Carol Dweck: How to Help Every Child Fulfil Their Potential

[00:00:00]good evening and uh welcome to tonight's event I'm uh Jonathan ryson I direct the social brain Center here at the RSA been a long standing interest in car's work uh thank you for coming on such a beautiful evening um I thought that was because of our wonderfully famous and Brilliant speaker but Carol herself said it's just because the audience knows you have good air conditioning so I hope you're enjoying the the relative sort of gentle atmosphere in here um please turn off your phones if you can or or rather put them to silent because we do encourage tweeting so if you want to keep keep your phone on silently while talking to the world that's fine but we don't want them buzzing or beeping uh during the talk um and a reminder that this event will be uh podcast there'll be a podcast of this event in a video after the event is being recorded um so you can share it with friends and family or whoever else in a few days time um for those who are tweeting uh the hashtag ish RSA mindset um so that's the official notice is over now Carol D um is widely regarded as one of the world's leading resarch Searchers in the fields of Personality social psychology and developmental psychology she is the Lewis in Virginia Eaton professor of psychology at Stanford University and she recently won the distinguished scientific contribution award from the American Psychological Association one of the highest Awards in Psychology for my own part um being the director of the social brain Center I know that whenever you mention brain people think fixed they think permanent and the real sort of fascination of Carl's work is that it pushes in the opposite direction sort of suggesting that not to steal Carol Thunder but that one of the most fundamental aspects of human nature is just how much we can change it um so it's a great pleasure to have you here Carol and without further Ado Professor Carol Dwight thank you it's a tremendous pleasure to be here with you this evening we all come like this infinitely curious always experimenting always learning and addressing the most difficult tasks of a lifetime with tremendous Gusto you never see an unmotivated baby no and yet just a few years later you start seeing lots of kids who look as turn turned off as that baby not so different from the baby but the what we have now discovered is that mindsets are at the heart of this kind of problem mindsets that make kids afraid to try and make them easily derail by setbacks but what's important is that we are also discovering why this happens and what to do about it in my work we find that some students have a fixed mindset about their intellectual abilities and talents they think intelligence is just a fixed trait you have a certain amount and that's that this is the mindset that makes kids afraid to try because they're afraid to look dumb but other students have a growth mindset they believe that intelligence can be developed through their effort dedication learning and mentorship from others they don't think everyone's the same or that anyone can be Einstein but they understand that even Einstein wasn't the guy he became before he put in years and years of dedicated labor what I'm going to talk about today is how these mindsets work and how they can be changed how do they work they work by creating a whole psychological world for students where everything has a different meaning and I'd like to take you through those worlds now in terms of three mindset rules so if you're ready here we go I'm going to organize this by telling you about a study we did with hundreds of students making the transition to seventh grade they're about 13 years old it's an extremely difficult transition the work gets substantially harder the grading gets more stringent the environment becomes less personal and that's a crucial time it's a time when many students turn off to school and you start to see lots of De declining grades so as they entered we measured their mindsets that is we saw whether they believed intelligence was fixed or could be develop we monitored their grades in math over the next two years we also measured a lot about their attitudes toward learning now look what happened they had entered seventh grade with just about identical achievement test scores but by the end of the first term their grades jumped apart and continued to diverge over the next two years the only thing that differed were their mindsets now let's see why and how this happened the first thing we found after the math grades was that they had completely different goals in school the number one goal for kids in a fixed mindset is look smart at all times and at all costs and above all never look dumb so their whole lives are oriented toward avoiding tasks that might show a deficiency but in a growth mindset they where they believe intelligence can be developed their Cardinal role is learn at all times and at all costs and you can see how a focus on learning would create greater achievement we found the same thing in premedical students at an elite University in the US they cared about grades because they weren't going to get through the Premed curriculum without them but those with the growth mindset said they cared even more about learning and our analyses showed that because of their emphasis on learning they actually earned higher grades in their organic chemistry course they studied more deeply and if they had a setback on their original exam or two they did everything in their power to recover we're finding the same thing in our research and Fortune 500 