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1.5 Fixed Mindset Characteristics
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Posted by CUNY Mindset Initiative on March 11, 2024 at 11:02 am💬  Reflection/Discussion:Â
- Reflect on your own experiences and identify instances where you have exhibited characteristics of a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. How did these mindsets influence your approach to challenges, setbacks, and learning opportunities? What strategies or shifts in mindset have you found effective in cultivating a growth mindset or overcoming the limitations of a fixed mindset?
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I like your emphasis on having a “beginner’s” mindset. This might be especially hard for us to do when we are in a role where our students tend to view us as the experts. Second, I’ll echo the encouragement to leave space for some unstructured time to read, reflect, meditate, and think about what could be better in our work. For me, this has resulted in some good ideas and practical changes that I probably wouldn’t have considered otherwise.
@elizabethklein1 – Thank you very much for the article. I was able to open it and will check it out!
Hi @jelizabethclark – thank you for sharing your change of name to “drop in student hours”! I like that! Come to think of it “office hours” is really not very descriptive and just describes a location (often associated with being a “serious” place to do “work”) and is probably not helpful overall.
It reminds me too of an experiment I tried a few years ago. I was reading one of Cal Newport’s books (probably A World Without Email) and he recommends doing office hours for colleagues as a way to reduce emails. I tried something like that for colleagues, but it didn’t seem to work. I think that’s a very different situation than with students, but it makes me wonder how much the name “office hours” can sound uninviting in that context as well.
Thanks! My trick is remembering this when grading papers and telling my teacher candidates to avoid “3 grows and glows” when grading student work is not easy. This is the way that they are coached at work. I want to break myself and my students of thinking that it has to be a robotic list. One of the examples that resonated with students is when I told them of a recent experience with an editor and how helpful she was in her feedback to me.
From my deeply Catholic background, I think I had a fixed mindset about learning and living. It was only when I realized that I was letting the word should guide a lot of my thinking that I really began to grow. Should was keeping me locked in place and frustrated. Focusing more on what I could potentially do and what small changes I could make or small steps I could take that things started looking up. I try to share this lesson with students.
As a clinical instructor in a healthcare environment, I exemplified a growth mindset and a solid commitment to learning. While conducting nursing skills training for students, I encountered a medical device I could not operate. In a display of transparency and eagerness to expand my knowledge, I approached a registered nurse for assistance in front of the students. Subsequently, I effectively demonstrated the operation of the device to the students. By openly acknowledging my lack of expertise, I conveyed the importance of continuous learning and seeking guidance, fostering a growth mindset.
To counter a fixed mindset, I have embraced constructive criticism(which can be difficult)Â and interpreted mistakes as valuable learning opportunities. I am dedicated to embracing challenges, a crucial mindset in the ever-evolving healthcare field, and focusing on continual learning and development.
Working in the health and wellness industry for two decades I have worked with people to get healthier in their everyday lives, becoming stronger and more resilient moving from “I can’t” to “I can, I will, and I have”. A beautiful sight indeed to facilitate and be a part of that process of self-discovery. I was fortunate to have learned to never judge a book by its cover and allow space for the fire of the human spirit to shine bright through believe and action. From my own experience, continued growth and process of self-discovery I share firsthand knowledge and observations across age, class and culture of what is possible when one finds purpose, passion and spends mindful time on any endeavor.
I remember taking a college-level pre-calculus course the summer before my freshman year for college. I struggled with it and not for a lack of trying. I visited the graduate instructor’s office hours weekly and spent hours trying to work out the problems. As this was a 6-week summer course, somewhere beyond the midpoint, I noticed the graduate instructor’s frustration and my confidence diminishing. Until that point in my academic studies, I’ve sailed through math courses without much difficulty. After consulting with my academic advisor, they suggested dropping the course so that it wouldn’t affect my incoming grade adversely. I never took pre-calculus again and instead used other math courses to fulfill my math curriculum. I developed a fixed mindset when it came to pre-calculus and never rose to the challenge. Something that I learned later while watching a Ted talk by Carol Dweck was the power of “not yet”. Instead of seeing that failure as an inability to do pre-calculus, I can reframe it as I wasn’t ready yet so that it creates a bridge to approach the subject again in the future.
