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Mindset Matters

Mind is to brain as walking is to legs—only a billion times more complex! The various functions of mind (thinking, feeling, acting, learning, remembering, and creating) are a set of processes carried out by the brain (90). The brain makes us who we are, producing every emotion and intellectual act. The brain therefore, determines our moods, endowing us with the capability for great joy, and when circumstances change allowing us to experience terrible misery. Mind is a person’s intellect—a facility that enables awareness of our world, including possessions and obsessions we experience in it. Mind, as the faculty of consciousness and thought, enables us to think and to feel.

A mindset is a particular state—a “frame” of mind. While one might have a particular frame of mind about a person, place, or thing, it can be changed. This is the critical difference between mind and mindset. The functions of mind are carried out by brain. If a person decides to change the frame of mind, brain will carry out that function. We distinguish two states for mindset—fixed and growth. Growth sounds and feels better. But most people do not understand the nuance associated with mindset—either fixed or growth. In thousands of tests, empirical evidence indicates that the majority of people are convinced that (i) they only use 10% of their brains, and (ii) they are stuck with the brain they were born with (91).

As shown in Figure 13.1, candidates in courses that focus on the connection between neuroscience and learning can choose to place a sticky note on one of these four choices:

1. We use 100% of our brains
2. We use 10% of our brains
3. We use 37.5 % (female), 25.5% (male)
4. We use according to the Pareto 80/20 Principle

It is always a surprise for participants to discover (i) the wide spread in data, (ii) the lack of knowledge about brain, and (iii) the correct answer. Most people will swear that they heard the 10% use theory from their teacher/professor or from their guardians. In like manner, they are convinced that they have a growth mindset, but couldn’t explain in detail, what that entails.

Growth mindset sounds good. Feels good. But what does it mean? Why is one person’s mindset “growth” and another’s “fixed?” What constitutes the difference? Is my mindset always growth, or am I sometimes fixed? It’s hard to find someone who proclaims, “I want to have a fixed mindset?” Mindset can be confusing and frustrating for people even when they say they know exactly what it is and how it works.

Teacher Mindset

In this chapter, we will look at mindset from a number of perspectives. Carol Dweck’s work on defining the impact of fixed versus growth mindset has shaped how teachers (and a lot of HR managers) look at how people show up in the classroom (or workplace). Other considerations come into play when it comes to neural substrates for mindset and how children learn.

It turns out that mindset and the Reticular Activating System are intimately con-joined. Recall that in the last chapter we learned how RAS confirms one’s beliefs. Beliefs are at the heart of mindset. In addition, we look at the impact of mindset on the sensitive Orchid Child and compare that with how mindset affects a resilient Dandelion Child. The implications are extraordinary and reveal why many children fail to engage in learning spaces that they deem “unsafe.” In short, mindset, reticular systems, and autonomic nervous system reactivity work together to define a child’s standing in school and beyond.

The reticular system is located in the hindbrain—the reptilian, survival brain. It can be associated with a reactive response to incoming sensory data. Mindset is situated in systems that connect with reticular systems, limbic systems, and the neocortex. Rational thinking, emotion, and especially beliefs are thus crucial to mindset. The propensity to be reactive is always present in mindset—in particular, an uninformed mindset. For instance, if a child is unaware that people construct mindsets in making sense of the world, they are equally unaware that they can “adjust” their mindset. Mindset is easy to influence, and it can go negative just as easy as positive. The Reticular Activating System has a field day with negative mindset. In the following scenario, we meet Rachaela, a bright pre-teen who is vulnerable, impressionable, and hyper-vigilant (52).

Rachaela’s Mindset RAS

In Rachaela’s world, binary predominates. Things are good or bad, right or wrong, smart or dumb. She was lucky to have a teacher who understands this peculiar binary world, who knows that there is a different “cognitive” world. Above all, she is fortunate to have a teacher who is capable of making visible and translating that binary world for someone who is trapped in a mindset that limits. Plasticity is to the cognitive world as fixedness is to the binary world.

Once we learn about just how malleable the brain is, and how powerful our beliefs are, we can no longer inhabit just the binary world. We are liberated immediately and forever into a learning space that is aligned with brain. Rachaela was quick to change her mindset. She was ready and needed the support of a caring adult to help her walk through the “stretch.”

