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7.9 MINDSETS IN EDUCATION

Mindsets of both students and teachers vary across cultures. Along with Carol Dweck's fixed and growth mindset, which has shown the power of a students’ mindset over their performance, various cultural attitudes, like those regarding competition and seniority can impact teachers' methods and a students’ educational experience.

Competition

Competitive mindsets can work as a motivator for students to perform well in class and as well as aid teachers with classroom management. Korean society, for example, is fueled by competition and this is true in the classroom as well. With this mindset, however, comes new rules on what is acceptable behavior for students: cheating and tattling on fellow students is commonplace to get to the top. Students place much of their long-term focus on the suneung, Korea’s college entrance exam. Maintaining a competitive edge is so critical for these students, and such a part of Korean culture, that planes are grounded on test day for fear of disturbing focus. The same competitive mindset can be found in China with the gaokao, the country’s annual national college entrance exam that can determine one’s future. A common saying surrounding the gaokao, “gain one point, surpass a thousand people,” demonstrates how students can be both victims and proponents of the competitive rhetoric and massive pressure surrounding their academic performance.

Parents' Influence

Mindset in the classroom stems from the administration and works its way through the system down to teachers and then through to students. The idea of mindset and its influence does not end there. A parent’s influence on their child or experience with individual teachers or schools can shape how they receive lessons. Parent’s perspective on failure affects the ways they respond to difficulties their children face, and these behavioral differences influence their children’s beliefs about abilities. Failure, especially that of a child’s can be challenging to work through and persevering can increase the child’s self-esteem. Encouraging parents to adopt a failure-is-enhancing mindset could be beneficial, helping their children to adopt a growth mindset about intelligence. Parent mindset greatly influences a child’s perspective on their individual mindset. Young children are constantly looking to their parents for advice and validation that what they are doing is correct. Parents have a stronger impact on their child’s mindset than is imagined.

Growth v. Fixed Mindset

There are two different mindsets students can hold when it comes to their education, as described by Carol Dweck in Mindsets: How to Motivate Students (And Yourself). Dweck describes the two mindsets in education as being a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is when, “they [students] believe that their basic abilities--their intelligence and their talents--are fixed traits.” Comparatively, a growth mindset is described as a mindset where, “people believe that their abilities can be developed through learning, perseverance, and good mentoring.”

There are multiple factors that can affect the mindset of a student. First, the mindset of a teacher heavily affects whether or not a student subscribes to a fixed or growth mindset. Dweck says, “When we teach one group of students a growth mindset along with some study skills and another group is taught just study skills, teachers (who don’t know which children are in which group) single out the ones who have had the growth-mindset training to say that they’ve shown remarkable changes in motivation.”

Second, a student’s environment can affect the mindset they subscribe to. On the topic, Dweck called the environment a “huge factor.” When a student is surrounded by like-minded students who lift each other up; a teacher who encourages learning over performance; and parents who play an active role in the academic success of their child, then that student is more likely to subscribe to the growth mindset, which, “promotes challenge seeking and resilience because it’s oriented towards learning, not measuring the self.”

These factors create a chemical change in the brains of students where, “the neurons in the brain form new connections. Over time, you can enhance your intellectual abilities.” This means that a growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed mindset, creates permanent, positive changes to the chemical makeup of a student’s brain during crucial years of brain formation. By encouraging a growth mindset early on, whether that encouragement come from parents, teachers, or other students, this mindset can create positive changes and outcomes for students’ academic success and learning abilities and, therefore, improve a students’ confidence in themselves and their abilities as intellectuals. Different Teaching Methods

The most common teaching method in the United States is referred to as the mindset approach whether that be a fixed or growth mindset approach. In Finland, teachers are getting rid of the teaching by subject method and is trying out a new method, teaching by topic. For example, a student who may want to take a vocational course, might sign up for the "cafeteria service" lesson which would combine many different topics like math, languages (to help serve foreign people as well as their normal customers), writing, and communication skills. The classroom itself is set up differently, there will be no more rows upon rows of individual desks that sit in front of the teacher all day. The students will always be in groups, sitting together at tables, working on solving problems and working on their communication skills instead of listening to the teacher all day long. One of the main reasons they are "updating" their education system is because its the 21st century and the school department wants to help get their students ready for the real world by using this teaching by topic method.

Jim Stigler who was a grad student at the University of Michigan, went to Japan in 1979 to learn more about how they run their classrooms and use different teaching styles and methods. He wanted to learn the difference between Eastern and Western cultures in the classroom. He sat in the back of a fourth grade classroom observing. The lesson was on how to draw 3D cubes on paper. Most everyone could do it except this one boy. The teacher had the boy who was having a hard time, come up to the board and show the class how to draw a 3D cube on the board. There were no snide comments or making fun of him, he never gave up, he just kept trying. The teacher had his classmates give him tips on how to fix it and he finally figured out how to do it and he was beaming with pride. His whole class gave him a round of applause. In many classrooms in the U.S. the teacher will normally call up a student to the board who knew the answer. "In Japanese classrooms, teachers consciously design tasks that are slightly beyond the capabilities of the students they teach, so the students can actually experience struggling with something just outside their reach". Stigler came to the conclusion that in the United States, struggling with a task implies that you are not very smart and people who are smart don't ever struggle with anything because the information comes naturally to them. He found that in Asian cultures, struggling is a good thing and is learned as a learning opportunity each time it comes up in their classroom.

Jin Li, a professor at Brown University conducted a small study between mothers and their children and the way their conversations ended up. An American mother was talking to her 8 year old son, who loves to learn and was telling his mom his friends and him talked about books that day at recess. His mother told him that that is what smart people do and it was a smart idea for him to talk about books with his friends. Li, found that that the mother implied that the cause of his success in school is his intelligence. There is something inside him that allows him/controls him to do or say what he does. Another conversation between a Taiwanese mother and her 9 year old son who just won 1st place in a piano competition. He wanted to know why he won. His mother told him he won because he practiced over and over and even when it got hard he never gave up. Li found that Asian cultures feel that academic excellence exists in only what they do and not who they are as a person.