Homeroom with Sal, Carol Dweck, PhD, & Vicky Colbert - Tuesday, May 25

Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to the Homeroom with Sal live stream. We have a very exciting show today. We have, I would say, two mega figures in the world of education.

We have Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford. You all might know her for her really pioneering work around growth mindset, really coined the term, author of Mind Shift. We also have Vicki Colbert, who's the executive director of the Nueva Escuela, or Escuela Nueva Foundation, Fundación Escuela Nueva, which is a really incredible series of schools and a new learning model through Latin America that has made a huge impact on the world.

Both of them are actually the first, I believe, the first two winners of the Don Prize in education globally. So we have two titans of education. Start thinking of your questions for either Carol or Vicki.

But before we do that, I will give some of my standard announcements. First of all, a reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit. We can only do what we do because of donations from folks like yourself. So if you can, go to khanacademy.org/donate. Whatever you're capable of, it could make a huge difference if you're in a position to do so.

I also want to give a shout-out to several organizations that stepped up, especially during the pandemic. Many of y'all know that our traffic grew by a factor of three during the pandemic and our costs went up. We tried to accelerate a whole series of programs, and so we wouldn't have been able to do that without the support of the folks on the screen: Bank of America, AT&T, Google.org, Novartis, Fastly, General Motors, and many other supporters, large and small, who allow Khan Academy to build what we do and create the content that we do.

Last but not least, I want to remind folks that there is a version of this live stream that you can get wherever you get your podcasts: Homeroom with Sal, the podcast.

So with that, I am very excited to introduce both Carol and Vicki. Carol? Vicki? Welcome!

Thank you. Great to be here with you!

So I wish I could have two hours with each of you. There's a lot for us to cover.

But maybe I'll start with you, Carol. I think a lot of folks who’ve been in education know about growth mindset. But if you could tell me, for anyone who's been under a rock for the last several decades, what is a growth mindset and why, in your mind, has this work been... why is it caught the zeitgeist, so to speak, of education? And maybe a little bit of what are the misconceptions around it?

Um, thanks, Sal. A growth mindset is the belief that your fundamental abilities are not fixed but can be developed. It's in contrast to a fixed mindset, where the belief is your abilities are genetically based or in some way fixed and you are what you are and you have what you have and that's how you stay.

I think the growth mindset caught on for several reasons. First, we've done decades of work showing how when students believe that their abilities can be developed, they have greater motivation to learn. They're less afraid to take on challenges, less discouraged by mistakes. They're developing something they're not afraid of; it's being judged deficient.

This was a new way of seeing students—instead of sorting them into the smart and not smart categories, they are people you can develop and help realize their full potential. I think it's exciting for teachers to believe that every single child in front of them has unknown potential that you can unlock.

Now, some of the misconceptions: it's not always so intuitive how you communicate a growth mindset to your students. Some teachers thought just telling them to work hard, telling them you can learn anything, telling them everyone's smart, would be enough. But what we have found over time is that growth mindset is a classroom culture.

It's not something you say to kids or put a poster in front of the room; it's something that you bake into the culture of the classroom and have all kinds of practices that support it. Like making sure every student knows you care about their learning and believe they can learn to a high level, making sure they know you think they can learn from their mistakes.

The mistakes don't mean they're incompetent. Letting kids redo work to raise their grade and demonstrate their understanding, focusing on the progress, not immediate performance. So now we're really focused on this idea of the growth mindset classroom culture that fosters and empowers the students to use their growth mindsets.

One follow-up question before I... I think Vicki's work is very complementary to everything you just talked about, but I'm curious, Carol, and I've never asked you this: what got you into this research? What was the reason that you kind of started formulating this whole theory around growth mindset and testing it?

If I can start in childhood... but I'm not gonna go every year. If you ask me who's my most influential teacher, it's Mrs. Wilson, my sixth grade teacher, who seated us around the room in IQ order.

Wow! I thought, even as a sixth grader, I thought this is so wrong. I know the kids in this class; I've been with them for years. You can't sort them point by point into IQ! Nonetheless, I was sucked into her system. I wanted to succeed within her framework.