The brain is always “listening”. It listens for information that is critical for survival, telltale facts for determining a safe space, and, in particular, a safe “social context”. The sensitive Orchid Child is also always listening, because she lives in a place of hyper-vigilance. For the sensitive child, social context can be anywhere: school or home, playground or school bus, hallway or cafeteria. Each social context has capacity for imminent danger, for anxious premonitions, and for reminders that they are often out of their depth, like limping baby zebras on African grassland. Social context defines her.

Let’s give the dad the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say he loves his daughter. Let’s say he wants to toughen her up a bit and make her more resilient, because life is hard. Perhaps he thinks he is doing her a favor. Perhaps, he never said those awful words, but Rachaela picked up the meaning from his body language and, perhaps, from his tone when she overheard him yelling “support” at her softball game. She picked up on his disapproval about her strikeout when he didn’t think she was listening. Orchid children hear everything, see everything, interpret everything as meaningful from a survival, trauma standpoint. They can internalize incipient trauma in an inner cauldron of chaotic fever. One thing is clear. Beyond dad’s intention—whatever it was—the damage to Rachaela was immediate and forever.

RAS-iness Is All

Dweck’s definition of mindset (15) goes to the heart of reticular RAS-iness. Her findings highlight two important constructs that pertain to learning—Intelligence and Talent. One’s understanding of these constructs dramatically influences any academic outcomes and purpose. Children entertain mindsets that are instituted through interaction with family and school.

A child has a “self-theory” about herself with respect to intelligence and talent. This all-telling “self-theory” established itself with the aid of covert curriculums at school and at home, in an unconscious social assembly. The way the student defines herself with respect to intelligence and talent can have serious implications for present success in school, as well as future success in life. The bottom line is clear. When the student believes that intelligence is malleable—it can be changed—then her perspective on learning new things enhances her ability to be academically successful. She can easily understand that effort is the pathway to mastery; she is able to persist even when school is challenging.

Similarly, when she realizes that talent is not inherited, but the result of focused effort, she is willing to put in that effort, not give up in response to setbacks. In short, if she knows that getting smarter is simply a function of neural plasticity, she can transform her learning life with amazing knock-on upside for the rest of her life.

Mindset implicates a child’s mental state with success or failure in school. Academic mindset refers to beliefs, but couples them with attitudes and ways of perceiving oneself in relation to learning and intellectual work. Mindset is therefore associated with motivation and students’ readiness to engage in learning tasks. From this perspective, readiness is RAS-iness.

Teacher Talk

Strategies for Change

When we teach to the orchid, we are immediately engaged in a fixed mindset journey. Plasticity and self-talk become pillars of support for a child. Mental models that highlight these four points help liberate the child from a mindset that is fatalistic to a creative space:

1. How malleable the brain is
2. How effort is connected to talent and intelligence
3. How white matter structures can be built with simple concrete steps
4. How these same structures can be strengthened with cognitive rehearsal

Simple Strategies

Many teachers have embraced the notion of teaching to the orchid by helping them gain an understanding of fixed and growth mindsets. By graphically incorporated mindsets into zones of social and emotional regulation, they scaffold the child’s ability to place themselves on a continuum. Mindsets play out differently depending on the child’s autonomic nervous system reactivity. For instance, the Orchid Child typically displays a desire to look smart; the Dandelion Child typically displays a desire to learn.

By using a visual scaffold, the teacher facilitates a shift from fixed to growth along five constructs as follows:

• Challenges: Avoid or Embrace
• Obstacles: Give up Easily or Persist in the Face of Setbacks
• Effort: Effort is Fruitless or Effort is a Pathway to Mastery
• Criticism: Ignore Useful Negative Feedback or Learn From Criticism
• Success of Others: Threatened by or Inspired by
• World View: Deterministic or Free Will
• Life Outcome: Plateau Early or Reach Ever-higher Levels of Achievement

The RED Zone equates with FIXED Mindset; the Green Zone equates with GROWTH Mindset.

The chart explains the difference between “fixed” and “growth” by portraying a mental journey along a continuum. Figure 13.2 is a simple tactile scaffold that facilitates the child visualizing a difficult mentalistic construct like mindset. At the same time, the visual scaffold that the teacher/child co-creates engages through (i) intrinsic motivation, (ii) a tactile model that represents the mindset journey, and (iii) peer-to-peer teaching when the child shows other children how to make the model and how to apply it to mindset.

Vocabulary

Deterministic, Intelligence, Mindset