Growth Mindset – the To-Do and To-Don’t list

(This article has been written by Cathy Lees, the amazing Academic Deputy at St Peter's 8-13)

We were early adopters of Growth Mindset ideas, influenced by Carol Dweck’s work to review and change pretty much every aspect of school life over the course of about five years. It’s been quite a journey and one we have not completed (yet ??).

However, this journey has not been an easy one. In the first few years, when there were fewer schools embracing the ideals we had started to publicly espouse, we had regular visitors from other leadership teams to find out how we’d implemented a growth mindset culture and I was completely honest with these interested visitors: we made pretty much every mistake possible along the way.

Pinning our colours to the growth mindset mast changed everything, but the core message is actually rather obvious common sense, and this makes something very simple extremely complex to implement.

So, for those who are just starting on the growth mindset journey in their schools, I thought it might be useful to share some of the pit-falls we fell headlong into (or, in some cases, ran into at an impressive, if reckless pace...) and some of the easy wins we managed to miss or ignore. Carol would, I’m sure, be proud of our willingness to share our mistakes so that others may learn from them.

Don’t swamp the pupils

We assumed that the core group to convince about growth mindset was the children. Wrong! Children get it almost immediately. Younger children already know this stuff. Effort = progress. Picking yourself up and carrying on is more likely to lead to a positive result than giving up is. Hiding from mistakes is a bad idea etc. etc. None of this is news to children. They want to believe this stuff. A gentle shove in this direction and some pretty graphics showing brains with weights is enough for most pupils.

We prepared assembly after assembly and House meeting after House meeting on growth mindset. Form period power points were reinforced by endless messages on the screens in reception. We thought total immersion was the best way to launch something like this. Within a week the Year 8s were rolling their eyes at the mention of growth mindset. Audible sighs were heard when it was mentioned in the third assembly in a row. Shortly after this, wags were heard having conversations in the corridor that went like this:

“I haven’t had a detention this term.”

“No, Jonah, you haven’t had a detention this term, YET.”

We wasted our time on the one group of people who were already ready and primed and pushed many of them over the edge with our enthusiasm and commitment. What we should have done, was focus first on a completely different audience: the adults.

Don’t assume teacher support. Enthuse, encourage and support the staff. Relentlessly.

Without the entire staff on-board you will not become a growth mindset school. Sorry to sound melodramatic but it’s true. The staff hold the key to whether or not your plans will be successfully embedded. This is because the heart of growth mindset is in the language you use. Every. Single. Day. In every lesson, every breaktime, every match, every club, every pastoral meeting, every casual conversation over lunch. Children get growth mindset but we all know they are experts at spotting inconsistencies. If the person teaching them is only paying lip service to growth mindset pupils will quickly work this out and will start to doubt its veracity, and if language is used around the school that contradicts growth mindset then the message will be lost.

While the SLT can monitor language in reports and books, they aren’t (yet) omnipotent, and teacher talk has huge impact on pupils, so reluctant public compliance doesn’t cut it if you’re serious about growth mindset.

Some teachers will need to be convinced that the words ‘clever’ and ‘ability’ are more harmful than helpful. Some will believe that encouraging pupils to compare their performance to each other sparks healthy competition. Some will be used to talking about the ‘best’ in the class and will be reluctant to let this word go. This needs careful handling, a lot of discussion and a clear set of alternatives to the common (and probably long-used and dearly-held) words and phrases that accidentally reinforce fixed mindsets. The SLT will need to have an answer to every query, a repost for every negative or sarcastic comment and a core of passionately on-board cheer leaders to help sway opinion.

 Don’t rely on your enthusiasm to get parent buy-in.

Once the staff are ready to go, you need to start engaging parents. If our experience is anything to go by, this will take longer than any other preparation. The parents grew up in a fixed mindset world (as did most of us) and even those who have already heard of growth mindset and proclaim their support for it will still be heard praising their daughter for beating a friend in a spelling test, or sharing with their son that they were rubbish at maths when they were at school, so the son doesn’t stand a chance in the subject.

The Head needs to get on the case here. Every prospective parent who visits here now is given the growth mindset speech and pretty much told that if they aren’t interested in the ethos then our school is not for them. This is a pretty long-term solution, admittedly, and you’ll need to engage the parents you already have, who will be used to a different system – one they are familiar with from their own school days.

You can send out literature and links to great You Tube clips and articles, you can sell it through the newsletter and plaster the walls with growth mindset messages. These things will raise awareness but not necessarily buy-in. You need to make some tough decisions here. Are you going to gradually increase the growth mindset profile as the lowest year moves through the school? This has its advantages but means that it will be years before the whole school is in on the act, which brings its own set of challenges. The alternative is to go all out (as we did). Parents in our top two year groups were the hardest to persuade and many of them moved onto the senior school hoping to get back to some serious child-comparison. If we started again we would get the parents in to talk to them face-to-face far earlier in the process, ask them to fill in exit questionnaires and use these to determine where fixed mindset was most ingrained so our efforts could be targeted in the right areas.

Don’t keep using the words growth mindset: find a way to make the ideas and values fit your school.

After we witnessed the words growth mindset becoming something of a joke to our older pupils we stopped using the phrase every ten minutes. We realised that we needed something more tangible to talk about than neuro-science, something more ‘us’ than the research and the headlines. So, we started to think about what being a growth mindset school actually meant to us: how would it be shown in every classroom? How would we keep up momentum and not just gradually drift away from the ideas? How would we keep reminding the staff, the parents and the pupils that this stuff really does matter?

We invited in the wonderfully inspiring C.J Simister in to work with us for a day and a half, and from these sessions our learning habits sprang. Based on the Habits of Mind idea, we chose eight habits that reflected the behaviours, attitudes and approaches we valued and put them into three groups so we could focus on one group each term: Collaboration and Empathy; Creativity, Curiosity and Flexible Thinking; and Initiative, Embracing Challenge and Perseverance.

Staff broke down skills necessary to master each learning habit and these were further broken down into manageable chunks for each year group to focus on.

We encouraged pupils to record and reflect on examples of these skills being developed within lessons and we shared this development with parents through our reporting.

Growth Mindset is in our literature, our reporting and our exams. It’s who we are. But the journey, as I say, is not yet over (and never should be). We continue to tweak and consider, improve and reflect to be the best we can be.