February 23, 2019

From Gerald R. Lucas

Mindset?

Blog-pic-growth-mindset.jpg

I began reading Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success for our Tuesday meeting of the Chancellor’s Scholars’ Faculty Learning Community. So far, I have learned about two different mindsets: fixed and growth. The former ”makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged”; the latter "makes you concerned with improving.”[1] OK. I definitely have a fixed mindset on many things.[2] My thing is that while I think people can change, they have a propensity to stay the same. Change is tough. It’s deliberate. I think many of my students have a fixed mindset, too: they think they have nothing to learn — and that which they don’t know is not worth knowing. I tend to agree with Mailer, here:

I still have a few chapters to read for Tuesday.

Notes

  1. Dweck 2016, p. 13.
  2. One of her examples is intelligence: do you think people have a fixed intelligence or can it expand? Social factors seem to suggest a fixed intelligence, I don’t know. I guess it depends on how we define intelligence.
  3. Mailer 1959, pp. 349–350.

Works Cited

  • Dweck, Carol S. (2016) [2006]. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Ballantine Books.
  • Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. Cambridge: Harvard UP.