So years later, when I fell in love with psychology and saw that you could use science to study people's beliefs and motivations, I thought I'm going to study why some children are able to fulfill their potential by taking on challenges and sticking to them, and others who may be really, really skilled never achieve what they're capable of.

In graduate school, I embarked on the line of research that I'm still pursuing. It's fascinating. I definitely want to come back to that. But, you know, Vicki, tell us about Escuela Nueva. What was the reason you started it and what is the core underlying principle of what's made it what it is?

Escuela Nueva, a citizen... a word in Spanish: new school. Well, first of all, it's not so new anymore. It's one of the longest bottom-up innovations in the developing world that's still being sustained. It's like a pedagogical movement.

Nothing new in the philosophy of education—all the things we know that the great pedagogue said at the beginning of the century. Good child-centered learning— not everybody learns the same thing at the same time. Self-paced learning. Children learn looking into their eyes, dialoguing and constructing knowledge together.

So it's cooperative learning, a new role of the teacher as a great mentor, a facilitator that has more time to really focus on the human dimension. So we started thinking about all these things by necessity because we started with isolated rural multi-grade schools, invisible schools of developing countries.

And of course, in Colombia, where we started, we wanted to introduce these concepts of good pedagogy. All these ideas exist and have existed for so many years with John Dewey, with Maria Montessori, you know, all of these.

But these ideas came only to the elite schools in Latin America, not to the poorest. I am originally a sociologist, and of course, I had a wonderful mother. She was a great teacher who did a lot in Colombia and founded teachers' colleges, and she was always talking about child-centered learning.

So I had a contrast because of what I received in good quality schools, private schools, and what I was seeing in reality with the most isolated rural children of Colombia. So I wanted to introduce the concept of equity, reduce inequity. I wanted to introduce the concept of really child-centered learning to improve quality in education—21st century skills—and, of course, the new role of the teacher.

So these rural schools, there were so many difficulties that we really had to have a paradigm shift from transmission of knowledge to social construction of knowledge. We really wanted to incorporate and strengthen the relationship between citizenship building and your pedagogy.

So I guess these ideas, and the necessity for us—necessity was the mother of innovation. So I say it's a little bit like we had to learn how to transform all this complexity into simple, manageable action so that anybody, any teacher without having a PhD, could have results.

So I think these are the little tricks we have in Escuela Nueva, which means new school, and as I said, is one of the longest innovations of the developing world that's still being sustained and that has inspired, of course, many innovations worldwide, like the Vietnamese, for example, from Colombia to Vietnam.

Now, there's tens of thousands of these schools. I mean, it is at scale. For anyone who hasn't seen a new school in Escuela Nueva, what would it look like? Like, it sounds very different than that teacher that Carol had lined up. What does it look like? What would you hear and see?

Totally! When you go into an Escuela Nueva school, you see it as an example of democracy in a way, by the way we're going through all these crises and processes. But you see some children working on some things by themselves in pairs, others working in small groups, some are going to their learning corners.

It's a learning environment that has changed. They're permanently talking and dialoguing and you see a teacher walking around. When children call on the teacher, not the other way around—when the children call on the teacher.

Because we really wanted to be child-centered, you see the teacher going through the different groups, talking individually with some, talking in pairs with others. You see some children going out of the classroom to do an experiment by themselves. They're working with their learning guides. They have a lot of self-governing instruments to promote school government and democracy.

We really want to incorporate a culture of participation. There are many little tricks that we see that strengthen self-esteem, discovery learning, child-centered. Their self-concept... we want them to really enjoy learning and I think we have seen this in these very isolated rural schools of Colombia and other countries where we have worked.

And how did you feel? I mean, I think that's the most important thing on a lot of levels. How did this happen? I could imagine, especially if you're going to rural areas, the teacher's notion of what a teacher does is probably very traditional—someone at a chalkboard lecturing while students have fingers on lips and listening. How were you able to manage the controlled chaos, so to speak, of multiple students working at their own time and pace?

