Of course it is critical to challenge oneself, take risks, develop resiliency, and rack up failures and learn from them. This is pretty obvious.
Unfortunately, this may not be obvious to some schools, as the forums are filled with anecdotes of any "failure", setback, lack of growth, and/or plateauing, being used as evidence that a child is not gifted, not
so gifted, not the smartest in the class, and/or does not have academic/intellectual/educational/curricular needs beyond the regular classroom offerings, etc. Such determinations may be predicated on using an achievement-based definition of giftedness and focusing on a short-term time frame.
But mindset has become a buzzword that is now used in many school districts with little understanding of how it may affect both gifted and neurotypical students.
Agreed. In some instances, this may be due to not having reading Dweck's book
mindset, but only having read
about mindset... catching small sound bites here and there, out of context.
When using Dweck's work as a classroom theory which benefits ALL students, possibly this could include:
- It's OK to make fresh, new mistakes.
- Making a fresh, new mistake may be evidence of working at one's challenge level or zone of proximal development (ZPD): the pupil is exploring territory which was previously unchartered by him/her (but ideally is well-known by the teacher).
- It is not good to hide mistakes, as that short-circuits the important process of learning from mistakes.
- Kids could be encouraged to share a mistake, roadblock, or impasse which they experienced... and what they learned from it, or if it is ongoing, what they hope to learn from it.
(If a lesson did not afford the opportunity to explore uncharted territory and make a mistake... boredom could be an impasse, and ought not to be treated as a taboo subject... in the case of sustained boredom, a kid would be hoping for the stimulation of learning something new, to keep school interesting and avoid zoning out followed by eventual underachievement.) 
