Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Against the growth mindset

Here are some of the things that Dweck actually says:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/217172.Carol_S_Dweck

“Genius is not enough; we need to get the job done.”
― Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential

“I believe ability can get you to the top,” says coach John Wooden, “but it takes character to keep you there.… It’s so easy to … begin thinking you can just ‘turn it on’ automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you’re there. When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, ‘More than ability, they have character.' ”
― Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

That's a pretty clear statement about what I've been complaining about: poor performance is invariably a consequence of not working hard enough. Believe in yourself and study "better," and you will achieve!

And of course, if you fail, it's your fault for not working harder or better or whatever. It's certainly not my fault for leading you down the garden path.

In the discussion here, performance in school has TWO components: ability and effort. Dweck dismisses ability as something that you can increase if you just work hard enough, and that is a lie.

Well, working harder/smarter is is the only lever that students have. They can't go back to God and ask for a different brain

And if you work a little harder, you will likely do a little better (at least locally). (and sure, there is eventually a diminishing marginal return or even a negative return on each additional marginal unit of effort expended).

The Dweck powerpoint I read sometime back (sorry can't find the link) made clear her view that success is a function of both ability and effort.

WE can.

The problem, as has been noted up-thread, is that college campuses (and honors classes, and AP offerings, and, and and) are being filled up with a lot of students who have been, um--


conditioned--

by people who have made it their mission (with considerable zeal, in fact) to convince those students that YES! THEY! CAN!

When, in point of fact, a fair number of them really cannot.


On the other hand, they DO have numbers on their side, and also, much more importantly, MONEY to spend on the endeavor (fruitless though it might ultimately be).

Do colleges turn them away? Why, NO. No, they do not. What they do entertain is the notion of "making a place at the table" for everyone. Because everyone "can" do it, see...



This is, paradoxically, WEAKENING the expectations in all academic settings-- which in turn makes it even less likely that kids like those of forum members will escape the forces that drive perfectionism to start with (success which it far too easy, nobody ever telling them that some things are just HARD, etc).

I don't know. I think that this toxic madness is harder to see until you've had a child thoroughly "processed" through the system as it is now. Common Core's woefully implemented roll-out has only made things worse. Because NO, we can not actually make children at the 20th percentile all perform at the 70th percentile, no matter how much we might WISH that it were so... and throwing more and more resources at this, burying our entire educational system in more and more standards, becoming ever narrower in what is considered "normative"-- none of that does a gosh darned thing about the fact that some people aren't that capable. They just aren't.

NOT all people are "gifted." Not in the g-loaded sense of that word. All people are worthwhile as human beings. All people have uniqueness and have value. Yes.

Sometimes, your best isn't good enough-- even if really, really IS your best.

I think that Val and I are both saying that it is just plain CRUEL to take on a blame mindset about that and torture people whose best isn't good enough with "but--but-- if you just TRIED harder, and BELIEVED in yourself a bit more, see..."

Well, it doesn't work with disabilities, does it? You can't wish those into the cornfield, and some activities are simply g-loaded and not everyone CAN do them.

Dweck claims that if you work harder, you get smarter:


and from that same page:


This is pseudoscientific garbage.

Just a small comment on ID individuals learning to read:

Many moderately impaired individuals have the capacity to learn to decode and encode, if taught explicitly. The real difficulty is comprehension. I know a not insignificant number of adolescents and adults with IQs in the intellectually disabled-moderately impaired range who can read and/or write fluently at what we consider an average adult level with regard to basic skills (and I'm not speculating about either the cognitive level or the academic level, as I did the evals myself)--but their comprehension, especially inferential comprehension, is limited by their cognition. This manifests in writing as simplistic ideas, poor or simple organization, and less complex sentence structures.

The severely impaired children I've seen usually can learn some environmental print, and sometimes primary-level reading and writing (<2nd grade).

Beyond that level of impairment, they're often working on skills like joint attention, and reliably activating switches.

I'm pretty sure that in her zeal to encourage people to keep learning and growing, she's stretching the truth by assigning intent where there may be none and exaggerating small samples to big populations (where exactly are all these people she repeatedly refers to who do nothing else but sit around saying/proving how smart they are? In my 20+ years in business plus time spent at a top-tier business school, I can only recall a small handful I'd describe as remotely like that, and in those cases, I would ascribe it to them just being jerks.)

This is such a fascinating discussion.

I definitely see how a person could develop a point of view where their perspective is "if something is hard, that means I can't do it because I'm not smart / talented / creative / whatever enough and failure is TERRIBLE... so better not try" and that this point of view is fundamentally unhelpful. A person could also develop a point of view that has a perspective like "effort is good, failure is a part of learning, I can get better by trying" and that this is a more useful way of approaching challenge.

People are not the same but everyone has challenges and the way we handle those challenges (whether it's learning to dress yourself or learning calculus) is important. And the way we communicate to kids has a huge impact on the perspectives and opinions they develop.

Now as for Dweck, her book is in the pop-psychology / self-help genre that necessarily oversimplifies and is more about the soundbite and the slogan rather than any thoughtful nuanced analysis. It's also going to be targeted primarily to the middle of the intelligence curve -- where most of her audience is.

For high LOG kids, the problem is somewhat different -- getting them challenged in the first place so that you can then demonstrate to them what learning (effort, failure, continued effort, improvement) really looks like. Replacing intellectual challenge with work volume in order to demonstrate the importance of effort completely backfires (the reward for all that work? you still didn't learn anything!).

The ideas in the book have been directly helpful for us in dealing with DD (we consciously shifted to praising effort and embracing failure). But these same good ideas can absolutely be misused by a school system -- and society -- more interested in pretending that everyone is the same than helping individuals reach their individual potentials.

Okay, I'll stand corrected there. Thanks.

I suspect that this means that the kids I knew (50-ish) were mostly in the very-severe to profound range. As I mentioned, there was just no way those kids would have been able to learn to read.

Or, the condition itself had an effect that impaired the ability to read in spite of IQ around 40-ish (there were floor problems in testing).

Put me down as one in favor of the growth mindset.

I was constantly praised and valued for being smart as a child, to the point where my intelligence became my identity. My mother even refused grade skips for me to ensure that I would always be "the smartest kid in the class."

It wasn't until I entered law school that all of this began to backfire, as I found myself entirely unprepared to deal with real challenge. Consequently, I hit a wall, never practiced law or came anywhere close to meeting my potential. Instead, I've been stuck in middle management, bored and frustrated for years.

However, in the course of doing research on how to raise my exceptionally gifted son, I found Dweck and all the anti-praise research. Reading much of it literally brought tears to my eyes. It described my psychology so perfectly and predicted my outcome so accurately that it made me feel like a puppet.

Since then, I've not only changed the way I'm raising my son (praising effort, ensuring he has ample opportunity to experience and overcome the discomfort that accompanies challenge), but I've also completely changed my own outlook. A decade-plus out of law school, I recently passed the bar exam and am starting a new career. I feel more hopeful and optimistic than I have in years.

So, for me at least, Dweck's research has been very profound and powerful stuff.