A Mindset for Success E-Book

Tony Swainston

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In A Mindset for Success: In Your Classroom and School, Tony Swainston analyses how the ways in which schools currently conceptualise and measure success could be limiting students' potential to achieve it. It is critical for schools to move away from the many talent and IQ myths that presently exist and to stop categorising students in a way that damages their ability to grow and develop. Tony outlines key practical steps that can be taken in order to do just this, building instead a growth mindset culture in all classrooms and across schools. A mindset for success can benefit everyone by giving more meaning to learning that, in turn, brings greater fulfilment for teachers and pupils. A Mindset for Success illustrates how grit, resilience, determination and perseverance can be nurtured in every child, enabling them to take on the challenges of life and our changing world, which will lead them to greater academic success and personal happiness. By exploring the importance of emotional intelligence and student well-being, it offers a holistic view of the academic and social development of students. Educators will no doubt be aware of the theory of fixed and growth mindsets. That success can be a self-fulfilling prophecy and that attitudes to, and beliefs about, learning and intelligence profoundly influence academic outcomes is well-established. But how do you actually apply this in order to transform learning in classrooms and the organisational culture in schools? Drawing on ideas and research by Hattie, Dweck, Seligman, Goleman and Ericsson, amongst others, Tony outlines the latest thinking about mindsets and explores what schools can do to make a difference. Class teachers will find a plethora of techniques to get the best out of their learners, including strategies for coaching and deliberate practice, and affirmations to increase motivation and autonomy. For head teachers and senior leaders, there is advice about how to consistently involve all teachers, support staff and parents in order to have the greatest impact upon students' mindsets. A practical guide to changing mindsets in schools. Suitable for teachers and school leaders.

Leseprobe

Praise for A Mindset for Success

Tony Swainston has conducted numerous workshops for teachers and supervisors throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, all of which have been extremely well-received and have practical applications. A Mindset for Success addresses the practical needs of leaders and teachers across a range of educational settings. The motivational approaches to changing mindsets and engaging stakeholders in the educational process are refreshing, innovative and will contribute to improving student outcomes.

Tony’s positive and clear approach makes his theories transferable to the classroom. The book provides guidance in the collective teaching and learning engagement approach we are striving to move towards in the Kingdom; encouraging all stakeholders to recognise, realise and action their responsibilities in preparing our children for the future that lies ahead of them.

Abdulrahman Alfuraih, Head of English Language, Ministry of Education, Saudi Arabia

A great insight into the ways in which we can improve outcomes for students. Tony is able to share his passion and belief that through hard work, determination and deliberate practice we can all accomplish much more. Having worked alongside Tony to unpick this principle of growth mindsets, we have seen students and adults change their views and opinions.

It is my belief that, if we get this fundamental principle correct in the classroom, many more of our students will achieve much more and levels of aspiration will significantly increase.

Ian Mottram, Head Teacher, Le Cateau CP School

A must-read and must-do for school leaders who are serious about creating the very best organisational culture and environment for success. Tony takes you straight to the heart of the matter – schools have to be the ultimate role model for changing mindsets. This can only be achieved by leaders, teachers, students and parents, both as individuals and as a collective, being guided to view things through a different lens. With absolute clarity of thought and process, Tony prods and provokes our conscience at all levels and shows us how we can achieve it.

Michael Gernon, CEO and Principal, GEMS Wellington Academy

In schools we are always self-evaluating and looking to improve practice, something which is often driven by data trends and can often lead to much of our improvement work being subject specific. Therefore, as a school leader it is refreshing and energising to focus on how we can improve our practice overall. Tony’s book is a reminder not only of why we work in schools but also the impact we can have on children’s lives.

A Mindset for Success takes you from theory to practice in a very pragmatic way. From his initial exploration of the work of the theorists, right through to the practical application in the classroom, Tony’s narrative is clear, accessible and engaging. Tony deeply believes that mindsets matter: his passion for developing mindsets for success makes a positive difference not only to the children we teach but also to ourselves as teachers, the people responsible for preparing children for the challenges of their lives ahead. This is evident throughout the book and in our experience working with Tony at our school in Ripon.

Paul Bowlas, Head Teacher, Holy Trinity CE Junior School

How do we create a school culture in which students feel confident and achieve success? Founded on years of teaching, observation, reading and coaching, Tony’s excellent book lays out a clear and compelling case for developing growth mindsets in schools. Teachers and leaders should enjoy the clarity of exposition, the practical usefulness of the ideas and Tony’s sheer passion for the subject.

