Chapter 6B

To Learn or Not to Learn

First day of class, and the girls were practicing writing problems and hypotheses on their own while I walked around the room using my seating chart to start to learn names.
Kiki, I said in my head, studying her briefly for her identifying features before shifting my attention to the next girl. Emma…Whitney…Maggie…
While I practiced names, I also moved from child to child, observing what their individual answers were, noting who was tackling the assignment faster, who was tackling it slower. When I could tell that most of them had completed the initial solo work, I moved on to the next stage.
“Okay, everyone.” I interrupted. “Don’t worry if you didn’t quite get all five problems and hypotheses written; it’s just practice at this point. What I would like you to do now is go around and have each person at your table share your problem and hypothesis for each of the scenarios and then as a group decide who wrote the best one for each scenario. And it might be that one person wrote a better problem but another person wrote a better hypothesis.”
I paused. “Any clarification on what I’m asking you to do?” I said. There was a general shaking of heads. “Okay, then get started. I’m going to give you about 5 minutes for this part.”
The room came alive with sound then, and I continued to walk with my chart, adding voices to my learning efforts. Other Emma…Kylie…Christina…
Keeping my eye on the clock, I eventually started pausing at each of the table groups and telling them, “I want your group to put your best problem and hypothesis for scenario 1 up on that white board…” until all five groups had been assigned a specific one. I followed behind, putting a series of “plus” marks and “minus” marks next to their efforts.
Same classic mistakes, I thought. But then had to reminded myself, but the mistakes are new to them.
“All right,” I said, once everyone was done. “We’re going to start with problems first. I want you to look around the room at each of the ones you’ve written, and where there’s a plus-sign, there is something good about how that group worded their problem. And where there’s a minus-sign, there is something wrong with it’s worded. Take five minutes in your group and see if you can figure out why I marked them the way I did.”
Again, a chorus of voices filled the room, and I eavesdropped on their conversations, while continuing to keep an eye on the clock. Eventually, I caught their collective attention once more.
I walked over to a board heavy with minus-signs where a group had written, Why won’t Portia Porsche start? “So what are the mistakes this group made when they wrote this one?” I asked.
A young woman with dark brown hair raised her hand. Time to start practicing, I told myself.
“Ladies, I’m going to try seeing how well I’ve learned your names so far.” I said to them. “If I accidentally call you the wrong name, please simply correct me.” I pointed at the raised hand. “Ella?”
She nodded. “Because they used the word ‘why’ in their question?” She responded.
“Good. And no pun intended, but why do we avoid ‘why’ when writing a scientific problem?” I asked them.
Another young woman with blonde hair raised her hand.
Searching my working memory, I pointed at her and said “Whitney?”
She shook her head. “I’m Lauren.” She said.
“Lauren,” I responded, deliberately saying her name aloud. “I will work to do better next time. What’s your answer?”
“You can’t test ‘why’.” She declared.
“Correct.” I affirmed. “It’s not that we aren’t going to think ‘why’ in our heads, but we are going to need a ‘what’ or ‘how’ or ‘Is’ or some other kind of wording to a problem to enable us to know what we are actually going to test when we get ready to experiment.”
I walked to the next board, and we continued the dialogue, with me getting about a third of the names right and correcting myself on the rest, until we had generated a set of rules for writing good scientific problems. Then I turned to the class.
“Folks, the mantra of this class is ‘we learn from our mistakes’.” I announced. “Let’s see what you’ve learned. Use the rules you’ve generated and head back out to your whiteboards and fix those problems.”
They scurried to their assigned boards, wiping away their first efforts and re-writing their problems. I followed behind again with my marker, pleased to see I was having to write fewer minus-marks. But their facial expressions told me they were disappointed that I was having to write any at all.
“Much better!” I said, walking to a board where a group had written, What is the effect of temperature on a bird’s feathers? “But there is no such thing as perfection; there’s always room to improve. What’s not quite right about this one?” I asked, circling the word, “effect.”
A tall girl on the far side of the room raised her hand.
“Meredith?” I said, and she nodded.
“It’s kind of vague.” She responded. “It doesn’t really tell us anything about what we would observe about the bird.”
“Excellent!” I replied. “Words like ‘increase’ or ‘decrease’—something that indicates what we think the change is going to be are going to make our scientific problem more precise.”
I moved to the next whiteboard, and again, we repeated the dialogue, adding a few more rules to our list. Then I sent them out to their whiteboards one last time to fix their work and nodded my head in satisfaction with the results.
“Okay, people. That’s pretty good for now, and we need to move on to the hypotheses to figure out how to improve them.” I said to them. “But this is a skill we will be practicing all year long, and you need to always remember: the learning never stops.”

