To Promote Growth Mindset in Schools, We Need Less Quantity and More Quality Assignments
Growth mindset has become the buzz word for both schools and companies across the country.
Many schools in my local district had some mention of wanting to develop growth mindset proudly listed on their school website.
It is a good thing to aspire to, especially since the research backs up the benefits of having a growth mindset.
In other words, we want our students to believe that they can achieve success if they work hard enough, not simply fall into the category of “good at school” or “bad at school” and be forced to stay in their quadrant forever.
Yet, I think that school focused on growth mindset should be more than just a proud proclamation on a website or a poster on the wall encouraging students to think in “growth mindset” ways.
The first step in promoting growth mindset starts with the feedback.
There are two types of feedback that we, as teachers, can give to our students. There is evaluative feedback and descriptive feedback.
Most of the time, the type of feedback given is evaluative. This means that teachers are looking at work to pass judgement on it, usually as a grade. Even if there is written feedback, besides the grade, it is general and still a commentary how how the work met the guidelines, like, “Good job!” or “Try harder next time.”
This feedback, while it allows you to put a tidy grade in the gradebook, doesn’t help students.
And why would it? The assignment is already done, the grade is already given. Most of the time, the kids are pushed towards the next assignment, which may or may not have anything in common with the last one.
The kids who got an “A” are typically good students, who expected that their work was top quality, because they consider themselves smart already (fixed mindset). Even any errors they had were obviously superficial, and why should they improve when they are already doing so well?
The kids who got a “C” or lower tend to already think of themselves as bad students, and they never expected to do better anyways. They hate their grades, but are pretty sure that they are “bad students” and thus, any assignments that come home are just proof confirming what they already know, probably never looked at again.
The best feedback to develop a growth mindset is descriptive feedback.
Descriptive feedback provides information on how a student can become more competent. This would be taking the time to give detailed editing on a writing assignment or looking at a child’s math quiz to see exactly why they are getting their problem wrong.
Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning (see Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Hattie, 2008; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001).
If a child keeps getting grades, without any clear reason of what they could do to improve, it isn’t going to change the outcome. There is no room for growth there, and schools are perpetuating the fixed mindset idea.
But if teachers would share exactly what students were doing wrong, they would be on the road towards helping them improve, instead of repeating the same errors on future assignments.
For this to work though, schools would have to decrease the quantity of graded assignments and increase the quality of the assignments kept.
If I told a teacher today that they needed to look at every student’s writing assignment, and go through it with a fine tooth comb, looking for all the errors, as well as giving copious feedback on how they could improve the assignment, I would be laughed at.
There are so many assignments in a typical week that need to be corrected, it takes a great deal of time to even give the most basic grade, much less go in detail. Plus, since no one cares about the feedback on an assignment that is done, it is wasted effort.
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