Tony demonstrates how coaching and deliberate practice can change a school culture, providing practical ideas for communicating a growth mindset to teachers and pupils. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Hattie, Dweck, Seligman and Ericsson, Tony explains how the brain works and how we can develop motivation, resilience, grit, perseverance and well-being in students.

Leaders will welcome the analysis of how best to effect change in schools, in particular the value of the drip-feed approach to change management, including not only teachers, but parents, support staff and governors. Teachers will value Tony’s specific ideas for carrying out action research in this field.

There is no doubt that the beliefs and expectations of both students and teachers play a huge role in determining outcomes in schools. Tony develops a very persuasive argument for how changing mindsets can tap into the tremendous potential every person has.

Steve Smith, former head of MFL, author of the forthcoming Becoming an Outstanding Languages Teacher

A Mindset for Success

In Your Classroom and School

Tony Swainston

Acknowledgements

Although this book is not modelled on the OMP (Osiris Mindsets Programme) which has been wonderfully designed by Barry Hymer and substantially developed by Elizabeth Dawson, my experience as an OMP trainer has added to the expertise which I am able to bring to this work. I am enormously indebted to Barry Hymer for the generous way in which he has shared with me and many others his knowledge about mindsets, as well as the insightful way in which he models how to bring great clarity to so many important aspects of impactful classroom and school practice.

Contents

Title PageAcknowledgementsIntroduction Part I: Why changing mindsets in our schools matters1.   The academic and social impact of mindsets Part II: What mindsets are all about2.   What do we mean by mindsets?3.   Trying to get better4.   Support from other research5.   Using our heads Part III: How to change the mindsets of a school community6.   It’s about a culture change7.   Changing the minds of individuals8.   Further elements that support success9.   The benefits of action research Part IV: Practical activities that change mindsets10. Great activities with pupils11. Great adult activities – training with teachers, support staff and parents Appendix A: School focus and goal setting documentAppendix B: Example of a 12 month mindset for success programmeAppendix C: The ABCDE modelAppendix D: Who is this?Appendix E: The seven day dietAppendix F: The language we useBibliographyCopyright

Introduction

I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or dehumanized.

Haim Ginott1

If our schools are to truly bring about the kind of advances that are both desired and required by the changing world that we live in (and that our children will inhabit in the future) then things must change. And a critical part of that change is for schools to move away from many of the talent and IQ myths that presently exist. Schools must stop categorising students in a way that damages their ability to grow and develop. I am not in any way suggesting that schools do this deliberately, but it happens nevertheless, and it is crippling the prospects of many young people to achieve their potential. No matter how well intentioned it may be, classifying certain children as G&T (gifted and talented) or SEN (special educational needs) and perhaps the bulk of children as RHINOs (really here in name only – maybe this is a new acronym for you to add to your growing list of educational acronyms!) can be extremely dangerous. (RHINOs are the group of children who don’t create any fuss. They are neither viewed as being the exceptionally gifted or talented students, nor the students who are judged to have SEN issues or are behaviourally challenging.)

There is research, for example, which shows that ‘88% of children placed in sets or streams at age 4 remain in the same groupings until they leave school’.2 It is shocking to think that by the time children are 4 years old they might be put into a box of ultimate predetermined achievement, decided for them by other people, and from which they will very likely not escape during their school life. This is particularly disturbing when we all know that children develop at very different rates. If a child is placed into a ‘low group’ then it is difficult for them to overcome their own belief, and the beliefs of others, that they will never achieve a great deal. They might be presented with less demanding, less satisfying and less stimulating work by sometimes less qualified and lower skilled teachers. The only time they might have the chance to socialise with children from the higher groups may be during breaks away from the set curriculum being delivered in the school. Schools around the UK assert that they are committed to developing the potential inside each child, while at the same time there are customs and practices, like streaming and setting, which actively act against this.

The so-called level of intelligence of students has become so much part of what schools explicitly or implicitly seek to establish that it is likely to take some time to alter this culture. It is all too easy for us to stay with the old ways of assessing students and providing them with unhelpful feedback. It is easy to assess what we presently assess. Our laziness is hidden by references to ‘hard data’ concerning students which gives us the impression that this is the stuff that really matters. However, we should be reminded that ‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted’ (this quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein, although it may have been William Bruce Cameron who first said it), instead of continuing to blindly promote a system that doesn’t fit the requirements of the 21st century. The broad bands of uniformity and crude segregation that schools once tried to fit students into, in order to accommodate the industrial world, no longer match the requirements of today’s society. And it is not just the very obvious and blatant structures of inequality in educational opportunity on offer to different children that we should be concerned about. It is also the subconscious processes that go on in our schools which present an equally challenging danger for all of us. It may be hard for many of us to leave behind old ways of talking about students, including references to them being ‘intelligent’ and ‘talented’ (or otherwise!).

