Before watching the videos "The Power of Believing That You Can Improve" and "Make Challenge the New Comfort Zone" I had never heard about professor Carol Dweck's growth mindset research.
After watching the videos I realized that I had always heard about the power of being "thirsty" for more information. Throughout my whole life I have always been taught to be curious especially in college and to learn and grow from mistakes.
I think that professor Dweck's growth mindset research has finally put those cliche sayings into context and meaning for me. Children are taught from the time they start school that when things are easy that means they are doing something right. When in reality, yes it's great for them that they are getting things correct but they should be wanting to challenge themselves and learn more. Can you imagine how smart people would be if they were to have challenged themselves starting in grade school?
Personally, I think that I am more in the fixed mindset of the growth spectrum. Throughout school I have always just cared about getting the grades and moving on to the next assignment. I have never really cared about challenging myself. And when I have failed I have never thought about failure as "not yet" but rather maybe this particular subject or topic just isn't for me and I should try to find something else that I'm good at.
I know I will be interested in learning about the growth mindset this semester. I think it is an interesting topic and maybe it will change the way that I think.
(Photo from professor Gibbs "Growth Mindset Memes blog")
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, Chelsea! There are lots of K-12 educators who are using Dweck's work and teaching these ideas in school, but it has not caught on so much in college (although I do learn from people's blog posts in this class that there are some other people at OU who are interested in this too and weaving it into their classes). As you can guess, I really hope that this class will be a good space for curiosity and creativity and maybe taking some risks and experimenting with your writing just to see what happens! When you go out and get a job you might not have the freedom to experiment just to see what happens, but I think school should definitely be a space for wild experiments, and I hope this class can provide that for everybody. I know I like experimenting with new things in the class: they don't always work out as planned, but I always learn something useful either way!
ReplyDeleteP.S. You can call me Laura, really! And I'm not actually a professor (just a lecturer)... and Lecturer Gibbs sounds kind of weird, ha ha. Especially since I have never given a lecture in my life! :-)