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Psychologist and researchers Carol Dweck, David Yeager, & Mary Murphy explore what future education research looks like with a focus on the science of human motivation for the next decade.

In the past decade, scientists have shown definitively that people’s mindsets—their beliefs about themselves and their place in the world—can shape motivation and enhance learning. The next decade will be about using this knowledge to make lasting changes in teaching and learning contexts, and to reduce achievement disparities at scale. In the context of what we have achieved, this session unveiled grand challenges for the future and showed how scientists and practitioners will work together to solve them.

About SXSW EDU: The SXSW EDU Conference & Festival cultivates and empowers a community of engaged stakeholders to advance teaching and learning. SXSW EDU is a component of the South by Southwest® (SXSW®) family of conferences and festivals. Internationally recognized as the convergence gathering for creative professionals, SXSWedu extends SXSW’s support for the art of engagement to include society’s true rock stars: educators!

The Initiative builds on existing large, international studies on mindset and motivation and seeks to improve teaching practices and boost academic achievement and equality in classrooms throughout the globe.

Read more about the Initiative.

This is part of a series called, Ask a Psychologist at Education Week
July 08, 2020 – Jamie Carroll and David Yeager

Question: During distance learning, I think I’ve been teaching my students to use a growth mindset. But how do I know when it’s working—and when it’s not?

In the classroom, teachers can usually tell when a student is feeling discouraged. Maybe they put their head down. Maybe they throw their hands up in defeat. Or start copying answers. If you’ve been establishing a growth-mindset culture, you can emphasize everyone’s potential to learn, even when the work is hard.

But it’s harder to see the early-warning signs of disengagement—and sustain a culture of learning—in remote or blended learning contexts.

We asked Dana Stiles, an OnRamps statistics teacher at Bowie High School in Austin, Texas, about how she handled this challenge during COVID-19.

First, the good news: Dana thinks that distance learning might have improved some students’ growth-mindset behaviors, such as help-seeking, because it removes a lot of the social comparisons that teens are especially apt to make. In a regular classroom, some students are afraid to ask for help because they don’t want to look dumb in front of their peers or they think they are bothering you.

But distance made it harder for her to know who needed more support. “In the classroom, I was able to take their temperature [metaphorically] by standing at the door as they walked in—knowing where their head is at and any personal battles they’re facing and challenges they’re dealing with,” she explained. But during COVID-19, she had to reach out to students proactively to see how they were doing.

She started by sending personal, physical letters in the mail to students she knew had challenging home lives or other factors that might get in the way of learning. She used Calendly to give students the opportunity to sign up for one-on-one video meetings. Using the Remind app, she sent personal messages to students who were not engaging in material with specific questions they had to respond to.

In the video meetings, she could keep the discussion personal and brief, covering just two questions: How are you doing and feeling? And how can I support you as you meet the ambitious learning goals in this class? These two questions let students know that you care about them as people and that your priority is their learning—not evaluating or judging them.

Students can then feel free to challenge themselves and reach out for help when they’re stuck. 

Contacting students individually is time-consuming and challenging, but Dana says it’s well worth the effort you put in: “The kids actually thank you for it because you’re personalizing what they need to do based on their results and their reflections.”

This is part of a series called, Ask a Psychologist at Education Week
July 1, 2020 – Jamie Carroll and David Yeager

How can I stop students from thinking that making a mistake means they’re stupid?

The last thing students need right now is to think they have failed. When kids make an error in class, they can see it as a signal that they’re not smart enough and will never be successful. Add the stress of distance learning and concerns about racial justice, and a simple mistake might cause a student to disengage from school.

Research on growth mindset tells us that students who understand that mistakes are a part of the learning process are more likely to persevere in the face of failure. But if educators have a failure mindset—the belief that failure hurts learning rather than helps by providing a growth opportunity—then students may think making mistakes means they can’t do the work. What can teachers do to convey that mistakes are not a problem but fuel for growth?

We asked Brad Branham, a veteran high school math teacher in Columbus, Ind., and a part of the National Mindset Innovation Network.

“The best way to connect with my students is for them to see my face every day,” Brad explains. On the first day of distance learning, he started a YouTube channel and posted videos of himself making mistakes. “I [wanted] to show them that I’m going to put myself out there and that making mistakes is a normal part of learning.”

