The Main Obstacle to the Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck's growth mindset, the idea of celebrating students who try and fail rather than those who stay in their comfort zone, is something I have heard of yet never really seen in practice. And it is not really all that surprising due to the way that schools design their curriculum and, more importantly, their evaluation metrics. In the majority of public schools students are given letter grades as ways to determine how they did in class, and, while I do not have much of a problem with letter grades as a way to determine how well a student learned the topics of the class, I have a problem with how these grades are calculated. That is, primary through the use of high-stakes tests.

I personally believe that the way testing is done in the majority of educational environments is a main obstacle to the growth mindset. This is because during a test you are under an enormous amount of pressure to be able to regurgitate what you have learned in the class in a short amount of time. This could be an explanation for why students who do not have a growth mindset shut down when faced with a challenge. Because they have been taught that if they do not know the answer right away then they have failed. 

I believe that working on projects may be a better alternative to testing in many cases. This is because often projects are not just about learning vocabulary that one will forget moments after turning in a test, but instead it really makes the students use what they have learned in a not so high-stakes environment. 

A high-stakes test