Among the books on this year’s summer reading list was Carol S. Dweck’s Mindset: A New Psychology of Success (Amazon citation.) Dweck, currently a cognitive psychologist at Stanford University, reports on her years of research and practice in helping people recast their thoughts from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. In so doing, people can live more productive, enriched, challenging, and satisfying lives.

The core of Dweck’s arguments about the superiority of the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset may be summarized in the following table:

Dweck’s book is long on examples of how famous and non-famous people have been held captive by fixed mindsets. Such people may find success, but such success is often short-lived and comes at the expense of other people and their own personal growth.

But for each example of the downsides of fixed mindsets, Dweck counters with even more examples of how the growth mindset can and does lead to success in the classroom, in the corporate board room, or in the sports arena.

Long on examples, as I said, but short on how to make such a change. Indeed, her examples of “research” are replete with too-good-to-be-true anecdotes of how various groups were put into a certain mindset with a simple set of directions and then, when asked to solve problems, predictably behave in ways that reinforce the superiority of the growth mindset. But if we know anything about personal change it is that it is hard. One cannot simply start thinking happy thoughts and snap out of depression, nor can one easily change a mindset.

Perhaps I am being a bit unfair. In her chapter on “Changing Mindsets,” Dweck acknowledges that “old beliefs aren’t just removed like a worn-out hip or knee and replaced with better ones.” But nonetheless I was disappointed in the relatively short-shrift paid to the really important work of how to change your mindset, or those of your students. This is the book that needs to be written. In the absence of a discussion that is at least as prolonged as Dweck’s hundreds of mindset examples, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success is just another feel good, cognitive psychology text for the masses that, like Professor Harold Hill’s band in The Music Man, relies more one’s imagination than on the hard personal work of change.

Those interested in hearing Dweck discuss her work will find the short interview (below) of interest.

<-Actual Book Cover!

It’s fortunate for Andy Zucker that you can’t judge a book by its cover. One wonders what the otherwise very smart people at Harvard Education Press were thinking when they designed the cover of Zucker’s new book, Transforming Schools with Technology: How Smart Use of Digital Tools Helps Achieve Six Key Education Goals. Is there something subliminal going on such as “schools are beyond hope, they have no future.” Or perhaps it was a flash of retro inspiration like “Readers’s haven’t seen a cover like this since Dickens!” Maybe Dr. Zucker had just pissed off the wrong person in the print shop. In any event, the image to the left is really the book cover and so much for marketing.

Let me say from the outset that this is an optimistic book, despite its cover. Indeed, only two lines into the Preface Zucker asserts “By using computers, the Internet, and other digital technologies in smart ways, schools are beginning to transform themselves into the more modern, effective, responsive institutions that our society needs.”

But there are some “tensions” about what institutions are society needs. Certain goals-focused bureaucrats don’t realize simply realities such as testing doesn’t really reveal what we need to know, that keeping dropouts in school can lower test averages, and the a focus on core subjects alone is shortsighted. And don’t get me started on NCLB.

Zucker asserts that technology can help, but a healthy skepticism of technology is warranted. “The thesis of this book is that digital technology has enabled schools to change the way they operate in significant ways; that technology is an essential component of the transformation of schools that most people believe is necessary; and, that the impacts of technology will depend partly on technical factors but also, importantly, on the choices many people make about how to use technology.”

Zucker makes ample two of many of the provocative works of the past few years to illustrate or provide counterpoint to his thesis: Friedman’s The World is Flat, and Cuban’s Oversold and Underused, but his forte is in ferreting out academic studies to help his prove his point. Zucker is most comfortable within the genre of educational research, though he doesn’t hesitate to pepper his book with anecdotal stories that support his thesis.

(Zucker rankled my feathers when he writes: “…there is little evidence to show that attending private schools results in higher achievement.” He obviously has not spent much time in top tier pirvate schools such as my own, but I’ll forgive him this misstep.)

Zucker organizes much of his book around the pursuite of six goals:

1. Increasing student achievement in academic subjects
2. Make schools more engaging and relevant
3. Achieve a high-quality education for all
4. Prepare, attract, and retain more highly qualified teachers
5. Increase support for children by parents and communities
6. Greater accountability by schools

He then devotes a chapter to discussing each of these goals in depth, describing the forces working for and against realization of each of these goals, and the role that technology might play in helping to achieve these goals. Each chapter is filled with examples and case studies wherein technology has proven itself to be a fundamental ingredient in change.

Zucker ends the book with two chapters on innovation and transforming schools. He rightly talks about the role his current employer, the Concord Consortium, has had and continues to have in creating innovative programs in technology, especially science education. Other think-tanks such as SRI and the National Science Foundation also get their due.

Transforming Schools with Technology makes a nice companion-piece to Christensen’s  bestselling Disrupting Class (previous review). Where Christensen talks about the need for schools to embrace technology to keep from being swept aside as irrelevance institutions, Zucker cheerily believes that “…schools have already reached a tipping point in using technology to reform age-old ways of operating, the pace of change has been so fast that the modifications schools are making are not yet widely known or understood.”

Readers interested in hearing Zucker talk about his book, and his take on Distrupting Class, should listen to this interview from EdTechTalk.com. http://www.edtechtalk.com/21cl_100

UPDATE: I was kindly informed by Jeffrey Perkins, Director of Marketing and Sales for the Harvard Education Publishing Group that the cover I show at the beginning of this post is for the library edition, and not widely available to the general public. A much more attractive cover is, indeed, what most people will get when they order this book. I both regret the error and express astonishment that people actually read my blog!

Among the many topics being tossed about amongst educators, psychologists, and parents these days is how to help our children become more “resilient,” to “take a licking and keep on ticking.” Apparently there is rising concern that helicopter parents may be a bit too protective of their offspring. Every competition that a child is in these days comes with an award, even if it’s just for having enough breath to fog a mirror.

Teachers in independent schools understand the consequences and questions that may be asked if one of their students earns anything less than a C. (No, make that a C+).

Perhaps resilience is the current generations answer to our grandmother’s boast of having to walk “ten miles each day to school, through snow with drifts up to my eyeballs, holding on to my little brother with one hand, while the other was clutched to a shotgun to deal with varmints, outlaws, or the occasional grizzly bear, which I was expected to dispatch with one shot and then field dress and tote home after school to put meat on the table.”

In engineering, resilience is about a material being able to resume its original shape after being deformed.

Who can argue with this?

One of the most resilient organizations in America is our school system. Deform them, re-form them, do what you want with them, and our schools have a surprising ability to take your best shot and bounce right back  to their original shape! Despite decades of attempts to reform, remake, reinvent, recharge, or reinvigorate schools what we often end up with is simple regurgitation. Schools come back the same way they were before all of the time, effort, and money was expended.

Yes, schools are resilient.

So when we talk to each other and to our students let’s be clear about what we mean by resilience. Resilience that results in one being the same as before after a trying time  misses the mark. Hard lessons imply that there is something to be learned, and learning leads to changes in behavior. Resilience is not about false bravado, but instilling adaptability, coping skills, mental elasticity, and the courage and fortitude to stand up when you’ve been intellectually or emotionally knocked for a loop; resuming much of our original shape while incorporating the experience into our new sense of self.

So kids of America, be resilient! But just not like our schools.