Working in the health and wellness industry for two decades I have worked with people to get healthier in their everyday lives, becoming stronger and more resilient moving from “I can’t” to “I can, I will, and I have”. A beautiful sight indeed to facilitate and be a part of that process of self-discovery. I was fortunate to have learned to never judge a book by its cover and allow space for the fire of the human spirit to shine bright through belief and action. From my own experience, continued growth and process of self-discovery I share firsthand knowledge and observations across age, class and culture of what is possible when one finds purpose, passion and spends mindful time on any endeavor.
Thank you for pointing out the importance that good rapport with students can have on making them more receptive for constructive criticism. I have noted a big difference in when I give feedback in person to students vs when I give feedback through the Blackboard grade center. I am always thinking of how to give the best and most constructive feedback to students, when I know that students also benefit from concise and directed guidance.
As a high school and undergraduate student Algebra and statistics were topics I feared and disliked. I always had to put much more effort and often felt the explanations and instructions were in some alien language. It felt as if concepts were well beyond my mental capacity. Because I was embarrassed to ask for help from classmates and instructors, I started to solve all/any problem sets on the topics being taught. I passed these courses because I learned to solve “typical” problem sets without understanding the topics. These experiences reinforced the fixed mindset thought that these were topics that I would never truly understand.
This was until I started undergraduate research in a biochemistry and genetics lab. I loved the lab and the research/experimental mindset came naturally. Designing experiments, performing growth assays, and genetic analysis required that I use many of the Algebra and Statistics concepts I did not understand from lectures and textbooks in the past courses. However, within the context of statistical analysis or understanding the meaning of my data graphs, I began to instinctively understand statistics and algebra concepts that seemed impossible to grasp in the past. I remember feeling empowered and thinking that if I could grasp algebra and statistics, I could figure out anything else! Interestingly, soon after I started teaching Genetics at Brooklyn College, a student who failed the first of 4 exams told me she was failing because she was not good at math… Unlike me, she did ask for help. She not only passed the other three exams but in her final exam she obtained a 97%. I later got a note that described the feeling I had as a new undergraduate researcher; “I never thought passing genetics was possible for me. Passing this course has taught me that I can learn anything”. I kept the note and read it when I feel a fixed mindset creeping up on me again.
I Had not heard about the sandwich approach for providing criticism. I had seen it in play. In my culture criticism is not a negative word or action, and the sandwich approach is hard for me to use. My mind goes directly to what I can teach them not what they already know, and I tend to dump my constructive criticism without any sugarcoating. However, seeing others use this sandwich approach made me realize that my style was not good for my students. It makes them feel that they can never do anything right, that they were expected to attain “perfection”, and it does chip at their self-esteem.
Now, in addition to trying to use the sandwich approach, I regularly use disclaimers in my lab meetings and courses (where I expect and encourage student participation). I tell students that culturally I struggle with giving praise, I will likely only emphasize something they have done well if others are struggling to do it. To use as an example. I explain that I will nearly always provide constructive criticism because they are here to learn, but it never means they are underperforming (unless I explicitly say so). I want to give them all the criticism I can so that they can continue to grow while they can and because I care.
Elizabeth Klein (she/her) wrote:Dear Casandra,
Thank you for your honesty. I found this article by Adam Grant a while back on the feedback sandwich that helped me, especially in giving feedback to students. https://adamgrant.substack.com/p/stop-serving-the-compliment-sandwich
If you have trouble, copy into your browser. I hope that you like it.
Best, Liz Klein
Excellent article! Thanks for this article
As I reflect on my own experiences, I think that I have long had a bit of a mix of mindsets. I believe that I got to experience a growth mindset when I was learning outside of a lot of the formal structure of education, such as when i was reading things of interest on my own or participating in informal learning activities. I think that within formal educational contexts, I often fell into a more fixed mindset. At times, for example, I struggled with technical subjects like math, chemistry, and language and didn’t necessarily believe that failure or feeling lost in the classroom was part of a growth experience. Of course, as I grew up, I did come to the realization that life itself teaches you to pick yourself up and try again when life hands you setbacks.
I believe in the growth mindset. I remember a teacher in high school telling us that we could go far in our studies if we put our minds to it. His way of helping us was to give us opportunities to succeed in his subject. He was demanding, but he kept telling us we could do it if we tried hard. From then on that has been my leitmotif: to keep going despite our difficulties and obstacles.
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