Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What would you ask Carol Dweck?

Been away from this forum for a while, but wanted to respond and thank Connecting Dots for kindly citing a blog post I wrote about the grit-talent dichotomy (http://giftedchallenges.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-grit-talent-dichotomy-creating_19.html)

This thread has been great in debating the merits and problems with the mindset philosophy. I think much of the problem comes from the oversimplification of the concept, turning it into an all-or-nothing term, and demonizing giftedness, as if telling a child he/she is smart will deter the child from academic growth.

Of course it is critical to challenge oneself, take risks, develop resiliency, and rack up failures and learn from them. This is pretty obvious. 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.

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.

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.)

Indigo, Those are great suggestions for the classroom. It would be amazing if more schools considered using them.

Also, agree with your point about how schools often use lack of "achievement" as evidence of not being gifted. Another sad circumstance most of us have encountered is where schools assume gifted children are fulfilled because of good grades and high achievement, and ignore that many are skating through with little or no effort, developing bad habits that reinforce an under the radar form of underachievement.

I caught a bit of Dweck taking calls on MN public radio last week (first hour of The Daily Circuit on 7/27) while traveling. There were a few calls regarding gifted/bright kids in the Twin Cities area. One inquired about how to encourage growth in their child who always has top scores and grades (cue 23 min remaining), and later, another parent inquired about a child in a gifted classroom, to which she did say:

"It's super important for your son to be challenged and to have a peer group that is being challenged. It's up to you, in part, to interpret what does it mean to be gifted. It just means that if you challenge yourself you grow your ability, you grow your talent in order to do wonderful things with it in the future, so you just need to interpret it. It's not a fixed trait. It's a resource that you use and grow in the service of some dream or contribution you can make in the future. I think that could help him not get stuck in that gifted fixed mindset place." (see 7:07 remaining, and then 4:05 remaining)

Edited: I found the archive and added details. There are actually two guests. Might be worth a listen. :-)

To praise or not to praise smart kids

Longcut, It is great to hear of an interview where she acknowledges the importance of gifted kids being "challenged and to have a peer group that is being challenged."

This concept - the need for ability grouping, and the idea that gifted people are, in fact, different - gets lost in the mindset literature.

What also seems to emerge in many of the articles that circulate (please don't ask me to quote them now!) is the assumption that gifted kids are at a disadvantage if they know they are gifted because that will create a fixed mindset and stall their growth.

What seems to get lost is the idea that:
1. Gifted kids benefit from knowing the reality of their abilities (since they already sense they are different anyway);
2. They need to be challenged, need to fail, need to take risks;
3. They can't readily learn to fail or take risks unless the system encourages this by actually challenging them, placing them in ability grouped learning environments, encouraging their creativity, etc.

It's almost a blame the victim mentality - "it's all the gifted kid's fault if he doesn't succeed - he knows he's gifted, that creates a fixed mindset, so he doesn't push himself. The schools are blameless. If no one told him he was gifted, he would push himself to succeed."

It's a simplistic and false dichotomy that may not be what Dweck intended at all, but seems to be what is emerging in some of the articles out there, and may be absorbed by teachers and school districts.

Agreed. This forms the basis for many great questions to ask Dweck.

There were more questions posed to her along these lines in the program I linked. It's 40 min long, and the program topic was focused on "smart" kids. She said people have misinterpreted what she's said in terms of high ability kids (which she refers to more as "advanced" and seemed reticent to approach using the term gifted). Based on that misinterpretation, it would be nice to see her supplement her mindset info to clarify, for the sake of schools using it.

Agreed, although I did not perceive her as reticent to use the word gifted; Rather I understood her to acknowledge the baggage which comes with that word and offer some additional words commonly in use in gifted programs (such as "advanced").
Thanks for sharing the link to the MPR segment featuring Q&A with Carol Dweck. The 40 minutes of Q&A provides great clarity, and is consistent with research presented in the book, mindset. Highly recommend.

This. You often see Dweck's work stretched out by others... to the point of some people claiming that giftedness does not exist and it's merely a social, elitist construct because anyone can "grow" to be smarter.

It's assuming that the cause of a fixed mindset is knowledge of one's own giftedness. I would argue that not being challenged is far more toxic and more likely to lead one into a fixed mindset.

I'm sure, after listening to that interview (thanks for the link, longcut!) that Dweck does not intend to imply that dichotomy. However, phrases such as "stuck in that gifted fixed mindset" (see 37:11 elapsed) don't really help the cause. They make giftedness sound almost inevitable to having a fixed mindset unless you take loads of precautionary measures.

I would further argue that euphemisms for "extraordinary cognitive ability" that mask reality (that this is a tail end of {gasp} a normal distribution)-- do not help, either.

It is INCORRECT to state that a child like my DD is "advanced." She isn't. She's qualitatively-- and ultimately, quantitatively-- different from most children.

I know this because we've seen it in action in her deevelopmental arc. "Advanced" implies that my 6yo was "about like a third grader," or that acceleration is a sole solution to the problem-- something that educators already believe as part of the mythology of what asynchronous development means.

This isn't helpful.

Not all five year olds who can read like fifteen-year-olds should be studying Othello or The Holocaust. But "advanced" tidily implies that this might be, you know, a thing. It simply is not.

Again-- we know, because we were in fact forced to VERY carefully tease apart what emotional readiness our PG-let had at various points in her developmental arc, and what might be beyond her, or too much at the time. We made occasional missteps-- some of which I've posted about here. It was a minefield, quite frankly-- as a parent, one never really knew what she'd maintain a safe emotional distance from and what she'd unexpectedly personally-identify with.

"Advanced" is not the term for highly asynchronous development. Period. It's a gross oversimplification that is a huge disservice to children who are HG/HG+ in particular.

This is no better than assuming that a child with an FSIQ of 60 is "delayed." What, so eventually that child will "get" to calculus or esoteric theological analysis??

Again, I'm not saying that cognition is a fixed thing. Clearly it is not. But I do think that there is a lot of money to be made in promulgating the belief that anyone can be Einstein if they just try harder, and if they just "let go of what's holding them back" (preferably by some kind of "training" module, for a modest fee, no doubt).

What if there is an "optimized" developmental arc for an individual... and then there is everything LESS than that ideal?

That might not be such a popular idea, but it sure seems to be the one most consistent with every bit of data I've ever seen published, no matter what the authors suggest that it means.