And you did this even before EdTech became a real tool. Explain the logistics of it, and then I actually want to connect it because it sounds very complementary to everything that Carol was mentioning.

Totally! Totally! That's why we say with Carol we fell in love with each other because Carol, coming from such solid scientific research and me coming from such necessity and complexity, there are... let's say the question you ask me is how do they know what they're doing and how they are.

Well, we had to develop—first of all, we had to change the teachers' attitudes. We wanted to make sure that teachers are trained with the same methodology they will be using with their students because we're asking teachers to make the change and they've been exposed to very traditional teacher-centered learning when they were studying.

So the first thing we had to do was try to change what most faculties of education and teachers' colleges are not doing. So we wanted the teachers to go through the same process they would be doing with their children. The second thing was not to leave the teachers alone.

We had to create a community of practice because teachers learn more from each other than from experts. And of course, the whole idea was to introduce the concept of flexibility—to act, time, and space. We have to introduce a whole concept of flexibility in these terms because learning is not a place; it's an activity.

Okay? So we have learned that many of the most important activities take place in their homes with their parents. And so we just wanted to make sure that all these ideas were incorporated in what we were doing, and we were really transforming all this complexity into simple manageable action.

We had to make it simple, replicable, scalable, and cost-effective. No! Super powerful. I'm already getting a ton of questions from social media, so I want to make sure I get to as many of these as possible, and these are connected to the work that both of y'all are doing.

From YouTube, Joshua Cadavel asks, "It's very difficult to motivate ourselves into a growth mindset. What do you suggest to help us get into that mindset?" I'll start with Carol, who knows the science and the research here, but then after that I'd also love to learn from Vicki, because if all of your students have this agency and it's real student-centered learning, I'm assuming a lot of them need the same growth mindset as well.

But Carol, what advice do you have for Josh or anyone listening on how to get into that mindset?

How old is Josh?

I have no idea. He's on YouTube.

Okay! Whether you're a student or an adult, you have to ask yourself, what do you want to do? What do you care about? What do you want to contribute to the world in your life? And then, how do I get there? You'll need to take on challenges. You'll need to know that everybody struggles through challenges. Everybody has setbacks. It's part of learning.

Your fixed mindset voice will come back to you a lot and say, "This is too hard. You were unrealistic. You can't do that," and you have to talk back to it. Not, "Go away! I don't like you. You're in my way!" but "Hey, I want to try this! Can you come on board and collaborate with me? Can you, um, contribute with me? Can you let me try this?"

Where we all have both mindsets, the fixed mindset is ready to trap back in and discourage you when things are hard or you have a failure. But you have to get it on board, get it on your side, and keep in mind what you're trying to accomplish and who you're doing it for.

And Vicki, I'll actually add this extra question from YouTube, and it actually turns out Josh is 16, so I guessed correctly somehow. I'm clairvoyant in some way! But from YouTube, there's a related question. Julian Miller asks: "Mrs. Dweck and Vicki, how would you go about getting a younger student with low self-esteem to gain a growth mindset?"

And Vicki, I love your take first because you've very... I'm assuming you've essentially had to do this. I don't know when you started Escuela Nueva whether you thought that you were doing growth mindset, but now there's the science from Carol behind it. But how have you thought about motivating kids, reinforcing a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset?

Yes, I think the first thing we wanted to make sure is that children love school. You know, that they would have a nice environment despite that it's a rural, isolated school. You know, that would be a nice, pleasant environment, so I think that that's crucial.

The second thing was, you know, that they would feel the love from their teacher— not classifying them— but a teacher that would always open the doors to them and give them the love and affection they're needing because they're really needing so much affection and love and a nice warm place and environment where they can be safe.

A wonderful aspect was, you know, to motivate children to intrinsic motivation. I'm not a psychologist; I don't know much about it, but we wanted children to have a little bit of self-concept to know that they could be happy learning.

We developed all these very simple instruments to promote autonomy and promote self-determination. The flexibility that, you know, all children can learn if you give them the time and that they don't have to compete with anybody else but that they can go on their own rhythm.

