Professor Barry Hymer talks about Mindsets ahead of his conference with Professor Carol S. Dweck this July.

Mindset theory is clearly a powerful and life-enhancing approach to learning, but there is some opposition to it. Where does this scepticism come from?

The people who are, in my experience, most sceptical (and there aren’t many – teachers get it, parents get it) are occasionally very wedded to the idea of self-esteem, and they can get very angry if I suggest that praise is much over-used and much abused.

We should not be creating students who are intellectually self-confident with high academic self-esteem because that turns out not to be stable and durable in the face of significant challenges – whenever they arise (and they will).

We should be setting out to nurture resourceful and resilient learners – and that’s not the same thing. So the opposition I get from teachers, early on at least, is that, “You’re knocking kids’ self-esteem if you’re too honest and too direct.” But I’m saying self-esteem is not where it’s at. Our prison system is full of gang leaders – young men with high self-esteem; I’d suggest that Robert Mugabe or Mick Philpott are probably not low on self-esteem.

It’s like the trend for removing competitions from school, isn’t it?

Yes, ‘All must have prizes’. Well actually no, not everyone deserves a prize. It doesn’t mean we have to take a competitive route; some of the best routes towards achievement are through collaboration and not competition. But there will be a place for competition, particularly the kind of competition that is based on ‘myself’, the PB, the personal best.

Can I be better today than I was yesterday? It’s setting these personal targets, that is where the really rich gains are to be had, confirmed not just by Carol Dweck’s research, but all the most robust research – as synthesised by John Hattie, Robert Marzano and others.

Do teachers need to have a growth mindset before they can teach their students to have one?

I think they do. In much the same way that I wouldn’t be a very acceptable politician if my views are right wing and I’m professing left-wing views or the other way around. You have to believe what you are saying and recognise the truth of it. We’ve all got a bit of the fixed mindset, some of us have a large chunk, but we’ve all got something to work on within ourselves. If the students see a gap between what you’re saying and what you’re doing, they will spot it: kids are smart.

Are we born with a fixed or growth mindset or is it something that we develop?

I think young children are probably born as learners and something happens to many of them to make them non-learners. I’m afraid to say this happens often in schools, which can turn a child with a wonderfully open growth mindset into a child with a fixed mindset who fears seeming to be not too clever.

Our entire examination and school system seems to be built around notions of pass and failure; work individually, don’t share your ideas with others, don’t collaborate, get it right, don’t make mistakes, avoid failure. These are all messages which make many young adults afraid of failure, associating it with not meeting a standard, whereas actually failure underpins all learning. If you are not failing you cannot be learning; at most you’re practising past learning. Failure is the point at which new learning starts kicking in.

So we’ve got to start making schools places where failure is celebrated as long as it’s initial failure. I worked in a wonderful school in Buckinghamshire some time ago and they had a little poster up in every classroom, expressed as an acrostic: F-A-I-L and every child in that school knew that that stood for First-Attempt-In-Learning.

As long as every child can get that kind of message, that failure is just a first attempt in learning, that’s a really powerful thing to take forward and to celebrate those failures as learning opportunities. In every field, particularly in science, where would we be without failures? Look at WD40 – Water Displacement 40 – the first 39 formulae didn’t displace water. These are the failures that are learning, which lead ultimately to the great products.

Are there any obvious links between mindset and maturity? Do you think that children with the growth mindset tend to be the more mature ones?

There’s no question that the kind of qualities that we admire as wise and mature and emotionally healthy, tend to be qualities associated with the growth mindset. But I have met some very little kids who under that definition you’d regard as extremely mature, because they don’t mind failure, they embrace it, they learn from it and they have no illusions about pretending already to be superbly skilled.

People my own age and older can be less mature by some considerable distance because we’ve developed that little illusion of perfection. So yes, it’s what our society likes and values. We admire maturity in people because we sense that it’s going to be very helpful for development and growth.

‘Fail, fail again, fail better’: how to cultivate a growth mindset. We’re trying to cultivate our own growth mindsets, so do you have any top tips?

I think it’s fantastic that you are and that it’s an ongoing journey that I’ve been involved in for many years as well. A top tip would probably be to listen out for the voice of the fixed mindset and name it. When you hear that voice saying: “Oh you’ll never be a swimmer” etc, recognise where that’s coming from, and recognise that that’s the belief that things are fixed and unchangeable. Because once you’ve recognised it you can then begin to contest it.

My dad always hears it. He’s 91 and he can do things on Adobe Photoshop that would impress any graphic designer! He is flying, he makes loads of mistakes but he’s improving all the way along. He’s a great role model to me because there are large parts of me thinking: “Oh there’s so much I’d have to catch up on” but basically, no, you have to get down to it and get cracking.

It’s no surprise that so many forms of therapy, particularly cognitive behavioural therapy, draw very heavily on intuitive understandings of mindset. Beliefs maintain and underpin behaviour patterns, so questioning false beliefs and questioning the foundations of those beliefs leads to changes in behaviour.

Finally, seek out opportunities to fail, look out for areas you want to improve in and then start picking out the next steps.

A great tip by the playwright Samuel Beckett is: “Fail, fail again, fail better.”
Because each time we’re failing, we’re failing better, we’re moving and we’re growing. SR