companies those employees who have a fixed mindset say they want to be the smart ones they want to be the star of any team they're on they always want to be right there in that culture of Genius but those with a growth mindset say they care for first and formost about learning even more than garnering the accolades that brings us to the second whoops I pushed the wrong one but I have a growth mindset uh our second the second mindset rule is about effort in a fixed mindset effort is a bad thing they believe if you have ability you shouldn't need effort and if you need a lot of effort it's a sign that you don't have ability they subscribe to Homer simpsons's motto trying is the first step toward failure I believe that belief that if you have ability you shouldn't need effort is one of the worst beliefs that anyone can have I think it's why so many of our promising students don't fulfill their potential they go along coasting along not trying that hard the other kids have to try one day they have to try too and they can't do it whereas students in a growth mindset say effort is what activates their ability it's it allows them to use to the fullest and it increases their ability over time they understand what psychological research is showing that even Geniuses have to work super hard for their great discoveries in fact in many cases their hard work is what made them Geniuses and rule number three in a fixed mindset a setback or deficiency measures you and reveals your limitations in fixed ability so what we find is that those students in a fixed mindset try to hide their mistakes or run from their mistakes conceal their deficiencies but those in a growth mindset think mistakes setbacks natural part of learning it's what happens when you take on challenges es so their view is capitalize on mistakes confront your deficiencies we saw this in action with our seventh graders we asked them what they would do after a disappointing score on the first exam in a new course and here's what they said those were the fixed mindset said I'd spend less time on the subject from now on I would try to cheat on the next test think about it the poor score meant they didn't have ability they don't like or believe in effort cheating becomes a more attractive option but those in the growth mindset recognized it was the first exam there was a lot more they could do they said I'd work harder in this class from now on I'd spend more time studying for the tests do you want to see how this works in the brain let's take a look in this study by Jason moer and his colleagues they measured students they measured uh the electrical potential from the part of the brain where errors are processed these students worked on a task periodically made errors on the right you see the brain activity of growth mindset students all that red h hotness is telling you they detected the error they processed it and they corrected it but look at that brain on the left that's the fixed mindset brain you hardly see anything as soon as there an there's an error they run from it as quickly as possible they're not processing it they're not correcting it the good news is that when these students were taught a growth mindset they started looking like the brain on the right so it's not an inherent property of a person's brain it's whether you see errors as something you flee from or something that you learn from so a fixed mindset gives no way for students to handle difficulty they may get discouraged give up flee or become defensive acting bored often this idea this statement it's boring it's a cover for a fixed mindset it means I'm afraid to try or acting out blaming the teacher or material so you can see not wanting to look dumb not liking effort fleeing from difficulty you can see how this would lead to lower achievement in the long run on how are these mindsets transmitted we've studied this in a number of ways but maybe the most interesting way is through praise for 15 years we have studied how adults praise affects students we undertook this work at the height of the self-esteem movement when the gurus were telling us all to praise our children's ability tell them how brilliant and talented they are but for 15 years we have found praising children's intelligence harms them it puts them into a fixed mindset and turns them off to challenging learning let me tell you about a series of studies we did with 10 and 11 year olds we brought them one at a time and we did the study six times because the results were so striking we brought them to a room in their school we gave them 10 problems from this nonverbal IQ test initially they did pretty well cuz they were matched to their age level and each child received one form of Praise a third of them got intelligence praise wow that's a really good score you must be smart at this or process praise that's about the process they engaged in could be their strategy their effort their focus their persistence here we just praised effort wow that's a really good score you must have tried really hard and the control group wow that's a really good score I won't talk much about them because they tended to be in the middle now if you listen carefully to the messages that are embodied in each statement the first one says I value intelligence the second says I value process let's see what happened first yes indeed praising intelligence put kids into a fixed mindset compared to praising the process but the most astonishing thing to us was that praising intelligence turned kids off to learning because after we praised them we said what do you want to do now anything's fine