Indigo,
I wouldn't describe Dweck as "waffling" exactly, but she does sometimes seem to ridicule the mere concept of innate ability and other times acknowledge it.
These two statements of hers, for instance, seem to be at odds.
The quote I provided earlier:
I also don’t like the word “gift.” It implies that abilities are simply bestowed from on high, that some students have them and some don’t, and that students have no role to play in developing them.
From an interview with her at http://www.iub.edu/~intell/dweck_interview.shtml :
I think our society tends to believe that geniuses are born, not made. And I wouldn't dispute that there might be a strong innate component, but it's just clear from the histories of so many geniuses that motivation is a key component.
Granted, she doesn't use the word
ability in the second quote, though I read "innate component" as being equivalent to "innate ability" as measured on an IQ test (since she brought up geniuses).
I would strongly disagree that the word "gift" conveys all of the meaning she is assigning to it in the first quote. Unless we as parents and educators are actually assigning that meaning to the word, those ideas do not have power. I use the term "gifted learner" with DS rather than simply telling him he is gifted. To me, that acknowledges that he
can learn quite differently than many of his age peers, but that the learning part is still up to him and will take effort.
I think the larger problem with the growth mindset movement is what Dweck
doesn't say about the very practical challenges of motivating students who indisputably learn far more quickly than others from the start (i.e., the gifted). This article, for instance (
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids1/) jumps to the conclusion that Jonathan checked out from seventh grade solely because his parents praised him for being smart:
A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son's confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless (bolding mine).
I have a real problem with the way this is presented. She makes it seem incontrovertible that Jonathan's problem was the ability-based praise he received suddenly wasn't enough to motivate him when the "going got tough." More likely, he hadn't been given enough challenge all through grade school, and no amount of growth mindset was going to work for him since he had already "hit the ceiling" on expected growth. More likely, seventh grade absolutely sucked socially and emotionally for him (as it does for
so many kids), and what was previously a less-than-ideal-but-tolerable situation suddenly became living hell. More likely, it was easier to "throw in the towel" completely on school and run away from "boring and pointless" work... the school was providing him nothing but 6-7 hours a day of waste.
And, also?
Jonathan is fictitious! She needs to prove her point by
making someone up? Couldn't she have taken an actual student and changed his name to make her point?
If she has considered that gifted kids needs a more challenging environment to grow (rather than simply a change of mindset), I have yet to come across a quote of hers that states that. And I think
that is what irks so many people on this board.
