LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Dave Paunesku introduces growth mindset

I'm Dave Ponesku and I'm the executive director of Pertz, which is the Project for Education Research at Scale. It's a center at Stanford University. Pertz makes a variety of resources that help educators learn about the science of motivation, and we do that in order to help educators inspire all of their students to learn fearlessly.

When students have a growth mindset, when they're thinking in a growth mindset, they're really thinking of their abilities as something that they can grow, something like a muscle, something that they can grow over time by investing their effort into the right strategies. When students are thinking in a fixed mindset, they tend to think of their abilities as something fixed, something like eye color, something they really can't change about themselves.

When students are thinking in a growth mindset, they're doing, I think, two things that are really helpful that will ultimately help them be more successful, that'll help them be more motivated. One is that they're viewing challenges really as opportunities to grow their abilities. That means they're much less likely to be discouraged if they encounter something that's challenging. In contrast, they might be more likely to seek out challenges, and research shows that, in fact, students, when students are thinking in a growth mindset, they're more likely to seek out more challenging work.

The second piece is that they realize that if they're really stuck on something, then the key to doing that one might be to persist, but two, and just as important, is to switch up the strategies they're using, maybe to seek out help from someone. If they're thinking in a growth mindset, they're going to be less likely to be worried that if they need help, that means that they're not smart enough to succeed. Instead, they'll understand that their teachers and their peers are there to help them grow and develop as learners.

So through the LearnStorm activities, we're really trying to arm teachers with a bunch of activities that will help them and their students learn together about the science of learning and the science of growth mindset. That will help them engage in important kinds of self-reflection and different kinds of activities that could help really reinforce those ideas over the course of LearnStorm. But then also create a model, a scaffold, and an approach towards self-reflection and thinking about learning and about growth mindset that could then be revisited throughout the year to really reinforce these ideas and to remind students to keep going and keep growing.