mindset war - open learning versus closed learning systems

have meeting with world bank open learning campus on sept  10 and need open educators stories!

cheers chris macraedc 301 881 1655  chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk

Fall 2014 Sal Khan writes:

My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell­-tale signs of a “growth­ mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones.

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What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed, and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.

However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually.

The good news is that mindsets can be taught; they’re malleable. What’s really fascinating is that Dweck and others have developed techniques that they call “growth mindset interventions,” which have shown that even small changes in communication or seemingly innocuous comments can have fairly long­-lasting implications for a person’s mindset. For instance, praising someone’s process (“I really like how you struggled with that problem”) versus praising an innate trait or talent (“You’re so clever!”) is one way to reinforce a growth ­mindset with someone. Process­ praise acknowledges the effort; talent­ praise reinforces the notion that one only succeeds (or doesn’t) based on a fixed trait. And we’ve seen this on Khan Academy as well: students are spending more time learning on Khan Academy after being exposed to messages that praise their tenacity and grit and that underscore that the brain is like a muscle.

The Internet is a dream for someone with a growth mindset. Between Khan Academy, MOOCs, and others, there is unprecedented access to endless content to help you grow your mind. However, society isn’t going to fully take advantage of this without growth mindsets being more prevalent. So what if we actively tried to change that? What if we began using whatever means are at our disposal to start performing growth mindset interventions on everyone we cared about? This is much bigger than Khan Academy or algebra — it applies to how you communicate with your children, how you manage your team at work, how you learn a new language or instrument. If society as a whole begins to embrace the struggle of learning, there is no end to what that could mean for global human potential.

And now here’s a surprise for you. By reading this article itself, you’ve just undergone the first half of a growth­-mindset intervention. The research shows that just being exposed to the research itself (­­for example, knowing that the brain grows most by getting questions wrong, not right­­) can begin to change a person’s mindset. The second half of the intervention is for you to communicate the research with others. We’ve made a video (above) that celebrates the struggle of learning that will help you do this. After all, when my son, or for that matter, anyone else asks me about learning, I only want them to know one thing. As long as they embrace struggle and mistakes, they can learn anything.

 

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survey 1of child centric education

My dream: everyone experiences Harrison Owen OpenSpace After%20the%20Rage.pdf

IF SCHOOLS were child centric they would make age relevant interventions:

if anyone is illiterate at age 6 it only takes 90 days to change that - best of all a literate kid can be main helper in 20 minute session - see sunita gandhi

finacial literacy would be practicsed from age 8 - see aflatoun ( works in 100 countries

from age 10 pre-teens would have access to pfysical and mental health studies designed peer to peer -see Lancet

no kid would leave primary school without knowing how open space meetings/teamwork is facilitated

teachers would be celebrated for clarifying which skills involve experiential learning not classroom examination - while there is some recognition that music and sports involve practice, its shocking that coding isnt valued this way ..

==============

Do you have life-changing moment to share? - what was it and what did you think or do differently after it?

example until 9/11, i assumed that (good) futures are happening somewhere in the world and would be searched out so that all could communally replicate them;  === 9/11 caused me to question whether global connectivity will give us time to find sustainable solutions for our kids- i became particulaly interested in places where good education leaps appeared but did not get app'd the world over - one example actually goes back to my favorite 1990s advances in schools that a small cliuster of new zealand schools pioneered - download it here https://oiipdf.com/download/the-learning-revolution

i welcome discussion of this book's parts at any time rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk if you have a solution every community that develops youth could be cooperational

in 1984our book with economist editors 2025report made the case for 40 year commitment to every child identifying own skils dashboard and maximising AI curation of this- we valued this as sustainability critical worldwide cooperation - we see no logic for changing this concern

== we live in an age where most up to half of knowhow of techforgood changes every 3 years - we needed mindsets for exploration not for being standard examined; a nation that makes its college students its largest debt class is likely to collapse economically socially environmentally if web3 is designed for celebrating sustainability cooperation; and if web3 is not designed for neough yout to linkin the first sustainability generation then we are all heading the way of the dodo

I am learn to learn

chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk  

TECH - What is IT? and which exponential multipliers most impact human and natural futures?

AI   >. silicon chip singularity (ie when one chip > one brain in pure analytical capacity) - science fictiion no moore

who programs the ai - the race to include lost voices eg girls- the world of statistics re=-examined like never before (eg previously mass statistics very weak at coding meaining from numbers)

Biotech  >> Affective science (loveq and emotional intelligence remains human's unique edge over artificials for at least 10 more years!)

Some people say that Virtual or Augmented Reality has advanced at its best so far in last 12 months that there are hardly any qualified teachers only pioneering explorers- does this matter - well its VR which is your gateway to web3 - intead of just a mobile device you will like wear  a visual sensor system; equally others argue that you shouldnt worry about how fast you put googles on - what you should want is to take back ownbership of what you spend time creating virually- look at the small print of the big platforms you probably dont own anything without them..maybe this is a generation issue bu interstingly the met-generation can now work on chnaging anything that old systems are destroying (eg climate) ...t 

 IOT which things will now have brains and be as mobile connected as you are

Crypto - can communities celebrate financiang their own most urgent sustainability cooperations? if they dont who wil?

Cyber >> Drone - opportunities and threats of public spaces- first in spaces like the arctic circle if we dont use drones we will get no warning before the big meltdown

-the mkist memorable western campus event i attended in 2010s was tufts colllaboratory summit convened mainly by arctic circle youth under 25; 

one of the main debates how to help teachers in arctic circle schools empower their students to use virtual reality to visit other arctic circles schools communities; many of the changes and solutions are analogous; I am reminded by educators leading the compilation of virtual realty libraries of the DICE acronym - a reen might want to do something dangerous like climb everest, why not VR simulate that? there are impossible things a trainee doctor will never be able to travel inside a humans gut but that can be VR'd; there are catastropghic simulations - you would rid the world of bees just to test if donald is wrong about nature being more powerful than he is, you can simulate it; or the future of smart tourism may be curation of what a community is proudest of being visited for - this way ecotourism, cultural appreciation exchanges can be twinned to maximise celebration of each other- and by the way friends of the tourist can join in virtually- of corse this raises a metaverse question - that Hong Kong is leading the world on

being 100% public - good and bad hacs- note context matters - context 1 smart city context 2 isolated vilalge no moore context 3 make a huge land safe at borders

3D printing aka additive engineering

Big Data Small by market tech sector Leapfrogging

Nano cf einstein - to innovate science model more micro

Blockchain

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