Rabbi Wendy Grinberg (grinbergconsulting@gmail.com) is the founder and director of the Jewish Education Lab and clinical faculty at HUCJIR’s New York School of Education.
Wendy Grinberg describes how Carol Dweck’s theory of growth mindset impacted on a congregational school’s ability to adapt to its students.
Imagine you are in the leadership at a large, successful suburban congregation. Your religious school has a good reputation and the students who come give positive feedback. Recently, a consistent group of sixth graders have stopped attending altogether on Sundays. What is your reaction?
When this scenario played out at Barnert Temple in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, the rabbi met individually with each family to asses where the congregation was failing to meet the needs of those families. Then they created a pilot program to better suit them. In an email their educator sent out following the meetings, she wrote, “Thanks to your honesty, we believe that Barnert is going to move into a new era that will offer all families a more accessible, relevant and meaningful Jewish experience.” This episode is a window into the culture of ongoing learning at Barnert Temple. I believe this culture is directly linked to the prevailing mindset in this community, what Stanford University psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck (2006) calls a “growth mindset.”
In her writing, a growth mindset is contrasted to a “fixed mindset.” In a fixed mindset, people believe their strengths and weaknesses are a given. In a growth mindset, people believe that they can develop their abilities through hard work. A person with a growth mindset is open to feedback, seeks out challenges and learns from mistakes. A person with a fixed mindset is constantly concerned with proving him/herself and therefore shies away from any challenge in which s/he may fail. People with a fixed mindset also surround themselves with others who make them look good, while those with a growth mindset want to be around people who push them to think differently and improve.
For an example from Jewish tradition, we can look to Hillel and Shammai. Take the famous story of the potential convert who challenges each rabbi to teach him the Torah while he stands on one foot. (Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 31a). Shammai chases the convert away. We guess his thought process was something like this: This person is ignorant. He has no respect for the depth and breadth of Judaism. He would only dilute and corrupt Judaism if he were converted. He is making a fool of me and all that I stand for. This kind of thinking comes out of a fixed mindset. When faced with the same challenge, Hillel responded, “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” What mindset does this reaction reveal? The whole Torah on one foot? Now that’s an interesting challenge! I’ll give it a shot! This man is showing an interest in Judaism. Once he is attracted to Judaism and its philosophy, he will be able to learn more and become a true student of Torah and member of the Jewish community. This is the thinking of someone with a growth mindset, particularly revealed in Hillel’s concluding statement, “Go and learn it.” Hillel believes that learning is possible, even for this person, and that it will be transformative.
As Dr. Dweck explains, organizations can operate under either a growth or fixed mindset as well. She cites the book Good to Great to demonstrate that successful companies had “the type of leader who in every case led the company into greatness…. They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers – that is, to look failures in the face, even their own, while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.” A leader’s mindset profoundly affects the way the organization functions. Dweck explains that when a CEO (or we might say rabbi, principal or superintendent) has a fixed mindset, s/he cares most about looking good. This stops the organization from engaging in real deliberation, critique and improvement. In an experiment, Dweck talks about a study conducted by Robert Wood in which 30 groups of three managers were created and given a complex management task for a simulated company. The leaders were selected by their answers to questions which indicated their mindset, and half of the groups had fixed mindset managers while the others had growth mindset managers. In addition to more readily learning from their mistakes and feedback, “The members of the growth-mindset groups were much more likely to state their honest opinions and openly express their disagreements as they communicated about their management decisions. Everyone was part of the learning process.”
We can see the growth mindset and culture of learning play out at Barnert Temple as well. In order to learn more about Barnert Temple’s culture and approach to learning, I interviewed eight people in the leadership, including both Rabbis Elyse Frishman and Rachel Steiner and the Director of Lifelong Learning Sara Losch. The five volunteer leaders I interviewed (three women and two men) all are part of a self-study in the area of education. This group has been convened in order to look at trends in Jewish education as well as patterns and challenges of Barnert’s education offerings and then make recommendations for improvement. The education self-study is just one in a series of think tanks and learning efforts devoted to improvement, including a worship think tank, identity think tank, groups to create vision and mission statements, and a recently created strategic planning committee. In the words of the lifelong learning chair, “We tend to like these kinds of participatory, soul-searching processes.” One of the most veteran members of the congregation involved in the self-study told me, “I think one of Barnert’s strengths has always been its willingness to approach self-examination.” Of course it is possible to make decisions regarding curriculum and school structure on your own if you are the principal or key person responsible, and the membership will rely on you to bring your expertise to these decisions. On the other hand, bringing your skills as an educator to the families in your community in a way that helps them to guide a decision making process is an approach that can create a growth mindset culture in your organization.
