More to Know: We Can Help Our Students Develop Academic Perseverance
Carol Dweck, a Stanford University psychologist, writing in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2007), introduces her readers to two mental constructs: fixed mindset and growth mindset. As the labels suggest, people with a fixed mindset believe they come into the world with a fixed amount of intellectual firepower. They accept failure as an inevitable reflection of their cognitive limitations. People with a growth mindset, on the other hand, refuse to be limited by real or imagined deficiencies of any sort. They believe that with enough hard work, perseverance, and practice, success is inevitable. Ryan and Deci (2006) suggest that we are mostly motivated not by the material consequences of our actions but by the inherent enjoyment and meaning that those actions bring us, a phenomenon known as intrinsic motivation . They identified three key human needs: 1) our need for competence; 2) our need for autonomy; and 3) our need for relatedness (personal connection). A growth mindset and intrinsic motivation develop when these three essential needs are sustained. In a similar way, educators Pam Allyn and Ernest Morrell (2016) speak of the “seven strengths” which include belonging, curiosity, friendship, kindness, confidence, courage, and hope. In combination, the seven strengths help to build “super readers” who develop strong identities as readers together with the mindset to control and monitor their own reading destinies. Closing Thoughts Garcia and Weiss (2016) explain the policy implications of acknowledging the social- emotional skills that enable our students to lead more fulfilling and productive lives. What does this mean for the ways in which we go about designing high-quality education for our students? Garcia and Weiss explain that we need to: Better Define and Measure These Skills “Integrating social-emotional skills into the education policy agenda requires, first, the identification of a satisfactory and concrete list of these skills, and systems or scales to measure them. Measurement and methodological research are required to validate a complete and accurate list of education-related noncognitive skills, and to provide metrics that are both reliable and usable.” Broaden the Curriculum “The identification of those noncognitive skills that play important roles in education should prompt a discussion of how to design broader curricula and specific instructional strategies to promote those skills, including promoting school and classroom environments conducive to them.”
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CHAPTER 3: EQUITY
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