Teaching is to Emancipate

There were many great, stimulating, enthusing and positively challenging things about this year’s Scottish Learning Festival but for me, two are most memorable and, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a little connected. The first was Professor Carol Dweck’s keynote, “Developing Growth Mindsets: how praise can harm, and how to use it well”. In it, she described for us a dual categorisation of (i) the Fixed mindset and (ii) the Growth mindset. These categorisations are characterised by three rules:

Rule #1

• Fixed: look clever
• Growth: learn, learn, learn

Rule #2

• Fixed: It should come naturally – hard work makes me feel stupid
• Growth: Work hard – effort is key. The harder you work, the better you get. Geniuses are distinguished from their peers by hard work, working hard at their strengths and weaknesses

Rule #3

• Fixed: Hide mistakes – have no recovery recipe for failure
• Growth: capitalize on mistakes, confront deficiencies

Professor Dweck went on to identify that mindsets come from our language and importantly, praise can encourage the Fixed mindset. She carefully distinguishes between praise of intelligence (which encourages the fixed mindset: “what a clever girl!”) and praise of effort or process. Helpfully, we were given practical advice on what to praise:

• Effort, struggle, persistence despite setbacks
• Strategies, choices
• Choosing difficult tasks
• Learning, improving

Because of the plasticity of the brain, the mindset can be changed with the right work and the effect this has on motivation is significant: one place where this is exemplified is at www.brainology.us, where a mindset development programme for students offers a “manual for the brain” to help overcome problems in school. It’s not a free programme, but the (free) demo certainly seems engaging and promising.

Teachers have a duty (imho) to have expert knowledge on aspects of learning rooted in this kind of research and this brings me to the second memorable thing at the SLF09: I was lucky enough to have my name picked to speak for seven minutes at the Teachmeet event at the BBC. I’m not going to talk about the teachmeet phenomenon – there’s plenty on that, but taking that as read, I was very happy indeed to be able to offer a description of a critical thinking task I have been using with some of my Higher and Advanced Higher Physics students. This was something I came up with whilst on holiday this summer, reading some Feynman and Taleb’s “Black Swan”. I developed a problem for pupils which required them to initially fail – the problem is not solvable numerically – and then persevere, reflect, think out of the box, struggle and – this is what I hoped for – resolve with a new perspective on their own knowledge and how they came by it.

I admit to the obscurity of this task in the context of the daily mayhem of the average secondary school but excellence is not for all (despite what it says on school stationery): excellence is elusive and precious – and anything precious is hard won. The prize is nothing less than emancipation (look at the banner on this site) – setting minds free of the bonds in which they have been enslaved by social context and the dull linear education that most encounter. Let one pupil (one out of about thirty) leave you with an insight into what I was seeking:

I learned that to truly understand something (especially something like this that requires hard thinking) you have to not only work at it, but to sit back and think about it. Then, if you’ve got it, finish the task then at the end reflect over it. If you still get it – then you know you’ve done good at it. Then you get that good feeling.

“That good feeling” is addictive. It is the joy of winning the intellectual battle. This student has set her mind free. The task was posted here.