Growth mindset

How does Carol Dweck’s concept of “growth mindset” help you to frame your thinking about learning and motivation?  How can you use this idea to help you be a successful learner both in the college environment and beyond?  How might you help the students you are working with to understand and embrace this principle?

The idea of Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” presentation discussed and showed a lot about the importance of using your brain even when it is something we might not fully understand yet. By challenging ourselves to learn we can more efficiently learn and improve ourselves. Another thing she added was the word “yet”, the importance of this word tells us that we will achieve this later rather than never achieve this goal. A fixed mindset will not grow compared to a person with a grown mindset because they are not willing to challenge themselves. This concept is especially important to me because it is an essential idea of being a learner in college and in life. This mindset can benefit yourself and the student you are tutoring in a mutually beneficial way.

For me personally using Dweck’s concept helps me frame my thinking on learning and motivation because it has me keep an open mind on always learning. No matter what I come across, using a growth mindset, I’ll be able to achieve most of my realistic goals but if not I will have learned from the process. This goes directly hand in hand with my motivation. Outside of school I can use a growth mindset to help me whether that be day to day issues such as managing my schedule for the day in which I can apply a growth mindset to better solve any complications I have by challenging myself to think of the best plan. This can also apply to bigger goals such as finding a job and what is the best situation I can put myself in to be a good candidate for a job.

This idea of thinking and motivation heavily applies to my role as a college student and what my future leads me to such as my job as I talked about before. In the college environment, I need certain qualities to make sure I become a successful student and understand course content properly so I can become a successful student and teacher. By using a growth mindset I can more effectively learn my classes and challenge myself with the assignments that I am assigned rather than just giving up because these classes are too hard. A growth mindset is what you need in a college setting and basically in all types of learning environments. This mindset is the reason why we learn.

Applying this to tutoring can do a lot for the student and myself. The reason is that by having an open mindset, I am more open to figuring out new strategies to help the student progress in certain aspects that he or she might be struggling with. This mindset does so much for the learning process for the student and the teacher because it allows for you to challenge and adapt to new ways to curate your teaching. With the student, by teaching them a growth mindset it sets a goal for them, it might not be their progress right now but their progress at the end of the tutoring giving them the goal to work towards. It will help be more open to trying new ways of learning and adapt to assignments that might be too challenging for the student.

 A growth mindset is a keystone to progressing your education and your life in general. You will be able to conquer challenges that occur in your life when you have this mindset. Without a growth mindset you will not progress as a human being and you will not be able to adapt to certain situations. You will learn much more with a growth mindset no matter what challenge comes your way.