September 13, 2023
Publication is scheduled for early October 2023. For updates on the publication of this book, click here. This is the second of two excerpts from Stephen’s new book. The first excerpt is here.
Carol Dweck is the leading expert on growth mindset and her 2006 book detailing “The New Psychology of Success” around mindset has not only shaped and redefined how we teach but also how we understand the nature of education altogether. She defines the concept in the following manner: “In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.” This love of learning and resilience is key to understanding the benefits of this way of thinking. Collectively, we are all born into a growth mindset. It is inherent in young children to strive for growth and to work as hard as possible to achieve this growth. Imagine the child, trying to crawl for the first time and, finding it difficult, giving up and never attempting again. Imagine that child proclaiming herself to be a failure and simply accepting the inability to grow. It’s a preposterous concept. We push ourselves to crawl and then to walk and eventually run. We embrace our inherent growth mindset as we learn to think and then to speak and then to write. At any point, it would have made sense to give up because of the difficulty in learning these skills, but we persevered because of an inherent drive and belief in our ability.
The fact that we innately have an early growth mindset full of possibilities makes it all the more frustrating that, almost universally, we slip into a fixed mindset. When operating in a fixed mindset, Dweck explains, “people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, which are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort.” Maybe it is junior high when we face difficulties in new academic matters and start to doubt our abilities. Perhaps it is in upper elementary school when we develop slower than other students and question our athletic prowess. Or even in lower elementary when we notice other students grasping the content more quickly than us. Regardless, society eventually pushes us into a mindset that says “can’t.” This mindset adds the negative word “not” to every modal verb form we have including can, could, should, will, and so on. When these positive words are turned into their counterparts, we begin to say we can’t, we couldn’t, we shouldn’t, and we won’t.
Dweck’s work explores the ways in which we, as educators, can encourage students to move from this fixed mindset back into a growth mindset that centers on the notion of “I can.” It takes the idea that for students to do this, they must adopt the phrase “not yet” in place of “can’t” or “fail.” A Not Yet attitude suggests progress and forward movement; it suggests the belief in ability in the future. And this positive suggestion leads to the optimistic nature of a growth mindset. The beauty of the growth mindset is that it never has an endpoint—the nature of the mindset suggests that we work to adopt the philosophy that we are embroiled in a lifelong pursuit of learning, realizing that we will never “arrive” but that the journey itself contains the rewards. As educators, we often talk about creating lifelong learners in our students, but then we go right around and encourage (often unintentionally) a fixed mindset.
Nothing could be more detrimental to the notion of the lifelong learner than a fixed mindset. We live in a time where research tells us that more and more students, upon graduating from college, will never read another book in their lives. Where air pods blast playlists instead of audiobooks and where binge-watching television shows and spending hours on YouTube is considered the norm. In this state of things, imagine the impact on the world created by a group of students passionate about learning and growing and improving. And imagine if this passion continued throughout their entire lives.
One of the mantras inherent in teaching the entrepreneurial mindset involves the Why. We must believe, wholeheartedly, that we are changing lives for the better. Every day we are having a clear, tangible impact on the future success of our students. Rather than having to wait ten or fifteen years to see these results, we see them almost immediately through the flipping of the mindset switch. This is not to say that the changes are immediate, but the process to bring about the change is. Then, with the proper adherence to habit formation, the process becomes embedded and second nature. It is through this process that we arrive at an even larger why to inspire our methods: We are changing lives through our program and the lives that we are changing will in turn go out and change the world. Imagine a calling where you are changing the world—now imagine a school filled with faculty who truly believe they are, each and every day, changing the world. The great truth here is that the belief that what you are doing will change the world is often the very thing that does in fact end up changing the world.
Even as adults, we could do with regular doses of the growth mindset. We could use a little more learning and growing and improving. One might even go so far as to say that we cannot instruct our students in the growth mindset until we ourselves model it daily. And Dweck is quick to point out that the notion is not an either/or but is instead a spectrum. Rather than wholly operating in a fixed mindset or solely living in a growth mindset, we are situated somewhere on the long spectrum between the two extremes. The role of the educator, then, is to provide the tools and external stimuli to help students begin to move ever closer to the growth mindset end of the spectrum. The movement will be small at first, perhaps even minuscule in nature, but it will pick up speed and momentum once going. The principle of the flywheel is at work here—an enormous mass requires an excessive amount of force to just barely inch it forward. The force must continue in an unstopping powerful wave just to get the wheel to slowly turn but, as it begins to turn, it will turn faster and faster with less and less force. Eventually, the wheel will be rolling along nicely with just an average amount of force applied.