An education self-study task force is an example of the growth mindset at work on a macro level, but it can function effectively at the micro level as well. Dweck has done groundbreaking research with children on the power of praise and specific feedback. She found that, “Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.” When children are praised for their intelligence or talent rather than their hard work, they adapt a fixed mindset. This means that when they are faced with a challenge, they believe it should be easy for them, and if not, they should not try. In one of her studies, she spoke to two groups of children about math. One group she told that mathematicians were geniuses, while the others she told mathematicians were passionate about math and made great discoveries. These two approaches alone gave the students either a fixed or a growth mindset with regards to math. With regard to companies, Dweck explains: “Instead of just giving employees an award for the smartest idea or praise for a brilliant performance, they would get praise for taking initiative, for seeing a difficult task through, for struggling and learning something new, for being undaunted by a setback, or for being open to and acting on criticism.”
How might this play out in a school? A mother of two interviewed from Barnert Temple described to me “a time one of my sons didn’t want to go to Hebrew school because he didn’t believe in God. So, I called. The staff responded by developing a whole unit on questioning, explaining that it’s part of Judaism. They taught it to the whole grade.” Think of the message that sent to this child: Questions are not just acceptable, they are embraced. Struggling with our tradition makes me a part of it, not apart from it. The stories of our Biblical and rabbinic figures are those of people who learned throughout their lives, who accepted intimidating challenges, who wrestled with God. In order to cultivate a growth mindset in your school, you can hold up these figures as well as individuals (children, adults, teachers and leadership) as examples to the community, and celebrate learning over accomplishment.
The learning culture of Barnert Temple offers another example. Rabbi Steiner told me that there is no sermon delivered from the pulpit on Shabbat services. One of the rabbis creates a study sheet and/or facilitates a discussion on a topic. The message is that everyone is a learner and everyone is a teacher. Carol Dweck writes, “Seymour Sarason was a professor of mine when I was in graduate school. He was a wonderful educator, and he always told us to question assumptions. ‘There’s an assumption,’ he said, ‘that schools are for students’ learning. Well, why aren’t they just as much for teachers’ learning?’” Barnert Temple is a place where the staff, adults and children all engage in learning. The educator, Sara Losch, described to me a calendar full of learning and professional development opportunities for herself. In fact, she said that when she wasn’t initially going to conferences due to personal health reasons, “there was disappointment from Elyse and my chair.” A man I interviewed said he remembers the congregation where he grew up as a place with a lot of activities for kids, but that the plethora of adult learning opportunities at Barnert Temple sends a message about the ability of adults to grow as Jews.
It’s easy to get frustrated with the challenges of Jewish schooling, particularly supplemental schooling. It’s tempting to write off parents and children who miss school by saying their priorities are mixed up or they just don’t care enough about what we do. We could play down the curriculum, asking what can possibly be taught in the existing format with so few hours. In tough economic times, many congregations are cutting education budgets, including staff and days of school. A different option is to take a hard look at what families are choosing and what they need and try to learn and grow. Dr. Dweck highlights some growth mindset teachers in her book. “Jaime Escalante (of Stand and Deliver fame) taught these inner-city Hispanic students college-level calculus. With his growth mindset, he asked ‘How can I teach them?’ not ‘Can I teach them?’ and ‘How will they learn best’ not ‘Can they learn?’” The chair of lifelong learning at Barnert told me “The religious school was working great for families who came, but it wasn’t working for a lot of people who weren’t there. We could have embraced the model, but we saw we were having trouble reaching some families.” Rather than ask “Can we teach these students in this environment?” we need to be asking how we can.
Embracing a growth mindset and being a learning community means living in a state of constant change and growth. Although the current phase of the education self-study is coming to a close, everyone I interviewed told me it would never really be complete. Rabbi Frishman explained, “We thought we would have a whole new educational approach by now. As we worked – patience is an important piece of change – as we went through it, we realized there was a lot we needed to understand. It took us a long time to come to what is probably an obvious conclusion: learning must be experiential.” The “lifelong learning” quality of a growth mindset should be encouraging, not daunting. It means that mistakes, exploration and feedback are embraced because that is how people and organizations learn and grow. The good news about a growth mindset is that anyone can learn it. A workshop for teachers and students about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset is a great place to start. Check out www.mindsetworks.com and the Brainology® program for tools for teachers and students.
You can change your mindset, and you can change your school or organization to be a place that encourages a growth mindset. To return to our ancient rabbis, while Shammai may have been more accurate to insist that the Hanukkah lights diminish, Hillel embraced the challenge and potential of a new reality. Each Hanukkah we broadcast the message of the growth mindset: embrace change, learn from challenges, and light increases.
Note: An earlier version of this article was published at http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/a-growth-mindset-is-key-to-a-culture-of-learning-a-case-study/
References
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House.