Growth Mindset
“I don’t know,” the student quickly answers. “Well, give yourself a moment to think about it.” The teacher pauses to embrace the silence, the student looks back at the teacher waiting. After a moment he shakes his head and gives a little chuckle: “I don’t know.”
“Can you help me?” the little girl asks as she hands the task to her father. “How many times have you tried?” he asks in response. “It’s just too hard,” she sighs as she avoids the question directly.
“But this is the way we have always done it,” says the assistant to the trainee. “What if I could show you a way to make things easier?” the trainee humbly proposes. The assistant obstinately glares back: “But the procedures are how we’ve always done it,” she asserts.
Growth mindset is the mental positioning of being ready and open to learn. Learning takes effort, focus, and patience, from tying shoes to writing a book. Everyone begins the learning process from the beginning, the not knowing, a state of incapacity. The potential may be present in great amounts—someone might come from a long line of experts, might have similar skills that logically seem transferable, might have an eager interest in becoming an expert. The potential may be lacking or weak—there could be serious difficulties that would need to be overcome, the task could be a very difficult task to master, fate or chance or misunderstandings or circumstances or problems could arise. But growth mindset is a willingness and resilience to try, to do, to fail, and to try again.
Ballerinas did not take their first step as gracefully as they perform on the stage. First, they learned in early life how to walk. And just like other babies, they took a few tumbles before they were reliably moving around unassisted. Later, they were students in dance class, repetitively making mistakes yet refining each time they watched and mimicked the movements of the teacher and older classmates. Even the morning of the audition they woke with their muscles stiff and resistant to the motions. Through practice and warm up the ballerina goes from can’t to can.
In order to have a growth mindset, the individual must give themself the space and time to act. A common trait of a stagnant mindset is a quickness to declare “I can’t.” It is a statement of finality—there is no room for debate, for trying, for even considering—this helplessness is a fact. The student asserts it with a period at the end, with resignation but no shame. Shame is lacking because the student has dismissed the possibility of capability, and in their mind trying would be in vain, so according to them it is the capacity that is absent rather than the willingness.
The teacher is an important player in cultivating a growth mindset. Young children look to their parents’ reactions when they take a tumble in order to decide to respond in tears or to pick themself up and continue their play. They learn from social cues and results that if they are hurt, they will be comforted and tended to, which in some cases might be more reassuring for the parents than the child, as both enjoy the affection and attention. It is nice to have assistance and love, but there is a possibility of nurturing an addiction or dependency. In contrast, the adult who sits with the child learning to read and is patient with the slow sounding out, endures the routine repetition, and is soft with the occasional corrections enables the child to access a universe of knowledge. The adult who takes off the bicycle’s training wheels and steadies the take off before letting go and cheering sends the child off into a world capable of independent balance. Just as a gardener knows that overwatering is as problematic as underwatering, the teacher who cultivates growth mindset knows it is just as important to step back and let the child do. The teacher who is no longer needed enjoys the reward of the child accomplishing the task and their own redundancy.
The student is just as responsible, or even more so, for developing his own growth mindset. The student who says “I can’t” has given up, stopped being available to trying, and has moved on from any effort to find a different strategy or perspective. Students who say “I can’t” frequently enough may have discovered that these words have a sort of magic in them, since they dismiss responsibility and stop their effort: it is a declaration of permanence and apathy. With this declaration, the student adopts a learned helplessness: the task is not something they will attempt again, nor do they care about whether they are a doer or a quitter. They can or they can’t. They might even go into adulthood taking the attitude that they do what comes easy, they ignore, quit, or do not care about what takes effort and focus.
In philosophical practice, we follow the perspective of Socrates concerning education. In line with its etymology, education is a bringing out of what is already inside. This is in contrast to the conventional lecture based classroom where the enlightened professor shares his knowledge with his pupils by talking for an hour or two. Instead, we throw the interlocutor into the water and see how they start to swim. The philosopher avoids explaining, instead prompting the development of thinking from the interlocutor as a thinker capable of thinking. Stagnate mindset would lead the student to ask for explanation, instructions, approval, or help. Growth mindset leads the philosopher and interlocutor to be open to what ideas they can learn together with the freedom of turning the blank slate into something not controlled by one or the other, but composed together. There is a joy for the philosopher in this openness to the new ideas that come from this dialogue because the philosopher learns along with the interlocutor.