And, you know, the motivation, the self-regulation—there are many, many instruments of self-governing instruments, where children control their own attendance, you know, where they have all these simple instruments of the school government where children elect and are elected, and they have their school government with their projects, concrete projects they have with their parents in their community.

So we had to think of all these little tricks to make sure that any teacher could have a wonderful classroom and a nice environment. That all children could learn if you give them the time and a nice safe environment.

So it's really a whole concept of child-friendly concept that we wanted to embrace so the school was a place where children didn't want to leave. They wanted to stay because they had a loving teacher and they had their classmates where they worked together, and they learned to dialogue.

And so I mean, there are very simple tricks that we had to incorporate, but they've demonstrated that it can be done. Yes, we can introduce quality, reduce inequity, incorporate leadership skills from the beginning.

It's amazing to see these little children, you know, taking responsibilities and assuming their responsibilities and leading others and learning to work in teams. I have to say I had a professor at Stanford, Elizabeth Cohen, that I... for the first time, I learned about cooperative learning.

You know, here in Latin America we talk about personalized learning but not cooperative learning. And we have seen the results because, let's say, we've always tried to have some empirical research behind. So, for example, the University of London published one of our first research papers demonstrating the impact of Escuela Nueva on peaceful social interaction of children—not only on academic achievement but on peaceful behavior.

And I think this is so important coming out of Colombia. Very important.

No, thanks for that, Vicki! And Carol, you know, same question. There's a younger... say there's a younger student that you... How does a parent or a teacher or anyone who cares about them try to bring— you know, the question was specifically if they have low self-esteem— to have a growth mindset?

We've all met kids or sometimes we've been that kid where we're like, "Oh, I'm not good at this. My brain isn't wired for that!" What do you tell them? What do you do?

Well, first I want to say one of the hundreds or even thousand things I love about Vicki's work and her schools is that she takes a fixed mindset off the table. It doesn't occur to students in that environment to worry about being measured.

But in our culture, it's really different. Parents worry about how smart their children are, parents measure them. Then they go to school, they're tested, they're compared to each other. Teachers often decide who's smart and who's not smart, so it's not a surprise that we have a lot of young students with low self-esteem.

Now, my research and the research of others like Eddie Brumman in the Netherlands show that sometimes people react to kids with low self-esteem by telling them how smart they are, or by overpraising them, which actually makes them more vulnerable to failure in the future.

I would say the research suggests keep the focus on learning, keep the focus on progress, keep the focus on challenging yourself. Say to a child who did something easily, "Oh, I’m sorry! I’m sorry I wasted your time. That was too easy for you. You must have been bored."

Let's do something fun, something you can learn from! If the child gets stuck and discouraged on something, be that backup support. Like Vicki's teachers: "What can you... let's see what you've done. What can you think of doing next? Let's try that!"

So this detective process of what you didn't understand and how you can understand it makes that whole process fun. We've seen that parents who believe that failure can inspire their child's learning are much better mentors to their kids than parents who worry that their child's failures will harm them and make them feel incompetent.

So this whole focus on challenge, progress, learning from setbacks is what goes into this natural love of learning as opposed to the self-doubt that comes from feeling measured and compared.

Yeah, and there's a lot of questions coming in. I mean, I think everyone... this resonates with anyone listening, anyone who’s at any level of depth on this.

And I think a lot of the questions are the flavor of, you know, how do we actually put this out there in the world? We, you know, we talked about how you can do it as an individual or how you could even change your own mindset.

We know we have this question—I’m paraphrasing—from YouTube, Jamal Shaheed asks, "How would this look in an urban school?” From YouTube, Manish Raj Jaiswal— they’re talking about stereotypical South Asian parents that are more grades-oriented versus skill-oriented. How do you change that?

So that the broader question is how do you scale this? Because both of you all have scaled this idea in different ways. Carol, where do you think we are? Where do you think we could be? And I'll ask you where we are versus where we could be.

I'll tell you exactly where we are. We have shown that direct-to-student growth mindset programs can work. They can raise the achievement, the grades of lower achievers. They can inspire even higher achievers to take more advanced math courses. But if a student has taken this program and goes back into, say, a math classroom with a teacher who's created a fixed mindset culture, they can't put that into practice.

