Silly Rabbit! Growth Mindset Interventions Are For Teachers! (Too)

I’ve written before about the controversies surrounding growth mindset research. In short, early successes got blown out of proportion, leading to a lot of pushback. But recent evidence suggests growth mindset interventions can be effective when they target students who would benefit from them AND when those students’ educational environment has a “growth” perspective. But, people continue to doubt that a short intervention for students can really do all the good that advocates claim.

This new study by Hecht et al (2023) suggests that perhaps we should’ve been targeting teachers all along. The authors put in the work: they interviewed teachers, identified a core value (i.e., the desire to motivate student learning without threats or yelling), designed a growth mindset intervention for those teachers that was based in that value, and then did a large randomized control trial of the intervention.

What did they find? Teachers’ beliefs changed and, importantly, student performance increased, particularly for those students who were socioeconomically disadvantaged. This gets to an idea I’m buying more and more: growth mindset interventions are most effective when they target not only students’ thinking but also the educational environment.

I suspect it does little good to tell a student “Hey, failure is normal! If you keep working hard and getting help, you’ll succeed” if everything else in their educational environment is telling them, “Smart people learn easily. And you’re not learning easily, so you’re not smart.” This teacher-value-focused growth mindset intervention makes sense: change the educational culture in addition to students’ beliefs.

I’m excited to see where this research goes. And I hope it makes its way into educator preparation programs, where it could do a lot of good.