted through school and even graduated salutatorian from my high school, but I never tried at anything ever, in school or out. I never studied, I never practiced for my sports outside of scheduled practices, and I even would give up if a video game I was playing got too hard. If it was just a little bit hard I would feel embarrassed and not do it. 

    

    After getting to college and coming across things that were actually difficult for me I kind of fell apart. A combination of some personal things in my life, my classes which were now way harder, and being away from my family for the first time sent me into a pretty bad depressive episode that I only really started getting out of this past year. Coincidentally, when I started changing my mentality a little and focusing less on achievement and more on growing as a person things started to change for me. 

    I think the biggest thing I have learned about my learning is that I never really cared about what I am learning, only that I had success, which from my own experience I can tell is a bad thing. Another thing I found out is that what little effort I do put in will instantly vanish if I don't see a reason for doing it. An example of this would be when I was thinking about dropping out of college my sophomore year. I had changed my major four times already and still didn't have the magic answer of what I wanted to do with my life so I didn't see a point in being there. Even if I got enough credits there wouldn't be a career, or looking back I think it was more of a reward after I finished. 

    I absolutely would be interested in learning more about the growth mindset thing semester. I have sort of been trying to get myself into that kind of mindset this past year, and it will be interesting learning more about it and possibly apply some of it to my own life.   

    Going into this semester I had already made a promise to myself that I was going to put in all the effort I possibly could this semester. I currently am in the planned program's degree and when I was talking to my advisor about what I should take he said "take whatever you want". This is was the first time I would ever be learning just because I find something interesting and not because it was required of me. That's why this semester, along with making sure all of my classes were online so I could live at home with my family, I just picked classes that sounded interesting. That and I made the decision to actually put in the effort and not come up with excuses to not work. 

    Of the classes I am taking the ones I am most excited about are this class and my cinema of the American west course. This class I am excited about because I have always loved reading and writing and I know absolutely nothing about Indian culture, so I figured I would learn a lot of interesting things from this class. The cinema course I am excited about because my dad loves old western films, and I have enjoyed a couple, so I figured a course where I could watch and examine western films would be fun. 

    The only class I am worried about is my media law course. The only requirement of planned programs is that I had to take a senior capstone. I chose media law because it was the only one offered online, and I'm actually not that interested in the coursework. I am worried that that class will be harder to stay on top of, but I believe that I can put in the effort. 

    Going back to the growth mindset, there was one point from the critiques that really stuck out to me. Dweck's idea of a growth mindset wasn't really being used to actually help students learn but to have increased test scores, and it continues to put emphasis on achievement which allows teachers to label kids as deficient. I agree with what the professor said about growth mindset and that the current way we approach schooling isn't conducive for the growth mindset. 

    Overall I feel like everyone should strive to have a growth mindset, but I also agree that our societal systems need to change for everyone to have the best chance of reaching that mindset.