They can't thrive there in the special way that their growth mindset might have allowed them to. So then we realized we have to create a program for teachers, just the way Vicki has created a scalable program. We realized David Yeager, Mary Murphy, and I, we realized we've got to have modules that can scale up, that we can disseminate widely, that will prevent teachers from trying to implement it in ways that don't work.

We're in the middle of that now. Vicki is a valued, valued consultant in this project. This fall, we're going to test administer and test the first version of this. We'll do this the next year as well. When it's tested and ready, it will be available at no cost to all teachers.

We're doing it on an adolescent population. It's the hardest thing we've ever done. It's the most important thing we've ever done, and we're working on it around the clock.

No, thank. Thanks for that, Carol. And Vicki, I mean, you're already at scale. I mean, tell me what scale you're at. I've read tens of thousands of schools— I don't know how many students that is, but I'm guessing hundreds of thousands or millions of students across countries.

So you're already at a lot of scale, but how far do you think you're on this journey? Where do you think we could be in five or ten years? What's your hope?

My hope is that we can continue to move forward. However, there are many lessons learned from this process. How to work with whom do you work? Well, going back to your initial question to Carol, we have sort of had to modularize the curriculum.

Curriculums are, you know, like they're like big beasts! How do you tackle the national curriculum? So the first thing is we had to break it up in chunks, modularize it to facilitate flexibility because we wanted to incorporate the concept of self-paced learning and flexibility.

So it's an important aspect of the Escuela Nueva. So, the students' ability to progress through their learning materials, their learning guides using both self-assessments and group assessments. But we believe that this flexibility has helped a lot because, in this way, students know that they can achieve even if they're going a little bit slower.

So it's the whole concept of flexibility that we had to introduce in the curriculum and the way we work with the children in everything. So this was for us really, really crucial. And of course, we also—I mean, when we scaled up we learned to work with governments, which is something that I have also learned.

You have to work with governments because we learned how to make it a national policy, but you need governments for big impact and coverage. But you need the role of civil society and public-private partnerships for two key words: quality and sustainability.

There are many countries where we have started Escuela Nueva—in Brazil, in Guatemala—and in all these places in Latin America and beyond. We've inspired in Zambia. But the thing is, that you know, one of the big issues is that we have inspired many countries, but you get that the project started, it starts moving on, and then governments change.

So this is another lesson learned from all this process. Not only the, let's say, the curriculum dimensions of how to modularize curriculums and make them flexible to adapt that the school adapts to the children and not the other way around— because, by the way, I have to highlight the initial way when we had to make it flexible, because children in rural areas have to walk long distances, because children participate in picking crops with their parents.

So it's a mobile population, by the way! We have adapted Escuela Nueva to urban contexts—colective urbana—especially for migrant and displaced populations. Right now, we're working with many, many Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, and it's been a successful program where we adapt—this is in the cities of Colombia, not in the rural areas.

So this is where we adapt to the needs of the child and not the other way around—that the school really is open and flexible. And this is what we really have tried to do, and to maintain this flexibility.

I don't know if I answered your question correctly, but I I picked up on other things.

No, that was incredibly valuable! And, you know, this conversation—I thought we were like five minutes into it because I'm so intrigued and I realized that we're pretty much at time! And I apologize to everyone; there's so many good questions that have been coming in on social media.

But, you know, I'll leave it up to y'all. Maybe a last word from either of you on, you know, messages you have for folks who are both fascinated by these models, fascinated by growth mindset but also fascinated by y'all as individuals and are looking to have similar impact in their life—what messages would you have for them?

Maybe Carol's start and then followed by Vicki.

That's a big one! First, I just want to underscore something Vicki said: how important equity is in education, how important it is for schools to adapt to the culture and adapt to the culture and needs of students. Some growth mindset— a growth mindset assessment into a recent survey and testing found that growth mindset not only predicted achievement in much or most of the world of the 79 countries and economies but also motivation to learn.

