Backseat "Driving": A Reminder to Celebrate Growth
A few months ago, I was driving my two boys, ages 6 and 8, home from school. My younger son shared with me that he had a hard day. He was upset because he hadn’t completed his reading assignment during class time. He had really tried, but couldn’t concentrate through the assigned reading time. Sitting next to him in the back seat, his brother burst out in a loud, “ YEAH!!” I was shocked. “That is so disrespectful!” I exclaimed. “Your brother is sharing a hard part of his day and you are cheering?” My older son’s face fell. His shoulders slumped. “But Mom,” he said, “I’m just celebrating his mistake. It’s part of his learning, right?” Oh, wow, I thought. He is practicing Growth Mindset. What I perceived as him taunting his brother was actually an attempt to apply this critical component of learning – the ability to recognize failures and challenges as a natural part of learning. And often, as something to celebrate.
That important interaction with my boys has stayed with me. It has informed my instruction around Growth Mindset. Now, I realize that the way that we approach our students and their learning, the way that we communicate Growth Mindset messages, really matters.
When a student expresses what we call Fixed Mindset, which include thoughts such as:
this mistake is a failure
I cannot change it
I can’t do this
versus Growth Mindset:
this mistake is important to my learning
it is an opportunity
it is something that I can learn from
we must first meet them where they are. We must employ empathy in order to effectively help students shift to a Growth Mindset. We must communicate that we understand what the student is experiencing – frustration, confusion, defeat, hopelessness – AND then we can communicate that there is still an opportunity for growth. If we miss this step in our communication, a student will not hear the Growth Mindset message.
In addition, we must employ a curious mind, inviting our students to embrace mistakes. A curious mind is one that wants to understand and sees a mistake as something to explore and unpack. By engaging with wonder and curiosity, we can guide a student to ask why the mistake was made and what can be learned from the mistake. We can steer a student toward their own curiosity: what do I understand better about this problem or challenge now that I understand my mistake? It reminds me of Thomas Edison’s quote, in reference to his endeavor to invent the lightbulb. He said, ”I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways it won’t work!”
We must remember that curiosity and empathy are relational qualities that manifest at a fundamental level in our interpersonal exchanges with students. We cannot teach these qualities like we teach academic content. We must engage them as social/emotional techniques to inspire students. In order to effectively teach the core competencies of Social Emotional Learning, educators must be able to access and model these relational qualities. When students feel their experience is understood and when they see a genuine curiosity in us, we have the opportunity to inspire that “light bulb” moment for our students. Now that is truly something to celebrate!