To illustrate how so much that is going on in our subconscious mind radiates out from us to the students, I will describe an experiment carried out by Robert Rosenthal back in 1968.3 I will tell the story in my own words, which is how I explain it to the audiences I work with, and let you research more about this if you decide to do so. Rosenthal and his research colleague, Lenore Jacobson, devised an IQ test that was given to students in an elementary school, the results of which were analysed by the two researchers. From these investigations, the teachers who would be taking the classes the following year were informed that around 20% of the students had an ‘unusual potential for intellectual growth’. These were the students who could be considered the so-called ‘intellectual bloomers’ in the coming year. The teachers were asked not to indicate to any of the students what the test had shown. Then the researchers left the teachers to get on with their teaching until they came back at the end of the year to give the students the same IQ test. These test results were compared with the first test results and it was found that there was a surprising correlation between the predicted ‘bloomers’ and the children who had done particularly well that year.

I try to imagine what the conversation may have been like between the researchers and teachers when they sat down to discuss the findings. It may have gone something like this.

Rosenthal: You know, these results are astonishing.

Teacher A: Why? You knew from your original test that certain students were going to do particularly well. In fact, you told me the names of the 20% of the students who were going to do well. So why is it now such a surprise to you?

Rosenthal: Well, the truth is that we chose the 20% students that we said would do well completely at random. We had no idea who the so-called ‘bloomers’ might be.

Oops! We can only guess at the sense of surprise, and perhaps a little bit of annoyance, that the teacher would have felt in realising that she had been given false information. Even more surprising for her may have been the fact that the students whom she had been told would be ‘bloomers’ turned out to be the students who did very well in her class. This is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. What the teacher thought about the students had a significant impact on how they performed that year: the students that the teacher thought would do particularly well did do well.

This phenomenon is called the Pygmalion effect. It describes the finding that how a teacher perceives a student will have a very powerful impact on how they develop. And this does not just apply to teachers and students; it happens in the families of the students we teach as well, with parents being very powerful ‘Pygmalions’ to their children. We might summarise this phenomenon as when we expect certain behaviours from another person, it is very likely that we ourselves will behave in such a way as to make their expected behaviours ever more likely to manifest themselves.

When I have told teachers about the Rosenthal experiment their response is often that the teachers in the experiment can’t have been very good, otherwise they would not have been influenced by the information they were given. My understanding is that the teachers chosen for the experiment were in fact good professionals, but they had no idea that they were influencing the children in their classes to succeed in different ways. In fact, just like you or I, they were convinced that they treated all students in a fair way. The truth is that once we accept information we have been given as being a reflection of the truth, then it is very difficult for us not to act on this information, and much of our acting is going on at a subconscious level. Key messages that we are giving out as educators are not always transmitted through the words we speak. In fact, research by Albert Mehrabian indicates that in face-to-face communication the degree to which we decide we like somebody, for example, is influenced only to a small extent by the words spoken.4 In terms of percentages, it was found that 7% of the signals we receive that influence whether we like another person is through their words, 38% is through the way they speak these words (including tone, intonation and volume) and the other 55% is through their body language (including facial gestures). This gives us an idea about the way that many of the other thoughts and attitudes we have about the students in our classes will manifest themselves beyond the words we speak.

The psychological concept of ‘thin-slicing’ describes how in a very short period of time, usually less than five minutes, it is possible to draw very accurate conclusions concerning the emotions and attitudes of people interacting with each other. When defining the thin slice, I usually draw on the analogy of a stick of rock, let’s say from Blackpool, and with the word ‘Blackpool’ written inside. If we were to take a sharp knife and cut very thin slices from the rock, each one would have the word Blackpool written on it. In a similar way, from very short interactions – or thin slices – we pick up essential information from another person that enables us to make an assessment about them. It lets us know their central message – and whether they are from Blackpool or Whitby!

