Is it worth trying to promote a growth mindset in students? Yes. The effect may seem small, but it’s in the range of <em>lots</em> of education effects. We know there aren’t any silver bullets. We have to take many small steps with the expectation that each will make a small contribution to greater student success.

<p>Growth mindset suggests three concrete steps for educators when a student suffers an academic setback:</p> <ol><li>Encourage students to seek feedback about what went wrong.</li> <li>Encourage students to analyze these errors and use them as opportunities for learning.</li> <li>Encourage students to think of ways they might do things differently when they try again.</li></ol>

<p>Dweck emphasizes that mindset interventions should not be one-time events.</p> <p>Anything that happens just once — “a chart at the front of the room, a lecture where you define the two mindsets” — isn’t likely to work.</p> <p>Instead, we should focus on “the policies and practices in the classroom. <em>It is not about teaching the concept alone</em>, it is much more about implementing practices that focus on growth and learning.” [emphasis added] </p>

To a certain extent, I feel the growth mindset is the equivalent of putting a penguin next to an eagle and inviting them to both take off. When the eagle is a speck in the sky, the observer then tells the penguin that the only reason it isn’t also flying is that it isn’t putting enough effort in. If only it flaps its wings harder, it’ll be chasing the eagle in no time.

A rare point of agreement between hard biodeterminists and hard socialists is that telling kids that they’re failing because they just don’t have the right work ethic is a <i>crappy thing to do</i>. It’s usually false and it will make them feel terrible. Behavioral genetics studies show pretty clearly that at least 50% of success at academics and <a href="slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/01/talents-part-2-attitude-vs-altitude/">sports</a> is genetic; various sociologists have put a lot of work into proving that your position in a biased society covers a pretty big portion of the remainder. If somebody who was born with the dice stacked against them works very hard, then they might find themselves at A2 above. To deny this in favor of a “everything is about how hard you work” is to offend the sensibilities of sensible people on the left and right alike.

So basically, you take the most vulnerable people, set them tasks you know they’ll fail at, then lecture them about how they only failed because of insufficient effort.