But wait, aren’t teachers supposed to show students how to get the right answer? Not in Brad’s class. His students are used to getting the answer keys and working backward to figure out the process, not just the answer. This strategy puts students in charge of reflecting on their own understanding of the material to help them become independent learners, which is essential in distance learning.

So he created a video series called “Overconfident Mathematicians” featuring his children, a stuffed bear from a local university, and the animated character Pikachu saying they’re too smart to mess up. But they do. Imagine a “Where’s Waldo” for mistakes: The students know there’s a mistake in there, but they have to find it on their own.

Making mistakes can make you feel vulnerable in front of your students, which is scary. But it can help students realize that mistakes are not a big deal; they’re inevitable if you’re taking risks and challenging yourself to grow. By using mistakes as an instructional tool, you convey to students that mistakes help them learn. This tool can also build students’ confidence in their own skills. When they find a mistake, they realize that they know more than those overconfident mathematicians..

To learn more, you can watch our interviews with Brad and other educators from the National Mindset Innovation Network here. And if you have other great mindset practices to share, please tweet us at @NIMN_UT with #MindsetTeaching.

This is part of a series called, Ask a Psychologist at Education Week
June 24, 2020 – Jamie Carroll and David Yeager

How can I support a growth mindset for underrepresented minority students when the system doesn’t treat them like they can all learn?

If you ask most educators, “Do you think every student can learn?,” the answer is a resounding “YES.” But Black and Latinx students don’t always know this. The American education system has often told students of color, directly or indirectly, that they shouldn’t be in the same school as white students, in the same classroom with white students, and in the same college with white students. This de facto segregation has promoted racial and ethnic stereotypes that students of color have lower potential. Students might wonder how much their teachers believe these stereotypes, even in part.

An authentic growth-mindset culture can help. Most teachers know that a growth mindset is the belief that intelligence is not fixed. But this complex idea has sometimes been reduced to a slogan (“just try harder!”) or a single lecture. That is not what we are talking about. Instead, we are talking about growth-mindset cultures, which include consistent words, deeds, and values that directly and unequivocally convey the message that all students can grow their knowledge and skills.

The psychologist Claude Steele argued that if teachers think that intelligence can be developed and grown, then students do not need to be as concerned about confirming the stereotype that members of their group have lower levels of intelligence. The growth-mindset culture robs stereotypes of their power, at least in that classroom. Students can then feel safer to take intellectual risks (asking for help, seeking harder content), and learn more.

Ina recent SXSW EDU keynote, psychologist Mary Murphy showed that Black and Latinx students in courses taught by professors with a fixed mindset (the belief that intelligence cannot change) were less engaged, performed worse, and were less interested in pursuing STEM careers than white or Asian students. But when faculty had a growth mindset, these inequities were narrowed by half or more.

This is important in part because it means that white teachers can create equitable, anti-racist classrooms when they commit to authentic growth-mindset cultures. One vivid example comes from Uri Treisman, a mathematician at the University of Texas at Austin who is a MacArthur Fellow and was recently featured in the book The Years That Matter Most by Paul Tough. Triesman teaches a legendary calculus class that leads many students of color to pursue STEM majors.

From day one, Treisman contradicts the stereotype that only some students will have a hard time in calculus. He says things like, “Everybody in this class will struggle,” and “No matter who you are, questions are going to be flying at you that you can’t answer. If you don’t understand that [struggle is a pathway to learning], you’ll think it means, ‘Oh [no], I don’t belong here.” He challenges all of his students through intensely rigorous material but does not ignore differences in their background, confidence, and skills. He gets to know each student’s struggles and fears, then works with them, at all hours, to help them overcome these obstacles. Students who get answers wrong on tests have the chance to earn back points and still end up at the top of the class. And his teaching assistants are often former students who can serve as role models to show that, yes, you can do this.

As a teacher, you can’t just tell your students of color to “have a growth mindset” and ignore the messages they are getting from an unequal world. But you can build your own classroom cultures so that equity is a fact, not an aspiration. You can convey that all students are capable of excellence—and then do anything and everything to help get them there.