In “The Perils of Growth Mindset Education”, Alfie Kohn is exploiting what he believes to be the errors in Carol Dweck’s research. He believes that Carol Dwecks research was too general, “The problem with sweeping, generic claims about the power of attitudes or beliefs isn’t just a risk of overstating the benefits but also a tendency to divert attention from the nature of the tasks themselves”. This also ties into his belief that the problem today does not live within the children, the problem is due to a flaw in what/how the children are being taught, “An awful lot of schooling still consists of making kids cram forgettable facts into short-term memory.” In “Teachers, Parents Often Misuse Growth Mindset Research”, Carol Dweck defends her theory against those who believe growth mindset fails but are actually using it the wrong way. "As the growth mindset has become more popular and taken hold, we are beginning to find that there are pitfalls," said Dweck. "Many educators misunderstand or misapply the concepts." She goes on to explain the concepts of a growth mindset further. Dweck denies generalizations such as praising effort alone, “Praising effort alone, she says, is useless when the child is getting everything wrong and not making progress.”, telling kids to try harder, “Effort, Dweck says, is only one route for a student to make learning improvements. If a student doesn't have strategies for solving a problem, or the necessarily skills, or the steps for completing an assignment at his fingertips, all the effort in the world might not help.”, and repeating mindset jargon, “Dweck cited a recent Stanford Ph.D. thesis by Kathy Liu Sun, now a professor at Santa Clara University, which found that students continued to have fixed-mindset thoughts in math class when their teachers mouthed growth mindset phrases but didn't change their teaching practices.”
After reading these articles, I understand the differences. One with a growth mindset believes they can become smarter and wants to learn. Students with fixed mindsets believe that if they don’t understand something, it is because they are not smart enough and they never will be. A student with a growth mindset sees a challenge as a goal to reach. A student with a fixed mindset will come upon the same challenge and see it as a monster. Students with fixed mindsets tend to run from challenges and accept failure. Accepting failure was never something I was good at. Failure was the devil on my back. Not feeling like you are good enough is one of the worst feelings in the world and I am not a stranger to this feeling. I love my parents and my parents love me. My parents are great people but they tend to put pressure on me and my brother. A lot is expected of me for someone my age. I go to school full time and I work two jobs. If I have free time, my parents think it’s because I don’t have enough to do to keep myself busy. When you strive to make people proud, I think you get confused on whether you are doing it for yourself or for someone else. I believe having a growth mindset means not only wanting to make those above you proud, but wanting to make yourself proud also. I consider myself to have a growth mindset 100%. I was not always like this and it took time to get to where I am today. In elementary school, I was top of my class. I excelled mainly in reading and was always two levels ahead of the rest of my class. Though I was an amazing reader, my skills in math were not where they should have been. I was praised for reading and I was told that I could do just as well in math if I just tried as hard as I did with reading. The flaw with this statement, that I had heard 1,000 times, was that reading came easy to me and math did not. I did not have to work hard to excel in reading so if I applied the same amount of effort to both areas, obviously I would not do well. I struggled all throughout middle school to the point where the area I had exceled in, reading and spelling, was also starting to deteriorate. I didn’t know why I couldn’t memorize my times tables and I didn’t know why I couldn’t finish long division problems in two minutes like everyone else. For the first time, I was faced with something that didn’t come easy to me. Because I had been raised thinking that I was smart because I could read well, I now thought I was dumb because I could not do math well. My grades suffered all throughout middle school and six months of the ninth grade. Six months of people telling me that I was just lazy and that I just wanted negative attention. At my physical, my doctor talked to me about my classroom experience and why I wasn’t doing well. I took a few screen tests, got notes from my teachers explaining my situation, and within a few months I was diagnosed with ADHD. All of the sudden, I wasn’t “lazy”. Now, to my teachers, I was just “different”. My doctor prescribed me with a medication called Vyvanse. When I started taking Vyvanse, my world changed. I was motivated and I was happy to do well. I attacked challenges head on and enjoyed creating goals for myself. Throughout high school and my college experience, ive stayed on Vyvanse and I still believe that I have a growth mindset. I have outgrown the corrupt belief, posed upon me by my middle school/high school teachers, that I cannot perform as well as others just because of my disorder. Halfway through my freshman year and I work two jobs, bought my own car, and have recently been invited to join DCCC’s honors society. I just have one question for my teachers who knew me when I was “lazy”: Still think I’m lazy?
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GillianBlog for English Comp 1 Archives
May 2017
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