Carol Dweck’s Questions

1. Dweck offers two key terms, Growth Mindset and Fixed Mindset. Explain these two concepts. Use a Dweck quote for each as part of your explanation. Be sure to offer your explanation in a way that a friend might understand it.

A growth mindset from my standpoint is basically allowing the students in this case to believe in themselves that they can become smarter. From the video you can see this from the part where she talks about giving challenging problems to ten year olds causing them to become eager for the challenge saying things like “I love the challenge” and other positive minded comments. A fixed mindset on the other hand deals with the exact opposite dealing with making the students feel discouraged and questioning if they are indeed smart or not. 

2 Dweck names at least two ways to stimulate a Growth Mindset or to building a “bridge to yet” (3:53). What are they? Use a quote for each and offer a response. Do these seem reasonable? Does something about them bother you? Why?

 We can praise more wisely. This could very depended on helping and praising the progress and/or the process in which the kid is passionate about. Their efforts, strategies, and improvement are all ways that parents should praise rather than ignore. This process praise creates kids who are more adaptable and buoyant. So I believe that this is the right way to praise them.

3 Intelligence. Dweck’s ideas may suggest a notion of intelligence or smarts that is different from what many might think about when considering intelligence. How do you see her model of intelligence? Explain with evidence from the text.

I see Dweck’s ideas as effort and difficulty rather than the norm. As I watched the video, it was clear that any kid no matter where they are from has the ability to be intelligent as long as they have good effort and a higher difficulty to increase their knowledge. Examples of this range from the kids in Harlem to the natives in Seattle just goes to show that if you put in the time and effort you can do anything.

4 Write about a fixed mindset moment in your own learning history. Explain how that moment worked out for you. Be sure to offer enough detail for a reader to grasp the situation, your approach/experience, and the outcome. (We all have them at some point!) Make sure to explicitly link your experience to a specific idea (or ideas) in Dweck’s talk.

It was in my 3rd grade class and i wasn’t able to go out for recess because of horrible penmanship and I had to tell myself that I had better handwriting as I progressed through the hand at task. Anyways, if i hadtn given myself the mindset that I wasn’t going to be good then i was going to do bad but as long as you give effort and in this case put good messages through my head then i knew i was going to succeed at anything I did.