Teaching & Learning

Growth Mindset - Done Properly 

Our Year 11 students have just taken their first steps into the Year 12 HSC course - the beginning of a long and important road. But the idea I want to write about this time matters just as much for a child in Kindergarten as for one starting the HSC, because it shapes how a student meets every challenge in front of them, whether that's a reading task in the early years or a first HSC assessment: the idea of a "growth mindset," one of the most quoted and most misunderstood ideas in education. 

First, what it isn't. The popular version has flattened into a slogan: "believe in yourself and you can do anything." Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist whose research the term comes from, pushed back on this so firmly that she named it - the "false growth mindset." A growth mindset is not empty praise or a prize for every effort. It is narrower and more useful: the belief that ability can grow through effort, good strategies and help from others, rather than being a fixed quantity you either have or you don't. 

Why this matters starts earlier than most of us realise. In a study following children from toddlerhood, Gunderson and colleagues (2013) found that the kind of praise parents gave one- to three-year-olds predicted those children's attitudes to challenge five years later. And in one of Dweck's best-known studies (Mueller & Dweck, 1998), children praised for being "smart" afterwards chose easier tasks to protect that label and gave up sooner, while children praised for their effort took on harder challenges and persisted. The uncomfortable lesson for all of us who reach for "you're so clever" is that this particular compliment can quietly make a child more fragile. 

The most striking finding, though, is about failure. Haimovitz and Dweck (2016) discovered that children's mindsets were not predicted by what their parents believed about intelligence - but by how their parents responded to failure. When a parent treats a setback as a catastrophe, children absorb the idea that ability is fixed and failure is proof of its limit. When a parent treats a setback as useful information, children learn that ability can grow. Our reactions teach more than our words. 

So here are some practical things parents can do, and they apply from the early years right through to the HSC: 

Praise the process, not the person. Name the effort, the strategy, the persistence - "you kept going when that got hard" - rather than "you're so smart." 

Treat mistakes as data. When something goes wrong, respond with curiosity, not alarm: "What does this tell us? What would you try next time?" Your calm is the lesson. 

Add the word "yet." "I can't do this" becomes "I can't do this yet" - a small change that turns a verdict into a stage. 

Model your own learning. Let them see you find something hard, and keep at it. Children learn mindset by watching far more than by being told. 

Measure against yesterday, not the person next to them. Progress over comparison. 

A note of honesty, because good science invites it: growth mindset is not magic. Large reviews (Sisk et al., 2018) show it produces modest gains on its own, strongest for students who are struggling. It works best paired with the concrete study habits we wrote about last term - a mindset tells a child that effort is worth it; good habits tell them where to point it. For the Year 11 student at the start of the HSC and the small child learning to read alike, that combination of belief and method is what sustains effort over the long road ahead. 

Nash Clark 

Director of Teaching and Learning