Growth mindset is one of the ideas we promote strongly in
the academic mentoring program. It can be a valuable tool to help students persevere
when there are difficulties or struggles, as there often are in college. We
encourage you to share the idea of growth mindset with your student, whether
explicitly or by embodying its philosophy during your interactions with your
students. Here is what one of our lead academic mentors, Ryan Crass, has to say
about growth mindset. Ryan, a pharmacy student at UW, has led the Biology 151-152 peer learning session
for the past year.
"Growth mindset is something that I support not only in my
students but also in myself. Growth mindset gives you the tools to succeed as a
student and ultimately a professional. The power of growth mindset is that it
shifts the focus away from the evaluation of success and onto the process
necessary to achieve it. We too often as students forget that we are ultimately
here to LEARN, not to get A's on exams. Students often get too hung up in the
study-binge and exam-purge cycle where information is not retained but simply
regurgitated and lost. Growth mindset shines the light onto the process of
learning, and when I say learning I mean longitudinal retention of information,
not learning to perform and forget. By shifting the focus onto HOW one learns,
students are better able to change their studying habits to continual
processing of information, which in turn leads to greater long term retention.
Our culture is too focused on letter grades, test scores, and performance measures.
We tend to pass over the process and look only at the result. Growth mindset
mentors praise mentees on effort and not on results. Instead of saying
"Wow you did really well on that test" the praise becomes "Wow
you worked really hard to get that grade". In so doing, the mentee feels
that it was their hard work, rather than their innate ability, that helped them
achieve. This idea is especially applicable to students facing stereotype
threat who may feel that they have less innate ability than their peers. It is
important to emphasis the growth mindset ideal of egalitarian ability
differentiated by hard work and dedication. Success favors those who work hard,
not those born with ability. Everyone can learn if they work at it!
As a future health care provider, I am very much
motivated to learn. As you maybe can tell by my lengthy answer to the first
question, I am pretty passionate about the idea of growth mindset. During my
internship at a hospital this summer, I made many mistakes. I put medications in
the wrong stock bins, poorly labeled outgoing prescriptions, and struggled to
reconstitute difficult IV medications. A fixed mindset individual may get
frustrated and down on themselves for these mistakes and avoid these tasks in
the future. I may have questioned my ability to be a good pharmacist if I was a
fixed mindset individual. What if I am not able to choose correct medications?
What if I can't make the medications patients need? Because of the growth
mindset, I never even considered these self-depreciating questions. Instead I
looked at the process of how these mistakes occurred and not just the negative
result. I found myself asking the pharmacists how I could analyze medications
to make sure that I correctly chose those with the right release characteristics.
After the pharmacist explained to me that I had not labelled the insulin
syringes properly, I asked him what the correct process was. How can I work in
order to put the labels on up to pharmacy standards. Finally, the most
complicated failure was with the IV medication. This medication cost thousands
of dollars and took me almost two hours to make up. Meanwhile the patient
waited on the floor to receive it. Despite the fact that I did eventually get
the medication made, the delay cost the pharmacy some patient trust.
Afterwards, I worked with the pharmacists to see what I could have done
differently. I worked on reading the package insert on proper reconstitution
techniques, asked the pharmacists for tips, and worked with the technicians to
better delineate responsibilities. A big part of being a professional is
recognizing when you make mistakes, not getting discouraged, and fixing the
PROCESS.You can't dwell on the outcome, you must move on to a solution for
avoiding its reoccurrence.
I support growth mindset because it is the mental
perspective needed to support lifelong learning. In a year or so when I am a
practicing pharmacist, no one is going to be testing me on new medications and
changes to therapy. I have to have the drive to learn and to continually
improve my knowledge. This is the true power of the growth mindset individual,
the tools to be a continuous learner. Life is not a series of tests, but it is
a process. As academic mentors, we need to make sure that our students understand
that college is only the beginning, exams are not forever, but learning is."
