"Growth Mindset" Flocabulary Read and Review

There is one thing that determines how well you perform on a test, play piano, play basketball and even how you relate to other people. It's not intelligence, talent or ability. It's your mindset. That means your attitude and set of beliefs about hard work and learning.

Researchers have discovered that a belief that failure, learning and growth can lead to success can actually change, or rewire, the makeup of people's brains. They call this having a "growth mindset." Just like working out with weights can make your muscles grow, exercising your brain regularly can grow it, too! Your brain doesn't actually get bigger. What happens is that every time you push out of your comfort zone to learn something really difficult, causing new activity in your brain, the neurons in your brain make new, stronger connections. Making your neural connections stronger helps you achieve more and more over time!

According to the passage, your _________ is the thing that best determines your success.

• intelligence

• mindset

• ability

• talent

There are two basic mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. People with fixed mindsets believe their intelligence and skills are already set. Nothing they can do will change them. People with fixed mindsets tend to focus on outcomes and results, on looking smart compared to others. For example, if a girl with a fixed mindset does poorly on a math test, she might think she just isn't good at math and that no amount of studying can change that. Instead of listening to the teacher explain what she did wrong, she might find somebody with a worse grade to make herself look better in comparison. And next time there's a math test, she might make the same mistakes again.

A person with a growth mindset believes intelligence and talent can be developed through hard work and good strategies. People with growth mindsets focus on the process of learning, growing and getting better. If a girl with a growth mindset does badly on a math test, she sees it as an opportunity to learn. She listens to the teacher's suggestions and learns from her mistakes. The next time there's a math test, she studies hard, and her grade improves.

Stella gets a bad grade on a paper and wants to do better next time. She should. . . ?

• ignore her teacher's comments, and write her next paper the same way.

• tell herself that she's bad at writing, and give up on the idea of improving.

• stand next to Fionn, whose paper was even worse than hers, so she feels better.

• read her teacher's suggestions, and use these new methods when writing her next paper.

The key to a growth mindset is how you think about effort, challenges, mistakes and feedback. When you have a growth mindset, you know that mastering a new skill or solving a problem takes effort, or hard work. Difficult tasks or challenges are opportunities. They push you out of your comfort zone and help you grow. Of course, when you take on challenging problems, you're going to make mistakes. But when you have a growth mindset, you know that mistakes are part of the learning process.

You can analyze your mistakes to learn. They help you understand not only where you went wrong, but also how to fix or avoid those mistakes next time. Often, someone else's advice or point of view can be very valuable. When you have a growth mindset, you know that getting feedback or constructive criticism will help you improve.

Which of the following is the best example of a person with a growth mindset?

• When Chiara falls on the balance beam during a gymnastics meet, she thinks about where she went wrong and practices hard for the next meet.

• Darius's brother gives him pointers for doing tricks on his skateboard, and Darius ignores his advice.

• Nathaniel decides not to do a project for the science fair because it would be too much work.

• Shonda does not take guitar lessons because she thinks learning guitar will be too hard.

It is important to remember that there's no such thing as a perfect growth mindset. Everyone has a growth mindset about some things and a fixed mindset about other things. It can be hard to maintain a growth mindset. Everybody gets discouraged when they face challenges, receive criticism or do badly compared to others. It's easy to respond with a mixed mindset point of view and say, "It's not my fault that I'm bad at this!" But now you know that this response can keep you from growing. Instead, you can say "I'm not good at this yet. But with hard work and practice, I will be!"

According to the passage . . .

• everybody has a fixed mindset.

• most people have a perfect growth mindset all the time.

• people have either fixed mindsets or growth mindsets, but not both.

• people can have fixed mindsets about some things and growth mindsets about others.

A growth mindset isn't just helpful in school! It's just as important to believe you can change and learn from your mistakes on the basketball court, the piano, in the rhymes you write and elsewhere.

Sometimes people can be "naturally" good at a sport or singing or acting. While such talent is inspiring, it can be easy to develop a fixed mindset if you don't have to learn to work hard or overcome hurdles, or obstacles.

A growth mindset helps people come up from the bottom and maintain success in the long term. Michael Jordan is a great example of this. He didn't make it onto his high school varsity team. He didn't even make it onto the first two NBA teams he tried out for. But with hard work and discipline, he became one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Similarly, LeBron James says that even with everything he's accomplished, having a growth mindset helps him keep getting better.

With which of these statements would LeBron James most likely agree?

• Professional athletes don't need a growth mindset; they're already at the top of their game.

• Professional athletes need growth mindsets at the beginning of their careers, but not later.

• Even a successful professional athlete needs a growth mindset to be able to keep improving.

• A professional athlete needs a fixed mindset to help them understand their natural talent.