with us you want a hard task you can learn from but you might make mistakes or do you want a task that's like something you're already good at so you're sure to do well the majority of kids who were praised for their intelligence rejected the chance to learn in favor of something they were sure to do well on I like to say they didn't want to risk their newly minted gifted label but those praised for the process overwhelmingly wanted the hard task they could learn from they didn't feel they were in Jeopardy if they struggled for a while before they caught on later we gave everyone a difficult set of problems and here we found found that those with a who were praised for intelligence uh lost their confidence um didn't enjoy the problems anymore and even when we went back to the easier problems their performance suffered those who were praised for the process remained confident they saw these problems were harder uh many of them said the hard ones were their favorites and when we went back to the easier ones their performance flourished because they remained engaged and they remained learning on the difficult problems a few months ago we published a study showing that mothers praise to their babies 1 to three years of age predicted that child's mindset and desire for chall challenge 5 years later so now I feel Justified when I intervene with mothers at airports who are telling their babies that they're Geniuses I have the data and Eva pomerance and our colleagues are finding the same thing with older kids parental praise is predicting the child's mindset and desire for challenge so remember praise process but it's even more than that it's convey to Children a new value system not about quick easy easy um smart things but like this sit around the dinner table and say who had a fabulous struggle today and each person shares the struggle that what are you going to struggle with tomorrow or if a child does something quickly and easily instead of rushing to tell them how good they are at it we should say oh I'm sorry I wasted your time let's do something hard let's do something you can learn from and the new value system is easy that's boring that's a waste of time hard that's worthwhile that's fun recently I have fallen in love with a new word yet I heard of a high school in Chicago where when they didn't Master a unit instead of a failing grade they got the grade not yet and I thought isn't that great because not yet means hey you're on that learning curve you're somewhere not at the finish line but you're somewhere on the learning curve and so if a a child says I'm not good at math yet it's like like get back on that learning curve I can't do it yet I tried but it didn't work yet when we saw that a growth mindset had so many benefits we asked could we teach it and and we did so in one of our first studies the control group which you see on the bottom got eight sessions of great study skills that teachers said were important that year but the growth mindset group got eight sessions of study skills with the growth mindset the growth mindset sessions kicked off with this article you can grow your intelligence new resarch shows the brain can be developed like a muscle and they learned that every time they pushed out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult the neurons in their brain form new connections and over time they could get smarter look what happened the students who um just learn the study skills these are seventh graders already showing declining grades in math those with just the study skills continue to show declining grades but those who learned the growth mindset with the skills showed a sharp Rebound in their grades is it ever to too late we did a study in 13 high schools around the us and we focused on the lowest achieving students the lowest thirds the one that the ones that the schools give up on and we sent them o over the Internet they did uh two growth mindset sessions they learned about the brain how it grows through learning and how they could put that into into practice the control group just learned about the brain and about memory improvement but not the growth mindset look what happened after only three months the grade point average and that's across every subject average was significantly higher in the growth mindset group than the control group and look at this the control group was um passing fewer and fewer courses but those in the growth mindset group were passing more and more courses we also I should mention uh did a study of kids from the top Charter Schools about 90% of them in these top charter schools get into University but only 30 to 40% get through we taught um the graduating high school students half of them we taught a growth mindset not just about their intelligence but about knowhow about making their way in the new um university environment which many kids from poor backgrounds don't know how to do so get them thinking about initiating ways to capitalize on opportunities in their environment we found that more than 20% more or about 20% more of the students in the growth mindset condition uh were still at University by the end of their first term than those in the control condition is a growth mindset for everyone Stephanie fryberg a professor in the US went back to her Native American reservation where she grew up and she started trying to transform the the grade school the elementary school in terms of a growth mindset it didn't take it first they didn't really care about getting smarter what's that what's that going to do for us but when she gave it a cultural framing a cultural me meaning