when people attempt to call her on it, she seems to use overloaded meanings of "ability" and "growth" to slip out of accountability for some of her more questionable statements.
I find this with most things: solid from a distance, up close it resembles a mosaic: more grout than substance.
So far, I've not seen that with Dweck, possibly because I do anticipate much of society being geared toward audiences in the middle as statistically that is where most consumers are. Despite what
mindset may offer the masses, I do think that
mindset has an important message for the gifted, which they may be wise to consider. On the forums I've paraphrased it this way:
One aspect or application of a fixed mindset is that gifted kids may stop taking appropriate risks in order to always be "right" or always be "smart" or never be "wrong", and this may work against them.Do you have an example of the waffling you describe? I'd like to take a look at it and see what thoughts might occur to me. Thnx.
I would ask her for an exact definition of "ability" because it seems to me to be the word everyone is sliding around on.
I say this is a great idea. If a second edition of the book, or a follow-up book with additional research is ever published, I would suggest including a glossary of terms, including ability (which may have multiple contextual meanings, as many words in the dictionary do, and yet each can be expressed in descriptive terms), intelligence, talent, effort, skill, smart, gifted, genius, prodigy... all words we understand in general use but seem to have specific meaning within the context of discussing motivational mindsets, implementing mindset coaching in the classroom... or selling the coaching to schools.
