Email: Mindsets Matter: The Touchy-Feely Side of School Change

Mindsets Matter: The Touchy-Feely Side of School Change
	While I was preparing to be a teacher, the concept of malleable intelligence was drilled into me. As it turns out, a person can get smarter by putting their brain through a workout. Using this metaphor, teachers are the academic trainers of their students; they identify students' ability levels, set an ambitious target, and design a practice regimen to meet it.

This is a powerful mindset; unfortunately, it is not consistently applied to students or to teachers.

There is no question that some students perform better than others. What the malleable intelligence mindset suggests, however, is that this difference is not solely a matter of fixed attributes. Rather, all students have the potential to achieve at high levels given the right academic workout regimen. Now, some students' needed regimens might be outside a school's capacity to provide, but students—individually or in groups—should never be written off as unable to learn.

All students should be provided a path to success.

This same mindset also applies when discussing teacher performance. It has become customary to talk of “good” and “bad” teachers, as if each teacher has a fixed level of skill. If only the bad teachers could be replaced with exceptional teachers, we are told, schools would improve.

While a few teachers may be incurably incompetent, an overwhelming majority are dedicated professionals working 50- or 60-hour weeks to give their students the academic workouts necessary for success. Instead of trying to shame teachers into higher test scores, we would do better to focus on cultivating a professional mindset of continually improving effectiveness for all teachers.

You know more than you did ten years ago, you are more skilled than you were five years ago, and you have a better sense of who you are as a person than you had one year ago. You aren't fixed, so why should our students and teachers be? The next time someone starts talking about “smart” and “dumb” students or “good” and “bad” teachers, raise the following question: how do we help them get better?

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Email: Mindsets Matter: The Touchy-Feely Side of School Change

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