Saturday, August 19, 2017

My Growth Mindset


I find Carol Dweck’s growth mindset ideology to be quite interesting. The logic behind it is actually pretty simple and seems like common sense. However, it actually isn’t and we generally need this mindset pointed out to us before we actually think about it. Overall, I do agree with the growth mindset and do think it has a lot of value both in education and in every day life.


Moving on, I can’t really say where I fit in the fixed-growth mindset spectrum since I tend to take different approaches depending on the situation. For instance, I don’t like failure and never have. But, I also have realized that I tend to learn the best after I’ve failed or made a mistake. I think this is because I tend to always put in effort afterwords to try and understand were I made the mistake so that i don’t repeat that mistake. However, this mainly only applies to things I’m interested in. If the subject that I made a mistake in is not something that interests me, I don’t put as much effort in to understand where I went wrong.


This applies when it comes to challenges as well. In general, I like to be challenged so long as it’s related to something I’m interested in. When I encounter a challenging problem, I tend to put in quite a bit of effort to overcome the challenge. Though this probably has more to do with my stubbornness to admit defeat rather than a growth mindset. Regardless, I tend to learn more this way because I have to apply myself more than usual. Just like the growth mindset emphasizes. However, like above, this also only really applies to things I’m interested in and I tend to care less about trying my best with things I’m not interested in.

Failing only plants seeds for growing, like the cat's doing.

1 comment:

  1. I totally understand what you are saying about the key factor of interest, Colton. That's really true for me too, especially in how I manage my time: I procrastinate on things that are boring to me, but I'm usually way ahead of schedule on things I find interesting. That's why there are so many choices built into this class: there's a downside to having choices (you have to think about what to choose, you might not always make the best choice, etc.), but I figure that with choice it is at least POSSIBLE people will end up with things they are interested in... and that's the first step to really growing and learning!

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