It is at this point that onlookers will say, “Hey, how did you do that so easily?” Of course, it was not easy, but as most demonstrations of success often suggest, it appears easy to those not in the know. Moving toward the growth mindset is certainly not easy. Moving toward the growth mindset is a daily struggle, an uphill climb, a certifiably difficult attempt to change one’s way of thinking and accept possibility over complacency. But the daily pursuit of the growth mindset grows, slowly and over time, into a habit and that habit grows into a mindset and that mindset grows into a belief system and that belief system brings about extraordinary results. Before long, others will look and say, “Why do they have it so easy? Why do they get everything they want?” And of course, to them, it does appear easy, but to us, who have been laboring away at the flywheel, it is a long, tedious work in progress.
The more we embed this style of thinking, this “I can” attitude, into our regular thought process, the more problems will become opportunities. This will change our outlook as well as our perception and will therefore effectively change our entire life. In the end, it is a growth mindset, more than anything else, that lays the foundation for what it means to think like an entrepreneur.
It’s one thing to philosophize and wax eloquent on the topic of growth mindset and its importance in education. It’s another thing altogether to do it. Often, as educators, we fall into the trap of assessing standards and competencies by traditional tests and quizzes, and we pat ourselves on the back while our students proceed to forget everything they’ve “learned.” This is the greatest challenge when assessing a mindset—traditional assessments are worthless. The only way to determine if someone has adopted a particular mindset is to test it in action. And when it comes to hands-on entrepreneurship education, this is precisely the kind of assessment that works.
For several years now, we’ve been using the following model for our program: First, we assemble a small group of students, usually between 8 and 12 in total, and place them with one mentor. We then guide them through an ideation and brainstorming phase that lasts several weeks and involves lots of ideas ranging from good to bad and everything in between. Then we focus on a few key ideas and begin surveying potential customers—the only way to determine if we are solving a problem is by determining the needs of the people whose problem we are trying to solve. The role of the mentor in all of this is to guide—not to overly lead, but to prod and urge and encourage. The mentor, rather than the sage on the stage, is more of the trusted advisor who is there to ensure that no one gets injured and that the group stays on track.
This idea of accountability is key to the program’s success. More often than I care to admit, we’ve trusted students to be responsible and self-motivated only to discover that they have been goofing off and wasting valuable time. Even our best students need accountability and deadlines—and rather than blindly handing these out, the mentor works with the students to determine these deadlines as a group and then create group accountability. This adds an additional layer to the project—rather than letting down the mentor, the student now also lets down the entire team if he is late with a deadline.
During the early stage of these group discussions, the mentor needs to facilitate and set ground rules for communication. It is often the loudest (and most obnoxious student) who steamrollers the conversation and silences (intentionally or not) the quieter voices. The mentor needs to develop a system, and there’s no one-size-fits-all to ensure that all voices are heard and that all sides are considered. And above all else, everyone must eventually come together in solidarity. This doesn’t mean they have to entirely agree on every point, but the team will have to work together, and this means that once they decide which direction (or business) they are taking, they must become, in Patrick Lencioni’s term, the ideal team player.
It is this formula that has led to, at the time of this writing, six successful businesses on our campus. Each of these businesses is evaluated yearly for the best method of handoff. If the business is firmly established, like our coffee bar, then the handoff usually includes a tiered leadership structure of students including a COO and vice presidents. These students in leadership positions are usually second or third (or even fourth) year students in the program and they receive honors-level credit as they are relied on to put in additional work. This also creates goals for first-year students to work toward as they grow the business. This model essentially gives students the choice between pursuing a brand-new start-up as a first-time entrepreneur or managing an existing business through an entrepreneurial mindset. And although the experiences differ in learning, they both offer valuable opportunities to students and are coupled with our online class which teaches the same key concepts across the board.
You may also be interested in reading more article written by Stephen Carter for Intrepid Ed News.
