Carol Dweck: Mindset

       Carol Dweck claims that individuals have fixed mindsets or growth mindsets. People often call this dichotomy nature versus nurture. Reading about Dweck’s theory that intelligence is constantly changing and growing based on effort, I realized that I am of both mindsets. My actions in life clearly demonstrate that I am driven almost unconsciously by the growth mindset. However, the negative tapes that sometimes play in my head are from the fixed mindset. This is my double-edged sword.  One voice says, “I want to be a whole lot smarter than is possible for my brain.” Another voice says, “I want to be a whole lot smarter than I am right now.”  The latter propels forward, and the former discourages effort.

Fortunately, I have had good role models, so I am constantly moving forward in spite of myself.  In addition, I have been in a university setting as long as I can remember, so my preferred environment is growth. I am drawn to growth. A very good way to reinforce this mindset is to share it with my students. They must push through many walls to grow as language learners. A fixed mindset has no place in language learning.

It is very obvious which students are striving for an almost impossible level of perfection. They are fixed on what they want to achieve and are often misguided in their approach. In language learning, perfection is seldom achieved. Adults inevitably associate language with intelligence. That begs the question who are we when we no longer have fluent language at our disposal—our clever turn of phrase? We have temporarily lost the ability to express our innermost thoughts, our personality. Limited language ability often takes adults so far out of their comfort zone that many interesting phenomena occur.

This is an ideal opportunity to share experiences and confront hurdles. There is a huge tendency for adults to withdraw and become passive language learners. This is a daily battle in the classroom. The challenge is how to create a language-learning community that is student centered, feels safe and inspires growth. In addition, relevant activities must be devised that bring on the implementation of certain speech acts while not seeming contrived. Students’ affective filter must be lowered, so they feel free to communicate. Substance should initially take precedence over form. Structure is important, but communicating content comes first. If one does not feel encouraged to communicate, a type of language fossilization occurs. Things become fixed.

I sometimes look around the room and see a group of students frozen around the pool and no one is taking the leap into the water. As language teachers we have the choice of continuing to open the tops of our students’ heads and pour in more bits of language. We begin at chapter one and finish at chapter ten, whether relevant or not—that is the curriculum. It’s fixed.

The other choice we have is to make students aware of their psycholinguistic processes, which, are profound, and discuss them. Then we need to confront the issue of passive versus active language learning—how best to grow. Oral implementation of the language can only be achieved in one fashion—by speaking. Once students begin to realize this is their only path to fluency, they come to understand they cannot skirt the fire. They must walk through it to grow. With this knowledge students who experience frustrated fluency begin to understand the dynamics of their own brain and the unavoidable process one endures when learning another language as an adult. Adults must fight their tendency to enter the language rut of a fixed mindset. They will find their experience much more rewarding if they are of the mindset that their language will continue to grow for years to come.

DANIEL PINK

Daniel Pink

According to Daniel Pink, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does in terms of what motivates people. Corporate and institutional thinking is out of sync with scientific findings that prove people are not motivated by extrinsic rewards unless the goals are very narrow and simple. Pink believes that true creativity does not lie in this approach to motivation. True creativity only occurs when activities have intrinsic value to individuals. The outcome must matter in some way. Perhaps people like it, they find the activity interesting or it is part of something deemed to be important.

Previous thinking on motivation was more about a system of reward and punishment. My husband reminded me that there is a long-held belief that the only true motivator is the threat of punishment. He referred to his time as an unwilling draftee into the United States military many decades ago.

Everyone had the same short haircut, wore identical clothes, ate the same food, received the same pay, to mention a few examples of the loss of individuality. Some might view this as a positive experiment in egalitarianism. My husband assured me it was not. There was no carrot offered, or even conceptualized. But there was a stick in the form of a top-down chain-of-command that squelched discontent and propagated the ugliness of totalitarianism. This was not the time or place for my husband to “question authority.” It was well understood that creative thinking was not encouraged; in fact, the opposite was true.

The carrot and stick seems to be an improvement over the military’s no carrot approach. But Pink is correct in asserting that carrot-stick mentality cannot work in the realm of higher thinking. True creativity requires autonomy, and there must be intrinsic value to motivate us to stretch and reach.

As a teacher, I am fortunate to have the opportunity to employ a certain amount of autonomy in my classroom. I can invent and reinvent my approach based on my students’ response to material presented. The students have a sense of satisfaction when they are engaged. This in turn satisfies the teacher. The motivation is reciprocal.

Pink believes that “traditional notions of management are okay if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works best.” In terms of education, when the teacher is receptive to what drives the students and the students are afforded some autonomy, higher learning can take place.

RANDY PAUSCH

The Last Lecture

Watching Randy Pausch give his Last Lecture, one would have to be cold-hearted not to be moved by the dramatic “now” of his presentation. The pause button was often used to allow tears to be wiped away. But I also sensed that this man loved life and learning and teaching so much that he could have presented the same story even is he hadn’t known that death was impending and final.

Two points presented by Randy Pausch jumped out at me. The first was his belief that “the best way to teach is having the students think they are learning something else.” He called this “the mind fake.” I try to implement this in every class I teach. It wasn’t always that way though.

When I began teaching more than 25 years ago, I used the assigned textbooks and found the students and I often struggled through the material. When I switched to creating my own materials, the classroom atmosphere changed for the better. As a teacher of English as a second language, I have taught students from 26 countries over the years. Many students were from vastly different cultures, had different customs, religions and more. This meant there was no homogeneous framework to fall back on. However, I discovered there was one trait that was truly universal: everyone learns better when they are relaxed and engaged. By sending my students out to an interesting neighborhood in San Francisco to interview Americans on an assigned topic, they barely realized they were learning a complex language like English. They were doing so in a way that was natural through a process of socialization, rather than book-bound mechanics.

In addition, by arranging peer groups of four students, the same number Randy Pausch used in his projects, stress levels dissipate by allowing students to interact without teacher interference. The goal of all these interactive activities is to produce “the fun while learning something hard” theory that Randy stipulated was paramount in any learning process.

The second point that influenced me in Randy’s presentation was the moment when a student taught the teacher.  When one of his female students asked where the fun was in a project, Randy said he liked moving toy soldiers around a virtual landscape. She responded that telling a story would be more important to her. As a woman I immediately understood this response. Much of the techno-wizardry of a few decades ago were created by and aimed at males. Times are changing, and it is so encouraging to see the gender balance that is beginning to emerge.

I chose to discuss these two points, but there are so many other powerful messages in the presentation that could be highlighted: listen to feedback, do things—not always book learning, be good at something that will make you valuable, the brick wall analogy and more.

Maybe the best message was the simplest: help others to enable their dreams. As a teacher I get to try this in every class. Thank you Randy Pausch.