The Growth Mindset in Studio Teaching
By Dr. Patricia Surman, Yamaha Performing Artist & Associate Professor of Flute, MSU Denver
What Is the Growth Mindset?
A growth mindset, as defined by Stanford professor Carol Dweck in her book Mindset, describes people who believe their success depends on time and effort rather than the immutable quality of talent or ability. Perhaps you have had a student who, defying expectations, over time rose to the top of their section or won an audition or competition. On the other side of the coin, we have all encountered students, colleagues, or audience members who have described your playing to be a result of talent rather than the hard work that you know you invested into the performance.
Students and teachers who approach learning with a growth mindset define their skills and talent as things that can be improved with effort and persistence. These people have developed the skills that allow them to embrace challenges, persist through obstacles, learn from criticism, and seek out inspiration in others' success.
Those who hold a growth mindset believe that they can grow as musicians by dedicating time, effort, and energy. Working on one’s areas for improvement, and embracing the process—not the outcome—are the most important components. When the investment of time and practice, people with a growth mindset believe they can achieve what they want. The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset.
Researchers now know through scientific study something that we musicians have suspected all along, and that is the most improvement can be made when we shift our minds away from a fixed mindset and adopt a growth mindset in the practice room. It turns out that the words that we tell ourselves have a large impact on our learning outcomes.
The Growth Mindset is More than Just Effort
“Perhaps it is time to level set the mindset. Even though some confuse growth mindset with terms such as grit and effort that is not the case. Effort is involved, but it isn't just about effort. Far more than effort, your mindset is about your access to support and your repertoire of strategies to help you solve problems. Effort is your means to an end, not the end. The end is that learning is improving. When nurturing growth mindsets, it's important to acknowledge effort, but praise improvement.” (Dweck, 2015).
In other words, when effort meets a toolbox of success strategies, growth is inevitable. As teachers, it is our role to help our students develop their toolbox rather than lend out our tools. One amazing tool that we can model is within the domain of praise. One of a teacher's obligations is to point out success. By shifting from the fixed mindset habit of identifying the achievement to the growth mindset habit of identifying and praising the effort, a teacher encourages the student to adopt a growth mindset. This will be amplified further if the teacher can model with a mental script for the student to identify their pride in their effort.
Fixed Mindset Teacher Feedback: Wow, your concerto performance was outstanding! You are such a talented student!
Growth Mindset Teacher Feedback: Wow, your concerto performance was outstanding! I'm proud of your effort over the last few months!
Growth Mindset, Student-Empowered
Comment: Wow, your concerto performance was outstanding! You must be so proud of your effort; you have so much power to affect your growth!
Strategies That Foster the Growth Mindset
- Normalize Struggle
The struggle is a key part of the learning process. Emphasizing and reinforcing this concept helps students learn to positively reframe struggle when they feel challenged. Point out your struggles and demonstrate a positive reaction. Perhaps when demonstrating a musical passage, you notice a point of struggle in your playing. Take a moment to point it out, "I know you aren't having this struggle but I'm finding the E-F# challenging today." You can follow that up with a short comment on how you intend to explore that in your practice session and jot down a note to yourself. Demystify your reactions and struggles because your modeling is one of the most powerful teaching tools you can provide.
- Encourage Engagement with Challenges
Teach students to perceive challenges as fun and exciting, and easy tasks as boring. Teach your students that being able to play the easiest parts of your repertoire gives only momentary pleasure. However, confronting the challenges allows us to explore our feelings about learning. It is through that engagement that real change can happen. When we decide to "play" with challenges and have fun discovering how we feel about our current limitations, we find our creative solutions. If we hide in the sand, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to grow.
- The Power of Yet
I learned this lesson from my son, and I owe the deepest gratitude to his amazing preschool teacher for empowering his learning. It is simply the power of yet. When he was asked if he could ride a bike without training wheels, he said, sadly, “I can’t” and then triumphantly exclaimed “Yet!” It wasn’t long after that statement that he decided to give it a try, and through struggle, met his goal!
Whenever a teacher encounters a student who is stuck in a fixed mindset and expressing frustrations, a single word yet has the power to reframe things. Imagine a student, frustrated with their ability to execute a skill, exclaiming "I can't do it!" The simple reply of "yet" changes everything. It is a powerful and succinct reminder that they are capable of growth and signals the fact that you, their teacher and mentor, have faith in their ability to grow. This simple statement might help a student to give the task one more try, or maybe even ten more tries. It empowers us to embrace the possibility of what could be with time and effort. Brain plasticity research teaches us that growth is always possible.
- Develop Cooperative Exercises
Not only is it a key skill in musical performance, working together to solve problems emphasizes the learning process and reinforces the importance of finding solutions. It also deprioritizes individual outcomes such as “winning”. This is a great tool to use in the studio. It empowers students to have agency over their learning. It empowers a group of students to work together for outcomes instead of seeing improvement as a zero-sum game. Working together to overcome challenges allows students to learn by observation, to learn through peer interaction and no longer fosters the often unintentionally communicated unspoken idea that another's success limits their success.
- Provide Challenges
An important aspect of developing a growth mindset is teaching students to overcome obstacles. A particularly challenging passage that stretches their abilities can provide opportunities for growth and further instruction that emphasizes problem-solving. Provide "Goldilocks and the Three Little Pigs" challenges, challenges that are "just right" to allow for maximum growth. Empower yourself to be flexible as a teacher to adjust to the challenge when it becomes clear that it is too easy or too hard. Scaffold technical learning so that there are multiple levels to a task, as an example, I started referring to the major scales as level one, two or three for one octave, two-octave, and full range scales. Students know that when they can execute the task at level one, they can start tackling level two. I am often pleased when they self-assess and come to the lesson and say I was working on level one during the first part of the week and decided that it was time to move to level two, or vice versa.
- Praise Effort, not Talent
As counterintuitive as it may seem, praise for "being talented" reinforces the idea that talent is a fixed trait. This can be demotivating for all students, equally for those being complimented ("I'm talented; I don't have to try harder"), as well as for those who don't receive the praise ("That student is amazing; I will never be that great"). Have your students practice reframing their views on talent and effort often.
- Set Goals
Teach your students to set incremental, achievable goals. Use SMART goals as a tool for teaching goal setting. SMART goals have five characteristics: they are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
It Starts with Me
In order to cultivate the growth mindset within our teaching studios, we must first cultivate growth mindset in ourselves. We must cultivate it within ourselves.
Studio teaching is hard work. Invest in yourself and cultivate a growth mindset in your own life. This is how the most impactful teaching can be created.
Looking For More?
You can check out Carol Dweck’s Ted Talk: The power of believing that you can improve, or explore in depth with her books: Growth Mindset and Growth Mindset Workbook.
Yamaha Performing Artist and Fulbright Scholar Dr. Patricia Surman is the Associate Professor of Flute and Director of Woodwind Studies at MSU Denver. A twenty-first-century musician, Patricia has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in North and South America, Asia and Europe. A passionate and dedicated teacher, Patricia is committed to guiding her students through the process of discovering how to cultivate their own innate musical gifts with the flute. Patricia is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Summer Flute Institute, a weeklong masterclass dedicated to developing flutist’s technical and tone development, musical expression and creativity, and building musical confidence. Classes and coaching on repertoire, orchestral playing and chamber music give participants hands-on learning opportunities. Patricia can be reached at psurman@msudenver.edu.