Failure is not the End

Source: @CherylIF29845362 on Twitter

I recently watched a video of Carol Dweck’s Ted Talk, “The Power of Believing That You Can Improve.”  To begin this talk, she referenced a school in Chicago who renamed failing grades to “not yet.”  Dweck’s Ted Talk was about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, and how children with a growth mindset tend to achieve more in the end.  This really resonated with me, because I’ve seen this difference first hand.

As Anna Kelsey-Sugg and Ann Arnold explain in their article, “A fixed mindset could be holding you back — here's how to change it,” those with a fixed mindset believe that people’s intelligence and abilities are limited; whereas, those with a growth mindset believe that intelligence and abilities can grow and improve through effort and hard work.  The idea that intelligence and abilities are limited isn’t inherently wrong.  People are not born equal; some things come easier to some people than they do to others.  However, that does not mean that a person can not grow and improve.

In her Ted Talk, Dweck describes studies that she has done on students, where the students with growth mindsets enjoyed and learned from challenges because they believed that they could improve.  The students that had fixed mindsets ran away from challenges because they saw failure as an end-all.

In both Dweck’s Ted Talk and Kelsey-Sugg and Arnold’s article, constant praising of children’s achievements was a major cause of fixed mindsets.  Children should be praised for the effort that they put toward improvement, not the accomplishment itself.  When a child is constantly praised for their achievements, they don’t learn to accept failure and negative feedback.

Being able to accept failure and negative feedback is an integral part of being able to grow.  As Tim Herrera explains in his article, “Why It’s So Hard to Hear Negative Feedback,” we need to be able to both phrase and receive negative feedback in a way that makes it constructive, rather than hurtful.

When I started to tutor others in math in high school, I noticed that most of the mistakes that those students were making were caused by their own self-doubt.  They had already decided a long time ago that math just wasn’t their thing that they doubted every step they finished, checking even the most basic arithmetic on their calculators.  While I can’t speak toward how much they were praised as a young child, what I did notice was the environment they were in encouraged them to give up.

Whenever things had come easy to me, my parents would always ask what I would do when things would become harder, because they will become harder.  The teachers that I had would always set the bar high, but would constantly remind us that it wasn’t impossible for any of us.  They’d still give us failing grades and negative feedback, but they would always remind us that one grade wasn’t the end (even if they didn’t go as far as calling them “not yet”).

The students that I had been tutoring had parents and teachers that would look at their low scores and tell them that, maybe that’s just the best they can do.  Nobody encouraged them to grow.  The environment they were in encouraged a fixed mindset instead of a growth mindset.  That fixed mindset was what was holding them back from being able to succeed and improve.