emBeddinG A Growth mindSet

Rhiannon Wilkinson Head, Ashville College

Why a ‘growth mindset’ is a crucial aspect in the culture of a successful school.

Parents – and teachers and governors – are often impatient for new Heads to reveal their plan for a school, as though there is some sort of magic bullet that will resolve all difficulties. In reality, plans take time to work out and, if they are to be effective, have to win backing amongst all of a school’s significant stakeholders.

I believe that there are far more important aspects to developing a school than simply producing glossy documents of elaborate plans. The heart of any school is to be found in its culture and the pattern of relationships that pertain within it.

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Culture is a difficult word. Academic students of the term, such as Terry Eagleton, argue that there are more possible definitions of the word than of any other in the English language. So, what do I mean by the word “culture”? I interpret it as “the way we do things round here”.

And how should we do things at Ashville? In many ways, the foundation should lie in the qualities that enable all human relationships to thrive. They are relatively easy to state, not always easy to put into practice, but they should be our lodestars in our behaviour towards each other: staff to pupils and parents, the “school” to parents and prospective parents, staff to staff, pupils to pupils.

Schools are said to be “in loco parentis” while children are in school. Clearly, schools like ours cannot actually be parents to our pupils (although House parents come close to that role with boarders in term time), but they ought in many ways to act like parents in the qualities they embody. A good school should be trusted. It should lead by example. It should treat all its members with kindness. It should have high standards and high expectations of all who are members of its community. It should be supportive and encouraging. From time to time, it will have to point out shortcomings and propose ways in which they can be overcome. It should be consistent. It should also exercise humility and the ability to listen. We are all human. Schools deal with that most challenging of factors - the variety of people – and we all have to accept that there is no absolutely agreed way of educating children (or bringing them up). If there was, I suppose we would all be doing it.

There is one aspect of culture which I have tried to embed in every school in which I have ever worked, even though in my younger days I would not have described it in the way it is now.

A Stanford University psychologist, Carol Dweck, has provided a large amount of supporting evidence for the efficacy of what she has called “a growth mindset.” Put very simply, Dweck proposes two mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Those with fixed mindsets believe that ability and the possibility of success, whether academic or otherwise, is fixed – either you can do it or you can’t. If you have a fixed mindset, you tend not to try at tasks you find difficult. Even if you are able but have a fixed mindset, you dislike putting yourself to the test in case you fail, and that failure suggests that you are not as bright as you would like to think you are or as you believe people think you are. Dweck produces convincing evidence that fixed mindsets have notoriously deleterious effects, effects which, I am sure if we think about it, we have seen, perhaps in ourselves and people we know.

A fixed mindset can affect girls and boys somewhat differently. Dweck’s evidence suggests that a significant number of girls who have always been regarded as “clever” will not take academic risks because they do not want to be proved wrong and be seen as “failing” and, therefore, less clever. Politically incorrect though it may be to say it, we all know girls/women who are quick to say: “I am no good at Maths” / “I have never been any good at Maths” (I am probably in that number myself!). The fixed mindset also explains the attitude of many boys – and the evidence shows that it is mostly boys – who do not try hard at academic work because they don’t want to be seen to fail at it, and take refuge in, for example, becoming the class comedian. We will all recall boys who have not revised properly and make that known so that they can think: “I’d be fine if I had revised.”

A growth mindset on the other hand does not see ability or levels of success as fixed. Instead, it tries hard to work out why she or he has not succeeded in what they’ve been trying to do and sets about trying to do better next time. If you read the biographies of Nobel Prize-winning scientists, they often seem to possess particularly strong growth mindsets. This capacity to learn

from experience is labelled “resilience” by Carol Dweck, and it is probably one of the most important qualities a school can

instil in its pupils. This is not to say that anyone can become a scientific genius if she or he puts her/his mind to it. But it does suggest that

many people can do very much better than you might at first assume if they learn to work out where and why they have gone wrong, as it were, and how they can improve. It also concurs with the ideas of psychologists like Eric Andersson whose research was popularised into the idea that 10,000 hours of practice could make someone into a concert violinist and Angela Duckworth who has argued, again based on extensive research, that “grit”, i.e. keeping at it and not being discouraged by apparent failure, leads to success. Their ideas are somewhat more complex than this summary suggests. They are not saying hard work alone will transform you into Marie Curie, Sarah Gilbert, Artemisia Gentileschi, Albert Einstein, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but that hard work, determination and focused practice will make you very much better than might have been the case without it.

Of course, few people will have exclusively fixed or growth mindsets, but I am sure that we should encourage all our pupils to develop a growth mindset and its essential element, resilience, the ability and willingness to work out where you have gone wrong with something and how you might do it better next time.

I have no doubt that the encouragement of growth mindsets in pupils (and teachers) is an essential element in the culture of a successful school.