saying and then you can really help your family and Community contribute to them better it just took hold and took off the teachers and the parents were brought into the intervention this Elementary School was 90% minority and that school was in the bottom percent bottom 5% of the state in achievement after a year to a year and a half of growth mindset immersion in the community the kindergarteners and first graders now lead the district in oral leading reading fluency and it's actually quite an affluent surrounding District in the Seattle area third grade on the state literacy test over 2third of them met or were Within 10 points of standard most of those students had been more than 100 points below standard in the fall and third to fifth grade most of the students were showing more than a year of growth in literacy and math and many of them were showing 1 and a half to 2 years of growth but the most exciting thing was the students were now believing and expressing the idea that their potential as native students is unlimited I want you to feel something effort and difficulty in a fixed mindset students tell us that's when they feel dumb but when students learn a growth mindset they know effort and difficulty those those are the times their brains are forming new connections and they're getting smarter can you feel that difference I want to end with some striking new findings by Lesley simpen and Meyer they asked whether mindsets could shed light on gender and minority representation in academic disciplines so here's the number of the proportion of women getting PhD across what we call STEM disciplines science technology engineering and maths and you can see how it declines as you get from biology to math engineering computer science and physics what they did was a national survey of scholars in those disciplines to find out from professors and graduate students what brings success in your discipline did they believe being a top scholar let's say in math requires a special aptitude that just can't be taught or did they believe when it comes to math the most important factors for Success are motivation and sustained effort raw ability is secondary the more a discipline believed in a fixed mindset that it was sheer brain power that could not be taught the fewer women and minorities were in that discipline conversely the more they had held a growth mindset the more there were women and minorities in the discipline apparently women do not see um this culture of Genius as hospitable or amable to them so in summary growth mindset and growth mindset environments allows students to embrace learning and growth instead of worrying all the time will they look clever or not it allows them to understand that effort creates Talent rather than believing if you have talent you shouldn't need effort and it allows them to stay resilient in the face of setbacks instead of running from errors and best of all it can be taught I'd like to end with this final thought the more research shows us that human abilities are capable of growth the more it becomes a basic human right for students to experience that growth to live in environments in which all students can fulfill their potential thank [Music] you well thanks very much Carol in a moment I'll open up to everyone I'm sure there lots of questions I want to ask a few myself um the first is kind of at the heart of this there's a a binary there's a kind of divide between growth and fixed now um I want to sort of there's a joke that you know the world's divided into those who believe there are basically two kinds of people and those who don't and you've probably heard that one before I'm sure but how much have you been how much how confident are you in the construct validity how sure are you that this these two divide and how much laap is there between them yes so I'm not a person who believes the world can be divided in two kinds of people it's really more of a Continuum and actually we can slide along that Continuum based on the situation we're in when we do our research we often divide people into those who predominantly believe in one mindset or predominantly believe in the other and I talk that way for Simplicity sure no of course um but how um fluid are they I mean when you say a person with a a growth mindset or a person with a fixed mindset that's not a life sentence right that's a no it's not a life sentence it can be fluid and can it go back the way as well can you develop a growth mindset and lapse if you can lapse um if the environment isn't supporting that and also um you can have a different mindset in different areas that's very very common you can think athletic ability I can develop that but intellectual ability you have it or you don't okay and in terms of teaching you say it can be taught absolutely but the way you presented it there it sounded like you were teaching at the level of kind of information the sort of know that of of growth and fixed and to what extent does this sort of get under the skin and become dispositional and how does that come about yes well we have students do exercises as they're receiving the information for example they summarize the evidence for growth mindset in their own words or they write a letter to a struggling student or friend of theirs um encouraging them in terms of a growth mindset so we really um create this personal engagement as they are receiving the material so it becomes experiential I guess exactly I guess the only thing with that is I mean if the children become informed of these two different ways of of being even with all the provisors that you mentioned