One of my concerns regarding the growth mindset is that its unclear how much of of the growth mindset is supposed to come from just changing the wording of how you present an assignment/work product vs changing the assignment to better challenge a student. Hearing people, especially those really into the growth mindset, talk about what is needed, they sound more like the former. But I suspect that for gifted students, the later is as important or more important.
I don't have an opinion wrt more typical students, but for a gifted student I question have valuable it is to say "oh you worked really hard on this" if they can show a good result without working hard. The growth mindset should as much arise from challenging work as from the type of feedback you give.
I agree.
I have no idea if this is exclusively a 2e thing. I expect that it is not, in fact-- my DD has spent a lot of years UN-learning what this kind of rhetoric seems to have done to her...
"I'm so proud of how much effort you put into this"
"You worked so hard!"
"Wow-- your effort really paid off here,"
etc. because it TOLD her what she knew internally was not true. The truth was that she wasn't working hard even remotely, because she honestly had no idea how. Or that such a thing might ever
be a thing, I have to speculate. It was effectively
gaslighting to her to use that growth mindset talk with her when she actually WAS NOT working hard-- at much of anything. Penmanship, I guess. {sigh}
I guess I needed it framed this way to recognize that so succinctly. Thank you, Malraux, for verbalizing this.
FWIW, her attitude was pretty awful toward schoolwork for a large number of years. From age 8 until about 12, in fact. She was still making great grades-- when she bothered. But it was an ongoing battle to get her to put forth even the minimal effort needed to get that. I honestly do NOT believe that she has any 2e issues. I've seen a lot of college students compensate for them, and she doesn't seem to be doing that now that she actually took the effort to learn to write well. She writes VERY fluently and rapidly, and doesn't seem to have any real weaknesses in the skill set. But ohhhhhh, the tears that it took to get her
motivated to make that effort.