Well-being! It gave a bigger boost to vulnerable students—low-income immigrants. It narrowed the gap between the rich and poor, the immigrants and non-immigrants. So we're caring about kids' lives, their well-being.

And again, we want to inspire them to think about the contributions they want to make. I'm worried kids aren't going to want to come back to school after the pandemic; they're going to feel behind.

Let's get them inspired by a contribution that they hope to make! Let's get them ready to do it! Let's keep them in school! Let's make schools they want to be in in order to learn how to make their contribution.

And I think, um, just one more thing: I think the pandemic has taught so many teachers how much caring about the student matters, being part of their lives matters, how much being integrated into the school with the community matters.

Not just the teaching and testing but creating a culture that makes students love learning and learn optimally.

Thanks! It's so inspiring! Vicki?

I guess reinforcing what Carol says is I want to say: it can be done! Yes! It can be done in the most isolated and the most impoverished areas of many of our countries.

It can be done! We demonstrated that with the UNESCO study—the first comparative international study of UNESCO in Latin America years back. I think it was in the year 2000.

Colombia and Cuba were the only two countries where rural schools outperformed urban schools, except in the mega cities. It demonstrated that, yes, you can reduce inequity. It's possible!

But also, not only that but it compensates for socio-economic inequalities. This is what we wanted to demonstrate—that it can be done! But also, the children learn and the children love learning.

And they continue. But because more of the same is not enough! I think this is important. We really have to make this change in education.

And I'm quoting someone—like that I heard and I always mention it because people don't understand. You know, if we bring a doctor from a hundred years back into a hospital today, that doctor is lost because everything has changed permanently, so much!

But if we bring a teacher from 100 years ago into a classroom today, even in an elite school, that teacher is not so lost because everything has changed except the way of learning.

So this is why this is the powerful message—it can be done, but more of the same is not enough. We have to make these changes!

No, well thank you both for spending the time with us! Honestly, for your decades of incredible work, which I think is just getting started on the impact on humanity!

I want to give a special thanks to the Don Prize Foundation, which has a mission of creating a better world through education supports practices in education for putting us all together.

We're all on this, what they call council of luminaries, which we're proud to serve on, but you know, I both—I look to both of your work for inspiration all the time.

And we're thinking through Khan Academy, as you know, I was more in listening mode today, but everything that we stand for is essentially what you all stand for.

How do we give students agency? How do we ensure that teachers have the information so that they can do more focused work with students, more human work with students?

Students can learn at their own time and pace. You need a measure; you need to assess. But it shouldn't be a statement on who you are; it should just be a statement on where you're at.

And so this even this notion of mastery learning, and if you're at an eighty percent, not a big deal; keep working on it. Get to a ninety percent. Get to 100%, which feels very closely aligned with this notion of everything you'll do.

So thank you so much for being a part of this. Wonderful to be with you, Sal. Wonderful to have met you a bit in person!

Thank you, and hope to meet you someday in person.

Great to see you again, Sal.

Nice to see you also!

Well, thanks everyone for joining! As you can tell, we could have spoken for several hours to each of Carol and Vicki. They really are titans in the field of education.

It actually turns out that a couple of years ago I was at a restaurant and I saw them—I’m pretty sure it was Carol and it might have been Vicki as well—and I was just like, "Oh, they won't want to talk to me."

But just right before this I said, "Hey, you know, I saw you at the restaurant! Like, why didn't you come by?" I was like, "I didn't want to bother y'all!"

But anyway, there are two heroes of mine. They've done profound work that's already impacted the world and I think is going to only impact the world more and more over the decades and generations to come.

And as I mentioned, everything we do here at Khan Academy is about trying to empower exactly what they're up to. You know, in order for someone to have a growth mindset about learning, they should be able to learn at their own time and pace.

If they haven't mastered it, keep working on it! The role of the classroom should not be one-way flow of information, lecture, everyone sitting passively silent.

It should be everyone working together, students working with each other, the teacher walking around, forming human connections. We should create ability for students to have agency over their own learning, which might be actually the most important skill of all, even more important than any of the academic skills.

So thank you for joining, and hopefully you enjoyed that conversation!