Thoughts for a New School Year

Welcome back to a new school year!  To me, a new school year, a new beginning, is one of the most exciting times of the year.  I always make my "new year's" resolutions at the beginning of the school year, rather than at the beginning of the calendar year, and have goals and plans for the school year. For children, too, the year marks a new beginning and new opportunities.

Recently, I was reviewing a book that I've very much enjoyed and appreciated -- Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success -- and it reminded me of an NPR article I had clipped last fall  relating to the mental attitude people have about learning and about struggling to learn something new.  The gist of both of them, which I think is very relevant to the beginning of a new school year, is that a student's mental attitude about learning, and his/her attribution of results to effort or to ability, can make a huge difference to his/her success in learning and success in life.

Mindset begins with this scene:

"When I was a young researcher, just starting out, something happened that changed my life.  I was obsessed with understanding how people cope with failures, and I decided to study it by watching how students grapple with hard problems.  So I brought children one at a time to a room in their school, made them comfortable, and then gave them a series of puzzles to solve. . .  I expected differences among children in how they coped with the difficulty, but I saw something I never expected. . .

"Confronted with the hard puzzles, one ten-year-old boy pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and cried out, "I love a challenge!". . .  What's wrong with them, I wondered.  I always thought you coped with failure or you didn't cope with failure.  I never thought anyone loved failure.  Were these alien children or were they on to something?. . .

"What did they know?  They knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort.  And that's what they were doing -- getting smarter.  Not only weren't they discouraged by failure, they didn't even think they were failing.  They thought they were learning. . .

"I, on the other hand, thought human qualities were carved in stone.  You were smart or you weren't.  It was that simple.  If you could arrange successes and avoid failures (at all costs), you could stay smart.  Struggles, mistakes, perseverance were just not part of this picture. . .

"Whether human qualities are things that can be cultivated or things that are carved in stone is an old issue.  What these beliefs mean for you is a new one: What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?" [emphasis added]

The article, published on NPR, entitled "Struggle for Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning" by Alix Spiegel (http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/12/164793058/struggle-for-smarts-how-eastern-and-western-cultures-tackle-learning), begins with the story of a teacher in Japan who chose the student who was struggling to put his work on the board. The student continued to work until he finally succeeded, without seeming concerned about his struggle.  The article continues:

"In Eastern cultures. . . it's just assumed that struggle is a predictable part of the learning process.  Everyone is expected to struggle in the process of learning, and so struggling becomes a chance to show that you, the student, have what it takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that struggle."

If you assume that intelligence is fixed and that struggling means you are not very smart, you will tend to give up easily and avoid situations where you will be seen as not smart.  On the other hand, if you believe that intelligence is fluid and you can learn by working hard, you will tend to persist and will be more likely to succeed.  Other researchers have investigated the messages given to children by different kinds of praise, finding that when children are praised for their effort they learn persistence, but when they are praised for being smart they tend to persist less and give up more easily when a task is difficult.  In the article, Spiegel gives another example of a mother talking to her son about his success in a piano competition, explaining his success as a result of his efforts:  "You practiced and practiced with lots of energy," she tells him.  "It got really hard, but you made a great effort. . ."

From everything I've read, it seems that helping students (and ourselves) avoid a fixed mindset and become more willing to struggle and learn would be a big contributor to their (and our) success, so one thing that all of us could do is be aware of our own assumptions and beliefs in this area and work on attributing success to effort and reinforcing kids in the belief that hard work will result in learning and success.

And I think I will reread Mindset in its entirety as I work on my new [school] year's resolutions.  Here's to a great new year for everyone!