is there a danger that um sometimes when you say you know very well tried good effort praising the process that the child thinks you're only saying that because you're think I'm not very smart is there a danger you have to you have to praise the process within a growth mindset because if you're just exhorting someone to try and they have that negative view of effort it won't be effective and if they try and then don't succeed they'll feel even worse it's got to have that growth mindset framework and and how much of this is is there a particular conception of intelligence at the heart of this I mean how would this change if you put it into say a multiple intelligence framework is there a sense in which it relies on an existing view of intelligence or because is it very adaptable I think it's pretty adaptable because we don't Define intelligence for students we just ask them whether they feel it can be developed or not okay okay I see and you've you recently moved beyond the education realm to apply this more broadly I believe particularly in the Middle East with regard to how Israelis and Palestinians view each other can you talk a little more about that yes we've taken first I'll say we've taken it in a number of directions um my colleagues and I have looked at um aggression in the schools willpower Prejudice but now we've taken it into the Middle East how would it I mean can you flesh out for us how it would link to aggression or willpower or these things um we went into a pretty bad High School where the the staff said don't bother it's too late for these kids but we um half the kids were taught that people don't do things because they're good or bad or have these fixed personalities they do things CU they have thoughts feelings insecurities that live in their brain and can be changed and it just altered the way that they they felt about themselves when something happened or felt about someone who might have excluded or bullied them and so aggression in the school was substantially lowered and similarly if if a group that's normally seen as a threat it might become slightly less threatening for the thought that they they didn't have to be that way yeah so in the Middle East we taught Israelis and Palestinians that groups in general don't have a fixed nature an evil nature a violent nature that groups are capable of change if the leaders change if circumstances change and we taught about um groups historically who might have once been thought bellicose or evil and now seem perfectly normal and what we found was just learning this different view about groups enhance their attitudes towards each other and their willingness to consider major compromises for the sake of peace PE go and um quick straw poll if I can how many teachers in the room please broadly conceived so right so it's maybe about a three and a quarter and a third I think um I asked that because one of the biggest challenges I imagine to your work is that a great deal of it's conducted in the lab it's sort of it's social psychology or development psychology done in a a context that's very different from the classroom um how much of a challenge is it to make sense of that transition I mean you know what works in the lab how confident can you be that it works in the classroom as well well most of our Studies have been done in schools Mo almost all the studies where we've changed students mindsets have been done in schools but we have delivered them because we wanted to show that if you tweak this mindset in a student's head it has an impact even if you haven't changed anything else about the school but now we think it's terribly important to go into the schools have teachers and staff participating to support these changes so it does matter to some extent who's who's conveying the growth mindset okay okay great um for me that's fine I've got more in the bag but I think there's so many people with questions let's open up um right we have Matthew from Twitter let's just reassure Twitter people that uh there there are we are going to take their questions so first of all Matthew and I'll come to you in a second there are a few questions on Twitter but if I could ask two of them sure um one came from Bob Marshall and he asks do organizations have a psyche and thus a collective mindset yes should I tell you the other one first and let's go with that one first quite a big one yes I'm so glad you asked that Bob um we're studying that we're studying Fortune 500 companies and um they do seem to have a predominant mindset according to their employees it turns out that when employees perceive that their company has more of a growth mindset they feel more satisfied loyal they say they're proud to work in that organization when they see an organization as having more of a fixed mindset they say there's a lot more competition going on it's a culture of Genius um people keep secrets in order to get ahead and the second one to there are a couple of questions from Helen Nick but I'll just ask one of them uh does the resilience does the resilience in the face of setbacks equally apply to personal setbacks for for instance family breakdown uh we haven't studied the kind of resilience that could get you through a family breakdown but anecdotally people have written to me and said that understanding the fixed mindset and that you're capable of growth and overcoming obstacles has helped them through uh personal crisis and there is a chapter on my book in my book mindset on relationships that might speak to this issue okay great thanks so we had a couple so gentlemen there please in the green and there was