Book Review: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. (2006)
Your personal success depends on your attitude and Stanford Psychology professor Carol Dweck wants to help you improve it. What’s more, her research on the link between mindset and success has powerful implications on how parents and teachers can encourage children to become effective learners.
Does your child fit the profile of a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? Dweck describes how children in a fixed mindset try to avoid failure by cheating or not seizing challenges, and constantly doubt themselves and their abilities. They refuse to hold themselves accountable for failure, do not bounce back from it and do not learn from it. Children in a growth mindset thrive on challenge and eagerly recognise and examine their own mistakes so they can improve.
A growth mindset gives people a positive way to handle failure: pick yourself up, dust yourself off and learn from your mistakes. The learning process keeps going and will not come to a screeching halt just because a test identified a weakness. Tests are crucial to the learning process because they tell us what we need to learn. The following observations show how a child’s mindset is shaped by the reactions of parents and teachers to their successes and failures.
For Dweck, effort drives success. Do everything you can to encourage your child to love exerting effort:
Other insights for parents and teachers:
Dweck gathers insights from her own experiments and experience, history and the media. Real-life stories from the realms of sport, business and relationships make the widely cited Mindset: The New Psychology of Success an accessible read. The essence of Dweck’s advice is the persuasive idea that anyone can choose to try.
More from Carol Dweck at: http://mindsetonline.com/
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