(This post is by Melinda Mann, LEV’s Development Director, who organized the event.)
Last Thursday, education activists and parents were treated to a provocative presentation about how praising your child can be good – if it’s done the right way or how it can have long-term negative effects if it’s not.
Dr. Carol Dweck, renowned psychologist and author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success was joined at LEV’s event by Lisa Brummel, senior vice president for human resources at Microsoft, and Kristin Rowe Finkbeiner, founder of MomsRising.
Two decades following the self esteem movement, Dr. Dweck’s research shows that saying ‘good job’ to our kids from birth builds an addiction to empty praise and a subsequent inability to deal with the inevitable obstacle that arises in life, whether it’s a crumbling block tower or a sticky math problem.
Those kids are being saddled with a “fixed mindset” where they think their intellect and ability is something they are born with versus something that can be developed. Instead, making observations such as “Wow, you must have worked really hard to build that so tall, or gee, I can tell you really concentrated on that drawing” would help kids develop a “growth mindset” where they see that what they put into something can make a difference.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that values good grades in many cases, over effort. Does anyone here have a middle schooler or high schooler who can’t stop looking at the Source, the electronic record of grades in Seattle Public Schools? I do and it’s all about making sure the grade chart is green for ‘A’, or blue for ‘B’, but not, god forbid, orange for ‘C’ and you can imagine what colors D and E are!
As Dr. Dweck emphasized, we need to let kids know from the earliest age possible that talent is a boat without a motor and that the motor is effort. It doesn’t go anywhere without the added energy.
But there’s hope for those of us who have a fixed mindset (and maybe didn’t even know it). We can evolve and learn to send messages to our kids about the importance of hard work and effort. We can let them know that mistakes — and even failure — are just pieces of information that can be used to make adjustments and can actually help you to succeed if you let them.
Lisa Brummel, who is in charge of hiring at Microsoft, says she cares less about how quickly someone can solve a complex problem, than she does about whether they can converse about the texture of it. Wow, think about that. At one of the most driving companies in the world, hiring is based not on raw talent or genius, but whether someone is willing to meander through a valley that could include pitfalls and unseen obstacles, but also unrealized opportunities, to get to the other side.
Kristen Row-Finkbeiner, whose national grass roots advocacy organization, MomsRising, has to be able to turn on a dime adjust to quickly changing political winds, says that as a growth-minded organization, they throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall to find out which one sticks – and that while messy — it works.
Dr. Dweck has turned her attention recently to the conflict in the Middle East, trying to determine whether participants in the peace process have a fixed or growth mindset and how that may affect negotiations.
So, from preschool to the global political stage — what we as parents and teachers say to our kids when they hand us a crayon drawing can affect our world for generations to come.
LEV Foundation, like many people, has both: a fixed mindset about what is good for kids – excellent teachers and challenging classes that get them ready for college, work and life, and a growth mindset about how to get there — making long overdue changes in funding and teacher support, growing public engagement, using evidence-based advocacy and lots of data.
So, the education reform movement is growing, making progress and riding the waves of change – stay with us.