one other we still have you great and front hi Carol thanks for your work it's been a big influence on me both professionally and as a parent so hopefully you won't tell me off if we ever bump into each other in an airport um I just wanted to ask you you more of a systems question in the UK I think we have an education system that's very much predicated on a fixed mindset um which you can see evidence by standardized testing we even have our Chief Inspector now suggesting that children should be inspect should be tested before they get into school and I suspect there won't be a not yet grading issued in those tests so what if if we had either our Chief Inspector or our education secretary here and we were trying to persuade them that the education system needs to move more in the direction that your work is suggesting what argue ments would you make how would you make the case for the approach that you're suggesting great question thanks yes great question um I would definitely have growth mindset characteristics built into the grading and assessment system so that students who took on challenges um persisted in the face of obstacles or even in the classroom helped other kids learn would get credit for that how precise would you have to make that I mean the worry there is that that's a very qualitative judgment and that's that may be fine that may be entirely appropriate yes but to what degree would you want to make that formal we're creating we're creating behavioral assessments of of these characteristics and what what's good about that is not just that lower performing students can get credit for um effort and Improvement but that the higher performing students can not Coast to a top grade they have to be challenging themselves I don't know about your country but we have an awful lot of very brittle um High achieving students who often are not making it through University and then I would say while we have the high stakes testing uh as it is students need to know that it is a snapshot of their skills at one moment in time it does not measure their potential to learn and succeed in the future just just to push that a bit because it's such a fundamental question um the students can receive that message and good teachers May convey it to them that this result is not final it's a it's a not yet or something of that nature but the policy makers tend to have somewhat different mindset I think which is a bit more risk averse which is a it wants to be held to account certain kind of way M so at that level where people are designing curricula and thinking of assessment that's probably the the point at which you have the most potentially the most influenced yes um is there anything more you can say about how you would persuade them to to embody this growth mindset in those in the and those structures in the assessment assessment and curricular I suppose in the curriculum it's it's relatively straightforward to incorporate the growth mindset when we introduce a new unit um we convey that we believe everyone can learn this and that we are committed to have everyone uh learn this we um give growth mindset feedback throughout we chart students Improvement so if they're confused or they feel like they're not getting something we show them how they've progressed they're not back to square one we give pretests uhuh before a unit where everyone sees they don't know anything they get used to getting it wrong then see that they're getting it right so you almost sort of make them relax about not knowing anything from the start build in the mistakes okay great okay and a question here at the front please um and then one take one second I just forgot to say if you could introduce yourself um before you speak need I'm fellow um do different National cultures influence um mindsets and education systems oh that that's an interesting question do different National cultures influent mind influence mindsets and educational system um East Asian cultures have a greater emphasis on effort across the board but not necessarily more of a growth mindset we just published work comparing um Indian Amer not American Indian but India Indian culture to American culture and more adults in India believe many more adults the majority of adults in India believe every baby is born with the potential to become a highly intelligent adult I undertook this work with two students of Indian descent I said what about the cast system they said it's not about intelligence it's about other character kinds of things and so um that was really interesting and we found that in American culture the more you believed everyone had this kind of potential the more you supported uh using funds for kids from poorer backgrounds or um engaging in kinds of affirmative action and you said there Carol that just because you believed in promoting effort didn't follow that you didn't have a relatively fixed mindset can you say a little more about how that can be yes um you can believe that um effort can compensate for difficulties and make you achieve a little more than you would even though you don't think it's making you smarter it's like a sad fact of life that you need more effort than someone else you have you have a fixed amount of intelligence because you work you might achieve just as much as someone who more but it works less okay great there's a question right at the front here please and then sorry I'll get you in a second thank you Mike grer fellow um could I just ask how important it is to coordinate in schools between parents student bodies and the staff I mean I work at a very selective School academically