How to Encourage a Growth Mindset
- kalieoku
- Mar 18, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 18, 2020
A simple guide on how to promote a growth mindset in children and adults!
Practicing specific responses to success and failure serve as a guideline to encouraging a growth mindset. By practicing effective language and modeling, educators, parents, and mentors can help children build a strong, positive foundation for short and long-term growth.
What Does it Mean to be a Mentor?
According to the Behavioral Theory in psychology, everyone is a mentor, or model in some way or another. The Social Learning Theory, developed by Robert Bandura is one of the most influential theories in psychology. In 1977, he added an important concept to classical and operant conditioning called observational learning. It is the idea that behavior is learned from the environment through the process of observational learning.
Children carefully observe key individuals in their life, learn their patterns of behavior, and imitate them. These key individuals are called models in behavioral psychology.
Models can be anyone in a child's life. Models have different strengths, or levels of influence for children. The closer a person (or fictional character) is to a child, the more influential that person or character is in the child's life. Some of the most influential models include parents, siblings, other family members, and close friends. Other models could be coaches, family friends, peers, characters on television, and anyone else that the child looks up to in some way. Through observation, children learn from models. This is why I often refer to models as mentors. Whether or not we know it, we act as mentors for the people around us.
In this way, each one of us acts a role model for the people and children around us. Even if we do not see ourselves as mentors or teachers, anyone who is observing us can learn from us.
I argue that it is not only important to understand the growth mindset theory as a teacher or parent, but as anyone because we are all mentors to those around us by nature of existing. While this blog is catered mainly towards speaking to children, I will offer how we can help adults around us to become more growth minded.
How to Give Process Praise
As Dr. Dweck and her colleagues’ research has shown, the methods educators use to respond to success and failure can encourage children to “attribute success to hard work, enjoy challenges, and generate strategies for improvement” (Gunderson, et al., (2013).
In order to give effective process praise, parents, educators, and mentors can practice praising children’s effort and explicitly tying the outcome of their effort to learning. (Dweck & Haimovitz, 2017).
The figure to the left provides examples of we can encourage children and students to have growth mindsets.
How might we encourage our adult family members, friends, and coworkers to have growth mindsets?
We speak to adults much differently than we do to children. It's quite humorous to imagine saying these growth mindset prompts to adults. I will provide some adaptations that are more suitable for adults.
Pointing out effort, aspects of a coworker's hard work, praising determination, overcoming challenge, persistence, and/or detailed work encourages a growth mindset.
For example, you could say something as simple as, "wow, I can tell you worked so hard on that! It looks great!" A highly developed growth mindset praise might look like this: "I really like the ____ you added to your work. It adds a lot of ____. You have been working on this since ____, and it's been so cool to watch your work progress." [conversational partner responds, likely with great enthusiasm] "Yes! Your attention to detail is amazing. And when [disappointing setback] happened, you didn't give up. You kept going and look how it turned out!" Sometimes, I like to throw in a, "you look so proud of your work!" If applicable, you could also mention that the other person's work has greatly improved, or that their abilities as a ____ have grown a lot.
Notice how "I am so proud of you"is not part of this praise. When it comes to promoting growth mindsets, praise doesn't stem from our approval of someone else's work. Growth mindset praise is all about observing the work someone has put forth, recognizing their effort, and mentioning how the person has grown or improved over time (as a result of putting in effort).
My "highly developed growth mindset praise"example is quite extensive and as a result may actually be awkward depending on the person and situation. The examples of praise I provided don't necessarily have to be in a single conversation, but can instead be sprinkled in throughout your relationship with the person.
Imagine if managers had a strong understanding of the growth mindset and used its lessons to motivate and provide emotional support to their employees. Research shows that when entire companies consistently use growth mindset techniques, collaboration, creativity, and productivity significantly increases! In contrast, people at primarily fixed-mindset companies report more cheating and deception among employees.
How to Respond to Failure
Just as process-based responses to success can lead to a growth mindset, so can process-based responses to failure. Children and adults who receive process-focused criticism are more likely to respond with “resilient coping… positive self-assessments, and greater persistence" (Dweck & Haimovitz, 2017).
Process-focused criticism can be modeled by the way parents, teachers, and mentors discuss their own abilities, and by openly discussing strategies for improvement. For example, parents, teachers, and mentors could facilitate a discussion about a personal challenge she/he has experienced in her/his life time. The mentor could emphasize their own potential to improve and learn as another way to model a growth mindset. Even better, the mentor could explain how they might go about improving. Maybe it's setting goals, mobile alarms, going to bed earlier, meal prepping, practicing meditation regularly – whatever it is, there is something that can be done to improve.
If a mentor experiences a setback, they could say: “I can’t do this… yet! Things are hard now, but with practice I can get better.” rather than commenting on their lack of ability (Dweck & Haimovitz, 2017). In this example, children and others would observe that struggle is necessary before mastering a skill (Dweck & Haimovitz, 2017).
Viewing failure as an opportunity to learn and applying that knowledge later is an important step in cultivating a growth mindset. Encouraging a growth mindset in others more explicitly can be done by graciously accepting mistakes, practicing forgiveness, and providing affirmations. Limiting heavy criticism is another way to show that the product or end-result of people's work is not what success means to you. Effort, persistence in the face of challenge, and growth is what success means, according to the growth mindset theory.
Research indicates that parents who believe failure is enhancing rather than discouraging are “more likely to respond with a focus on the process of learning––by engaging the children in discussions of what they could learn from the experience, how they could study the mistakes to improve, and how they might consider asking for help from the teacher” (Dweck & Haimovitz).
By emphasizing struggles, especially as something normal and positive in the learning process, parents, teachers, and mentors can help children develop a positive self-identity and understanding of how their own intelligence and skills can grow.
Highlighting that difficulties and occasional failure are a positive part of the learning process help children and others understand that their own intelligence and abilities can grow.
Take Home Message
An important part of encouraging a growth mindset is working towards having one yourself. It requires an extensive amount of self-awareness and reflection. Just doing this makes you a model for those around you. As we learned from Albert Bandura, we are all models to those around us just by being ourselves. Taking the next step to encourage growth mindsets in others also requires knowledge and practice.
How we praise others for their effort, and how we respond to failure can promote growth mindsets in children, family members, friends, coworkers, and any one else we come into contact with! I hope that the growth mindset theory has sparked curiosity and inspiration!
References
Gunderson, A., E et al. (2013). “Parent Praise to 1- to 3-Year-Olds Predicts Children's
Motivational Frameworks 5 Years Later.” Wiley Online Library , 11 Feb. 2013,
Dweck, C. & Haimovitz, K. (2017). “The Origins of Children's Growth and Fixed
Mindsets: New Research and a New Proposal.” Wiley Online Library.
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