What Comes First?

One little word, so much potential... the word "yet". I'm not good at this...yet. Carol Dweck has shown through her research that by adding that word you are literally shaping your brain to allow for new learning. We are all on a journey, and through experiences acquire "tools" along the way. Every challenge we come across allows for opportunities to use the tools we have or gather new tools to use. As learners with a growth mindset, we are able to reprogram our perceptions and attitudes to reframe learning as "opportunities" vs. "requirements".

However, we must also be careful not to disregard evaluating the learning structures themselves. As Alfie Kohn referenced, it's not only the learner's beliefs but also the quality of the curriculum and the pedagogy being used that influences learning outcomes. If students are learning the same way it's always been done in the same manner it's always been taught because "that's the way we've always done it", is that really learning? The more advances in neuroscience, biology, and educational psychology as to how the mind learns and what the mind needs to learn, the more schools and the way it looks and feels should change. However, the structure of schools has largely remained stagnant.

So who has a fixed mindset? I would argue it isn't the learner. I would argue that it is actually the social construct that our society currently clings to as "fact" that is teaching the learner that learning is a fixed process. And why wouldn't a learner believe that to be true when every current structure set up to prove learning validates and supports that through a gross over-reliance on biased standardized testing?

Everyone is born a learner. Everyone is born curious. Everyone innately knows how to research, explore, and learn through play. I would even hypothesize that a growth mindset is the original state and a fixed mindset is a learned social behavior. So what I'm left wondering is what is it about our society and culture that is killing that innate desire to learn? What is holding us back from actually redesigning our educational structures based on current research? Why wouldn't we want to embrace what our brain is capable of doing and provide that optimal learning environment and adjust our curriculum and pedagogical practices to indeed provide guaranteed learning?

Reference

Stanford Alumni. (2014, October 9). Developing a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiiEeMN7vbQ

The “Mindset” Mindset. (2015, August 16). Alfie Kohn. http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/mindset/