high flying but the fragility you mentioned is often because there's a there's a disconnect between the the language of the school room and the language of the parents and simly might be saying elsewhere yes I hear this a lot especially in highflying schools they feel that they're making progress getting some of these fragile students into a growth mindset but it's being undermined by the parents saying my child is a special genius and why did you put red marks on my child's paper so it is extremely important for schools to coordinate with parents to bring them in and the parents want the best for their kids but they're stuck in that self-esteem movement belief that you are encouraging confidence and um and um perseverance by telling them how brilliant they are so they need to know this there's um an article there was an article in New York Magazine February 2007 on our praise work that really wakes parents up so bring them in teach them the growth mindset teach them about praise get them as allies Because deep down they know that the praise they've been using isn't working okay great and there's a question in the middle of the middle um I'd like to find out from you how you would either um include or draw a line to how your work and general work on the response to stress with either adrenaline or cortisol being formed at those stress positions yeah and uh whether the resilience that you talk about is actually the person's ability to understand their response situation and therefore improve their their response in the situation yes so we think um that many of our effects are coming from teaching people a new way of construing adversity uh for example in our intervention with aggression we've shown that we're teaching those kids a new way of conceptualizing the adversity they experience and we are showing it's lowering their stress in the face of of an exclusive illusion event it's lowering their Global stress over the school year and it's lowering their cortisol levels we we've just found so it's another it's it's this approach to uh education is also potentially a way of reducing stress in general yes and with with reduced stress is coming increased Health great and you'd understand that because uh in a sense you're saying adversity is is the norm not the exception or nothing wrong with you because this is happening or how would you how would explain it exactly what we found is that when students have a growth a fixed mindset and someone excludes them or bil bullies them they think that's a bad person I hate them I'm a loser I feel like a loser I'm I feel shame and we have seen that it turns into a seething desire for violent Revenge even even in upper middle class samples so we're just see seeing the tip of the iceberg with some so there's a lot of sort of festering rage fering rage and but that learning the growth mindset seems to say hey here's a person who doesn't know how to cope I'm a person who doesn't always know how to cope right okay and so we have one more question here and we're moving towards the end now so if you're if you're think you might have a question now is the moment to show your hand so we can try and get you all in before we answer we have one two 3 4 and uh we'll take them together please uh cuz we're coming towards the end yes sir if you can go first please um hi there I can't quite see you car behind the lect um Sarah wbank from uh yes Futures we are a social Enterprise that works to build confidence and resilience in young people um so I'm really interested in your work and what you've just been saying about uh building kind of reducing stress and and also what you mentioned in your talk about resilience um I'm also Keen to learn about the confidence part and it does seem to me as though um the growth mindset would actually lead to improve confidence and improve self-esteem is there any evidence to suggest can we hold that question so confidence and self-esteem we have one or just take a few together if that's okay just so we can get them all in so confence off seems a big one one behind you there please don't worry I'll keep track of them so that okay so that we we should to answer them all I yeah I can see a lot of positives about the growth mindset I wonder whether there are ever any downsides it seems like it's Tim it's this is really the American dream that all you have to do is try harder and try harder and try harder and I wonder what that ever places people at risk great thank you and then uh one here front the front pleaser whoever can get the mic first uh yeah thanks hi Martin Robinson um you've come to us on the day that a new National curriculum has been announced worri someone ask about that um I just wondered what you thought of um probably in America's the Ed H approach the knowledge based curriculum and perhaps that's what's coming in here a bit more as well we have okay just okay knowledge knowledge base don't worry I'll keep tracking so we have one we have two two dtic together please hi um I'm from an or an organization called National numeracy and we've just created an online program called the national numeracy challenge which is a resource for adults to develop their numeracy skills and confidence I was wondering if you had any advice for developing growth mindsets via the Internet rather than in a face to- face context great online and next to you please hi um my question similar I'm a talent development executive so I work with um in training in organizations I was wondering can you teach um growth mindset with people um you know who are a little bit older and is that a training course or