by Dorothy Aidulis
•
27 June 2019
Introduction Last year I attended the Scotland Policy Conference keynote seminar on “ Next steps for STEM education and training in Scotland: widening participation, improving delivery and meeting the needs of business ” (26 June 2018, Radisson Blu, Edinburgh). This was a hugely stimulating event, and one of the first conferences I attended as a new business owner, coming "fresh" (!) from 15 years in Higher Education. The remainder of this blog is an article I submitted to the conference organisers afterwards, as participants are encouraged to continue the debate/discussion afterwards: I particularly enjoyed speaking to Dr Alison Hennessy about the Growth Mindset, a concept I had not been aware of before this conference. Throughout the morning I realised that Growth Mindset has links to several other key themes in education and STEM, including feedback, creativity and the freedom to make mistakes. There are also some very interesting parallels with research areas such as Appreciative Inquiry, and Threshold Concepts. These connections and links are discussed below, together with references for further information. What is the “Growth Mindset”? A recurring theme throughout the conference was the existence of maths anxiety, and even fear, among staff as well as pupils. The Growth Mindset is a concept that originated at Stanford, with Dr Carol Dweck, around thirty years ago, and sets out that intelligence is not fixed, but can grow. This would mean the commonly-held belief that people are either born “with a maths brain” or without, is in fact a misconception. Studies have shown that with the right type of encouragement, for example praising hard work and effort, children develop a “growth mindset”. Conversely, a “fixed” mindset (you either have or don’t have a “maths brain”) is more likely to result from feedback based on whether a child is “smart” or not. Therefore, finding ways to develop a growth mindset could be tremendously empowering, for both students and staff. Parallels with other concepts and theories Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a way of working, originally to do with change management, that is based on focussing on what can be done, rather than on what the problems are (Mohr & Watkins, 2002). Appreciative Inquiry therefore challenges another theme touched on during the day, the deficit model, which focuses on what is “missing”. Creating a positive and supportive learning environment was also mentioned, so that it is safe to make mistakes, and where pupils are not intimidated but rather encouraged to try again, and to learn from what they did wrong. This attitude brings to mind the notion of Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR), a term perhaps most associated with the psychologist Carl Rogers; and that UPR can also simply be called “respect”. If a student is held at all times in UPR by the teacher (ie treated with respect), confidence is likely to improve, risk-taking will increase, and learning has a much greater chance of moving on as a result. Meyer & Land (2003) proposed the idea of “Threshold Concepts”, where certain key concepts can be seen as “threshold”, and until these have been properly understood and dealt with, the student cannot move on with their learning and so remains “stuck”. This moving on (termed “passing through a portal” by Meyer & Land) can be problematic and uncomfortable, where the student has to “deconstruct” previous knowledge before they can see things in a new way. This deconstruction is a transitional state, but is not automatic and requires effort, creativity and support. Conclusion I would therefore propose that the idea of a Growth Mindset (ie that intelligence is not pre-set) is an example of such a Threshold Concept. This means that overcoming maths anxiety requires actively deconstructing the notion of “I can’t do this”, and finding ways to discover what a person can do. As Meyer and Land have outlined, effort and creativity are key. It is also interesting to speculate whether the methods and techniques used in Appreciative Inquiry can help to address maths and science anxiety. In short, we need to “unlock” the potential of both staff and students, in fact all stakeholders, to enhance the growth of STEM in Scotland. References MEYER, J & LAND, R (2003) Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (1) – linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines. In “Improving Student Learning – Ten Years On”. Rust, C. (ed), OCSLD, Oxford. MOHR, B & WATKINS, J (2002) The essentials of Appreciative Inquiry: A roadmap for creating positive futures. Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications, Inc. Available at: https://gcatd.org/resources/Documents/Special%20Interest%20Groups%20(SIGs)/Consultants/AI%20article.pdf [Accessed 2nd July 2018] [Note: This article has been previously published in the conference proceedings, along with a transcript of the whole event, as participants are encouraged to continue the debate/discussion afterwards. Proceedings are only available to attendees; however such articles are the property of authors and so freely available for their use. Thanks to Sean Cudmore, Deputy Organiser of the Scotland Policy Conferences, for confirmation of this permission]
