In Other Words: Phrases for Growth Mindset: A Teacher's Guide to Empowering Students through Effective Praise and Feedback

By Annie Brock and Heather Hundley

Learn how to effectively bring growth mindset into your community and classroom by choosing impactful language.

From the authors of the bestselling The Growth Mindset Coach, this handy companion is a must-have if you want to empower students through purposeful praise and feedback. Here are the key strategies, helpful tips and go-to phrases for helping students transition thoughts, words and actions into the growth-mindset zone.

Designed for ease of use and packed with over a hundred specific examples, this book offers a “say this, not that” approach to communication that will help you model and cultivate growth mindset in the classroom. For example:

Fixed Mindset:

• You’re so smart.

• You’re wrong.

Growth Mindset:

• l like how you used different strategies to figure out these problems.

• That didn’t work out for you. How could you approach the problem differently?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781612438146

Book preview

SECTION ONE

INTRODUCTION

Overview of the Growth Mindset

In 2006, Dr. Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, published a book called Mindset that changed the way many educators, including us, approached student learning. Armed with an aggregation of 30 year’s research, Dweck outlined a powerful theory on the two mindsets she had uncovered in her research subjects—fixed mindset and growth mindset.

Dweck’s journey began while she was studying how students coped with failure. She realized that students tended to handle failure in one of two ways: Some seemed to thrive in the face of a challenge, while others did their best to avoid challenging situations. She noted that students willing to grapple with a difficult problem tended to have better overall academic outcomes than those who practiced avoidance techniques. The more she looked, the more she realized that the mindset with which a person approached a situation made a tremendous difference in the outcome of that situation. She named the two mindsets fixed mindset and growth mindset.¹

FIXED MINDSET: The belief that we are born with a fixed amount of intelligence and ability.

GROWTH MINDSET: The belief that with practice, perseverance, and effort, people have limitless potential to learn and grow.

Here’s the thing about the mindsets: Both fixed mindset and growth mindset exist in us all. It’s whether we choose to view various situations through the lens of the growth mindset or the fixed mindset that makes all the difference. In Mindset, Dweck points out that all people begin life with a growth mindset. Indeed, babies are the very picture of the growth mindset. They don’t care if what they are saying makes sense as they are navigating learning to speak, and no matter how often they fall in the pursuit of learning to walk, they always get back up.² So, the question becomes, at what point do fixed mindsets begin to develop? Some would argue that fixed-mindset tendencies begin to emerge in childhood.

Dweck writes of raising children to have a growth mindset: If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.³

Much in the same way, teachers can offer students the gift of pursuing challenges, working through mistakes, and learning there is a direct line leading from effort to growth. In this book, we seek to give educators the tools to communicate with students, create Growth-mindset classroom atmospheres, and provide praise and feedback in a way that fosters growth mindsets.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book is meant to be a shorthand guide to communicating with students. Much of what is written here has been adapted from our longer works on the topic of growth mindset—The Growth Mindset Coach and The Growth Mindset Playbook. Consider this a primer of sorts, a cheat-sheet version of Playbook and Coach filled with tips, strategies, and go-to phrases designed to help teachers shift their thoughts, words, and deeds into the growth-mindset zone.

When it comes to praise and feedback, many parents and teachers fall into the same fixed-mindset traps that can ultimately hamper children’s ability to develop growth mindsets. When we say well-meaning things like, You’re so smart! we are overlooking the fact that those words—words that are associated with personal attributes—may ultimately be damaging. You’re so smart, might feel like appropriate praise in the moment, but later when the student meets with inevitable failure, they may fall to pieces because the words they internalized about themselves—you’re so smart—don’t seem so true, after all.

In our book, The Growth Mindset Coach, we differentiated between person praise and process praise, and we gave tips to teachers for providing feedback in a way that helped students see that academic success is about overcoming obstacles, putting forth effort, and turning mistakes into learning opportunities. In this book, in addition to offering a primer on growth-oriented praise and feedback, we’ll delve into methods to maximize growth-mindset communication in various school relationships, examine the ways that the two mindsets may play a role in the school day, and introduce you to the tools you need to respond to situations with a growth mindset. We’ll also demonstrate how you can create conditions in your relationships, classroom, and school in which the growth mindsets of others will have the opportunity to flourish. The sections of this book discuss:

Self-talk: People in the fixed mindset believe they can’t lose if they don’t play, but what they don’t realize is that they’ll never win that way, either. Here, we examine how our self-talk plays a critical role in choosing our mindset as we approach situations, including offering tips and strategies for taking control of your self-talk, encouraging your growth mindset through self-talk and affirmations, and overcoming the fixed-mindset voice by recognizing triggers and using specific language to reframe a situation.

Teacher-to-student communication: This section provides strategies for infusing the growth-mindset language, both verbally and nonverbally, into your interactions with students. This section will cover establishing rich, meaningful relationships; providing growth-oriented praise and feedback; promoting shame awareness; interacting with students who routinely demonstrate negative behaviors; and more.

Peer-to-peer communication: Here, we focus on two types of peer-to-peer relationships in the school setting, and the communication that defines them. Teacher-to-teacher communication will cover strategies and tips for growth-oriented communication with colleagues, and peer-to-peer communication will focus on facilitating growth-oriented language in student-to-student interactions.

School-to-home communication: Growth-mindset efforts at school may be hampered by fixed-mindset messages at home. In this section, we’ll focus on getting parents in on the growth-mindset game by offering ideas for helping parents become acquainted with growth mindset and giving tips for how to incorporate growth-mindset messaging at home.

The whole-school mindset: Not only do all people have a predominant mindset, but, in a sense, organizations do, as well. What mindset is being communicated by the policies, procedures, values, and routines of your school? In this section, we encourage education professionals to consider the ways the