is that a cultural thing what that part about age and partly Lear great okay um five questions all very rich in their own way first of all about confidence and self-esteem I mean is it does it have a positive knockover effect on that um confidence is easier to maintain within a growth mindset because in a fixed mindset you have to feel I know everything already I'm not going to make any mistakes but in a growth mindset you just have to believe you can learn something over time also self-esteem is repaired differently in a fixed mindset you look for easy successes or people who did even worse than you if you did poorly but in a growth mindset you repair your self-esteem by learning and a addressing your deficiencies so it's not that the level is necessarily different but the whole process is different okay great and the second question was a particularly good one it reminded me of um Thomas Young's the the rise of the meritocracy which broadly argued that the idea that somehow uh everyone gets to where they are based on their effort is very troubling it makes it makes people um uh somehow they have no one to blame they sort of everything becomes a lot of pressure um so following on from that is this all a bit too good to be true I think is the sort of undercover yeah the the growth mindset doesn't guarantee a result it just says you'll probably get further if you engage in a deep learning but if you're really Critical with yourself or Playing devil's advocate is there is there a potential negative side we have to be careful that people aren't blamed for their lack of success um because it's easier for effort to be successful if you have lots and lots of resources and networks and so forth so yes um we're very mindful of that possibility it's always effort in context it's effort with support and resources and environment okay great and then the third question was that you know we have a a new National curriculum um more generally curriculums that are based on knowledge comes back to the prior question about the way that policy is designed we have a new National curriculum called The Common Core and I have cautious optimism about it because it's more conceptually based for example in math there are fewer different concepts that taught every year now there are 18 different concepts at each grade it's more um continuous across grades but a lot will depend on the assessments whether the assessments are same old same old or whether the assessments tap into this growth of conceptual ability fingers cross do you have any idea of how to do that because the assessment seems to me always comes up like almost any discussion of Education people it seems to come back to if you can't change the assessment tools forget it because eventually everything will move towards that do do you have a sort of Magic Bullet in that respect how do you go about changing assessment practices you get the right team and the team that created the Common Core I am hopeful will be influential in shaping the assessment and then finally these last two questions a lot of the work is with children um but to what extent does it work with grown-ups and to what extent can you do it online yes there is uh work now showing uh that you can teach a growth mindset to adults like business managers and uh and relatively enduring changes can make take place a former student of mine Jason pla is doing work with elderly adults showing that teaching a growth mindset can raise memory performance yes it can be delivered online um many of our recent interventions have been done over the Internet so we have been trying out programs now that teach a growth mindset in one or two sessions online okay great um any more questions from Twitter Matthew are we doing PC okay p g de okay technical problems great so sorry to everyone of the Twitter vers who's listening um we have time for one more question I think if anyone's got anything burning yes one at the front here please just wait for the mic please um I just want to ask about the title and the word potential um because obviously potential puts a limit on something yes and I was wondering if you felt that was the right word to use okay that's a great question that's the third time I've been asked that this week and um the the the question is whether saying potential or living up to or fulfilling someone's potential makes it a a limited finite thing and I wasn't thinking of it in that way we cannot know what someone's potential is we never know what someone's potential is until they commit themselves and uh uh fully learn and grow in an area but I will take this under advisement thank you um and this was the last thing for me is that you know having absorbed all of that and thought about it a bit um the one danger would be misrepresentation is there anything that you think people might do or have done that you be very keen that they don't do with your work is there any sort of common mistake that people make with regard to it yes uh sometimes people or Educators believe that just exhorting children to try hard equals a growth mindset and as we've discussed today it doesn't or just thinking that teaching um about the brain will instill a growth mindset but you have to really show kids how they can have impact on their brain through doing difficult challenging work great well that and more is revealed in the book mindset which is a uh recently released and it's a UK version here and it's available outside Carol's happy to sign copies for you um I'd like to thank RSA fellows who made this event possible and if you can join me in thanking Professor [Applause] C