Mindet: fixed and growth
In these troubled times, paying attention to Dweck’s wisdom is urgent. Teachers are faced with overwhelming pressures from supervisors, parents, school boards, and politicians. They need to let go of any effort to defend a ‘fixed mindset,’ in themselves and in their work, and adopt a ‘growth mindset’ to discover ways out of predicaments and toward ways forward.
In looking back on my fifty-year career, I learned that nothing stays fixed. In what became a best practice with some groups fell on fallow ground with others. Comparing teaching to a textbook, which quickly becomes outmoded, so would have my methodology had I not paid attention. Each class, despite having common traits, each year proved unique, which demanded my having unique responses.
I imagine that today with its increasing cultural and political pressures on teachers, they will need to depend on a growth mindset, an openness to repelling challenges while creating responses. Otherwise, teachers will likely become conduits doing others’ biddings, not teaching but delivering. That’s not education, it’s disseminating.
You who are not teachers, let them know you understand they are educators first and only.