Pupils, therefore, pick up a thin slice of who their teacher is from their behaviour. This includes the beliefs that the teacher has about each and every one of them as individuals. If a teacher thinks about a particular pupil, ‘You are intelligent’, then this pupil will thin slice this message without a word being spoken by the teacher. The corollary is that there will be other pupils that the teacher will believe are not quite as intelligent, talented or full of potential, and they will thin slice a very different message which tells them that this teacher thinks they are not intelligent, not gifted, slow, lacking in ability, lacking in potential and so on.

Some teachers have said to me that the experiment carried out by Rosenthal was morally wrong because the teachers were provided with information that was incorrect. Some teachers have also observed that if the school which their own child attends were to carry out an experiment like this then they would be very annoyed, particularly if their child was not one of those randomly chosen to be a ‘bloomer’. The reason they give is that their child might be disadvantaged because the teacher does not have a high opinion about their ability to develop during the coming year. And, of course, I can understand this. But at the same time, all of us in education need to take into consideration the high levels of data collection and tracking of students that is going on every day in our schools.

We might need to ask ourselves some of the following questions.

Is the information and data in our schools helping our students to achieve their full potential? (It is often argued that our schools are now information rich but knowledge poor.)

Is the information and data in our schools building glass ceilings that limit the full development of the potential that lies inside each student?

Is the information and data in our schools, which we sometimes pass on to the students themselves, creating self-fulfilling prophecies in their minds?

Is the information and data in our schools unintentionally encouraging students to take on a fixed mindset?

Is the information and data in our schools encouraging teachers and other adults in the school to take on a fixed mindset?

Is the information and data in our schools creating a lot of Pygmalion teachers who actively, although unintentionally, support the development of certain students but at the same time negatively impact upon the development of other students?

Whatever the answer to these questions might be, and if we can’t or don’t want to change the present requirement for us to collect data, then we can at the very least move towards a mindset for success approach that encourages every child to take on responsibility for their own development. At the same time, each of us as educators can support them through the beliefs that we have about their true potential to achieve amazing results.

We need to remind ourselves that when we stand in front of students and communicate with them they are picking up a thin slice from us which communicates many different things. It might be a frightening thought, but we need to be aware that all students have the equivalent of a PhD in applied psychology when it comes to their ability to interpret the underlying meaning from this thin slice. They are the equivalent in the world of tennis to Venus and Serena Williams and Andy Murray. They have intuitive classroom insights that enable them to read the game of education in a similar way to how Lionel Messi and Mia Hamm read the game of football. They instinctively sense patterns in the classroom. The thin slice of us that they take contains clear indicators of all our beliefs, habits, attitudes and expectations about them, and they sense this almost instantaneously. They don’t just ‘see right through us’ as teachers, they also pick up all the messages that ‘radiate out from us’ and which provide the building blocks of how we think.

Two themes run throughout this book. These are that (1) the beliefs of students are of crucial importance to their learning, and (2) the potential for achievement and success, which each of us possess through the impressive capacity of our brains, is enormous and largely unknowable. For the purpose of this book I have used the terms ‘pupils’, ‘students’ and ‘children’ in an interchangeable way to refer to the body of young people in our schools who we have the pleasure to see develop and flourish before our eyes. At times, I may also refer to teachers, support staff, classroom support assistants, educators and adults in a similarly interchangeable way. We are all the people who seek to support the development of the young people in our care, and the content of this book is relevant to each and every one of us, no matter what our particular role might be.

Now let us start on a journey into the world of mindsets and learn how we can move towards a mindset for success in our schools.

1 H. G. Ginott, Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 15.

2 A. Dixon, Editorial, FORUM, 44(1) (2002), 1.

3 R. Rosenthal and L. Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), see esp. p. 61.

4 A. Mehrabian, Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1981).

Part I

Why changing mindsets in our schools matters

Chapter 1

The academic and social impact of mindsets

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

Anon.

Mindsets and academic progress

Professor Carol Dweck, in her remarkable book Mindset, provides many examples of where children with a growth mindset academically outperform those children with a fixed mindset.1

As we will explore in more detail later on, one such example looked at a group of American students who all had the same maths score when they left elementary school to enter junior high school. (In the UK this would be students leaving junior school to go to secondary school at 11 years of age.) The students were assessed in terms of their mindset: some of them had more of a fixed mindset and others had more of a growth mindset. The students were tracked over a two year period to see how their maths scores changed. The findings showed clearly that the maths scores of the students with a fixed mindset went down, whereas the scores for the students with a growth mindset progressively rose. We will return to what growth and fixed mindsets mean in more detail in .