Limits Are What You Make Them

In her pivotal research on how individual understandings and beliefs about abilities influence how each of us learn, psychologist Carol Dweck has identified a component of human thought which she terms “mindset.”¹¹ She argues that individuals can have either a “fixed-mindset” or a “growth-mindset” about any aspect of their life, and for those unfamiliar with Dweck’s work, a fixed-mindset is the belief that a person’s talents, skills, and abilities in a given area of learning are innately hard-wired into the brain, placing fundamental limits on what that individual can accomplish in that area.  A person with this mindset thinks people are “born naturals” to do a task or they are not.  A growth-mindset, on the other hand is the belief that someone can change and alter—“grow”—his, her, or their talents, skills, and abilities in a specific area of study through hard work and effort, removing limits on what said person can achieve in that field.  A person with this mindset thinks people can always get better at a task.¹²

What is interesting and important for us as educators is that Dweck’s research has “found that whatever mindset people have in a particular area will guide them in that area”¹³ and that a person’s mindset can actually vary from one area of endeavor to another; he, she, or they can believe they are a “natural” at one task, limiting their efforts, but be prepared to work hard to improve at another.  Dweck has also found that individuals can change their mindset about any task or skill at any time in their lives; a mindset itself is never innate.

I share this brief summation of Dweck’s work because I want to argue that the second critical thing it will take to achieve the kind of teaching and learning discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 in our classrooms is the creation of a growth-mindset culture in the work we do with all children.  I believe that only by cultivating what has been termed the “yet sensibility”¹⁴—as in “I can’t do twenty pushups…yet”—can we generate the resilience a student needs to keep “doing” a given subject until it has changed “how they live in the world,” and I believe that only by empowering children with the determination to push through apparent limits can we help them create the futures they want for themselves.

But to establish a growth-mindset culture, we have to do something that has historically made the various stakeholders in education uncomfortable:  we must establish genuine opportunities to fail at what we are asking students to do.  There is no risk-taking where there are no actual risks, and we must challenge all students with problem-solving situations that take them out of their comfort zone.  Indeed, our job is “not to prevent them from failing; it [is] to teach them how to learn from each failure, how to stare at their failures with unblinking honesty, how to confront exactly why they had messed up”¹⁵ so that they can do it better the next time.  Only when we challenge them “to look deeply at their own mistakes, examine why they had made them, and think hard about what they might have done differently”¹⁶ do we enable our students to change to become the individuals they want to be.

This is where the stress we spoke of in Chapter 3 comes into play, and it can demand some meticulous scaffolding to the challenges with which we confront our students to cause them to “bend but not break.”  But there is a tendency in our schools to set the bar too low rather than too high¹⁷ –creating conditions where real failure seldom actually happens—and the consequent reinforcement of fixed-mindset habits this produces has resulted in “a workforce full of people who need constant reassurance and can’t take criticism.  Not a recipe for success in [life], where taking on challenges, showing persistence, and admitting and correcting mistakes are essential.”¹⁸

 In addition, the reinforcement of fixed-mindsets in our schools creates further difficulties for certain segments of our student population that are already under-represented in the dominant white patriarchy.  Known as stereotype threat, it is the internalized message that certain groups of people are innately better or worse at a particular task (“born” to be good or bad at it), and in this fixed-mindset habit, “both positive and negative labels can mess with your mind.  When you’re given a positive label, you’re afraid of losing it, and when you’re hit with a negative label, you’re afraid of deserving it.”¹⁹   Stereotype threat is why “almost anything that reminds you that you’re black or female before taking a test in the subject you’re supposed to be bad at will lower your test score”²⁰ –unless you have the cultivated growth-mindset to counteract it! Thus, if we want good teaching and learning in all our classrooms for all our students, we must employ a culture of growth-mindset in all our schools.  Otherwise, we frankly harm tomorrow because as Dweck herself challenges: “Great contributions to society are born of curiosity and deep understanding.  If students no longer recognize and value deep learning, where will the great contributions of the future come from?”²¹