Mindsets
You try something, it doesn't work, and maybe people even criticize you. In a fixed mindset, you say, 'I tried this, it's over.' In a growth mindset, you look for what you've learned.
- Carol Dweck
Mindsets frame how we see ourselves and the world around us, and the way we approach challenges, and our outlook on setbacks. Mindsets have been described as “habits of mind.” Through our mindsets, we shape whether we think of ourselves as a creative person or not and whether we decide to approach the world and what happens with gratitude or not. One can adopt a fixed mindset understanding our intelligence and capabilities to be predetermined or a growth mindset believing that intelligence can be developed and that challenges can inspire change and learning.
Class Resources
What is a Mindset?
From Psychology Today. “Our mindsets help us spot opportunities, but they can also trap us in self-defeating cycles.”
Nature of Mindsets
A primer on how our underlying beliefs, by Ash Buchanan from the blog Benefit Mindset: Serving the Well-Being of All.
How to Build Confidence
David Kelley suggests that creativity is not the domain of only a chosen few, but that we can all tap into our own creativity and build a creative confidence mindset. Telling stories from his design career and his own life, he offers ways to build the confidence to create. (12 minutes)
Do Schools Kill Creativity?
Ken Robinson explores how we might re-conceptualize the educational process, placing creativity, and developing a creative mindset on equal standing with other subjects. (18 minutes)
The Science of Mindsets
Growth Mindset Revolution
“Researchers brought people into Columbia’s brain-wave lab to study how their brains behaved as they answered difficult questions and received feedback. What Carol Dweck found was that those with a fixed mindset were only interested in hearing feedback that reflected directly on their present ability, but tuned out information that could help them learn and improve. Those with a growth mindset, on the other hand, were keenly attentive to information that could help them expand their existing knowledge and skill, regardless of whether they’d gotten the question right or wrong — in other words, their priority was learning, not the binary trap of success and failure.”
What is Neuroplasticity?
The brain is actually malleable and subject to change as neurons can be stimulated and new neural networks can be developed. Increased neural growth is correlated with strategies often used by those who possess “growth mindsets” such as practicing, asking questions, and trying something again.
Make it stand out.
Carol Dweck
on the power of “not yet.” (9 minutes)
How to: Growth Mindset
a short video about how to build a growth mindset in those around you, and the importance of praising effort rather than intelligence. (2 minutes)