The Levels of Growth Mindset

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

I was sitting in a meeting today when the facilitator showed an image. Fixed vs. Growth Mindset. If you haven´t heard of it, Carol Dweck is the guru. So watch her Ted Talk or read her book (and probably move out from that rock you have been living under :) )

This idea has been in education for a while, and I think a lot of people have bought into it. I also think there are different levels (like anything).  As an educator, you can have a fixed or growth mindset about your students (some vs. all). You can have a fixed or growth mindset about yourself (some things vs. all things). There is one other area of mindset that I wonder about. Your thoughts about other adults...

When you look at some other human-- another teacher, an athlete-- anyone who can do something better than you. Are you willing to admit, out loud, that they have worked harder than you have? Or do you say, they were lucky? Or that´s just who they are? At this point in my life, when I see someone do something well, I now assume that they have put the required work in to do so. They may not have put it into the specific skill I saw-- maybe they worked a lot on something connected to it-- that made the acquisition and application of the skill that much "easier" than for me or for others.

Maybe you´ve thought someone was just "Techy". (or "artsy", or "sporty" ... any of the Spice Girls) Well, you might be relegating 30 years of playing around with technology (or art, or sport, or spice), experimenting with it, having fun with it, learning about it to your one word description. So, like I asked before, are you willing to acknowledge someone outworking you? If you are, than I think that means you are pushing the boundaries of what it means to have a growth mindset.