Day 5: Growth Mindset

Today we discuss the core belief crucial to learning: having a growth mindset. We discuss what a growth mindset is, why it's important to your learning, how to create a growth mindset, and dispelling lies and myths around learning.

Resources for this lesson:

• Transcripts
• Worksheet
• List of Scientific Resources

Summary

What is a Growth Mindset?

The core belief crucial to learning having a growth mindset, which is the belief that our abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort and deliberate practice as described by Carol Dweck. [1]

• This is opposed to a fixed mindset, which assumes that everything that we've ever learned, our brain, everything is set in stone and can't be changed.
• Our intelligence and abilities are in fact malleable. They can and are changed by our experiences.
• Having a growth mindset creates a genuine hunger for learning and encourages you to see mistakes as opportunities for improvement, rather than indications of failure.
• By adopting a growth mindset, you begin to praise yourself on the time and effort that you put towards your work, rather than some external motivator, like a greater score.
• Eventually this consistent process of deliberate practice and learning from mistakes means that earning those top grades will inevitably come.
• More importantly, though, the growth mindset translates to all other areas of our lives from our careers to our relations.
• The world becomes an exciting place to grow and embrace challenges that come their way, an outlook we're going to need this in order to develop mastery with anything.

A false belief you will encounter on the path to mastery is the 10,000 hour rule, popularized in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which has been debunked.

• The 10,000 hour rule was created from a 1993 study [2] showing the violinist becoming masters after 10,000 hours
• However, many studies [3] have actually debunked this and a recent study in 2016, combined all these studies and looked at this original study to analyze it and see if it was accurate. It wasn't.
• Practice is crucially important, but everyone will vary on how long it takes them to master something based on other factors including their strengths, weaknesses, personality, learning environment, ect.
• This is why Plato University focuses on personalized learning. We understand that everybody's different and takes a different amount of time to master a skill.

Why is Mindset Important?

Adopting a growth mindset and creating a more personalized version of learning for you, helps you to become a self directed learner, giving you personal autonomy and agency over your own life.

• The traditional education system tells you what to learn, who to trust, and what to believe.
• When we become adults, we begin just falling in line with trusting this one person, rather than taking learning into our own hands and starting to understand the world for ourselves.
• But this doesn't serve us very well. When problem starts to arise in our life, rather than us being able to solve them ourselves, we have to go to someone else.
• When you're a self-directed learner, you can solve these problems yourself because you know that you are able to pick up any skill that you want with enough dedication to learning.

With this mindset you realize you control over your own life, something psychologists call the locus of control.

• Locus of control means to what degree people believe they have control over their outcomes and events in their lives.
• People that have a strong internal locus of control or believe that they have a lot of control over their life, believe events in their lives derive from their own doing.
• Somebody who has a lower locus of control, or external locus of control, tend to blame factors outside of themselves, such as the teachers, the school, or maybe the weather was bad.

This is what learning is about. It's not about just taking in information for its own sake. It's about taking information in so that you can apply in your life and solve problems.

How to Create a Growth Mindset?

First, look at you're framing your learning and framing other things in your life.

• Frames are what humans use to change perspectives on things that they're encountering in their life.
• Almost everything in this world has different contexts or different frames that we can use to view things in a more positive or negative light.
• When an obstacle arises, examine how your framing your perspective about the obstacle.
• Practice reframing of obstacles as growth opportunities

Second, understand failures are just information rich pieces of feedback about how you're doing on something, signaling you just need to adjust your strategy or engage in further learning.

• You should expect and embrace errors during your learning because they increase activation of the neurocircuits that increase alertness which will lead to enhanced learning.
• Failures allow you to gain deep and rich understandings of why some solutions work and others don't, setting you far ahead of those that "succeeded" on the first try.

Third, break down daunting learning tasks into bite sized chunks that easily manageable, aiming for continuous improvement of 1% every day, made famous by James Clear in his Atomic Habits.

• Continuous improvement is defined as a dedication to making small improvements with the expectation that those small improvements will add up to something significant.

Finally, embrace challenges because they will help you learning better, based on the concept of desirable difficulty.

• Difficult learning that requires a lot of effort is deeper and more durable because the difficulty involved increases our retention.
• Effortful learning often requires intense levels of concentration and perseverance, like struggling with a really hard problem that you think you have no hope in solving.
• When learning is harder and more effortful, we learn more effectively and more efficiently.

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Activity

Examine your beliefs around learning:

• What do you believe about your ability to learn?
• How do you think this may be holding you back or helping you to become a better learner?

If you find you have some real negative beliefs around learning try some cognitive behavioral therapy techniques These will help you that will help you:

• Become aware when a negative belief enters your mind
• Acknowledge the thought without judgement
• Then reframe the thought into a positive belief that will help your learning.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.