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Growth Mindset

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Establishing the growth mindset is one of the most important jobs of a teacher.  It's also the most challenging because you are at odds with potentially other teachers, children the student interacts with, and possibly even the student's parents.  This is not to say that all of a student's social interactions are negative.  The point is that there could be conflicting messages.

I had a teacher trainer once tell me, "Always praise the process, not the product."  The advice stuck with me and became a sort of mantra that helps me to shape the words that I choose to use during the lessons.

It's not easy!  Over many years of teaching I've come to realize that praising the process is not quite as clear-cut as the pictured chart would have you believe.  For example, saying something like "You're so talented!  You played that beautifully," is obviously something that reinforces the talent is set mentality. 

But what about the grey-area phrases?  "Nice work, you played that really well" may seem innocent enough.  After all, you praised "the work," right?  But what work was that?  A student may interpret your meaning any number of ways.  If the student did, in fact, actually work really hard at the piece, his growth mindset would be reinforced.  But what if he only practiced the piece once or twice to get it sounding better than the previous lesson?  That's when this type of praise becomes less productive.  It could mean that the student thinks to himself, "Ha!  I only had to practice once and I got away with having a nice lesson."

What this means is that the more specific the feedback, the better.  "Work" is often too vague of a word.  What specifically improved about the piece?  A good example of specific praise would be: "Nice work on those shifts.  At your last lesson you had a difficult time hitting the pitches accurately.  This week you were in tune every time."  A specific improvement is pointed out.  Even better is if the feedback can provide comparison.  Last week/month/year this was happening but now it is improved.

What I've learned is that by focusing on improvement it removes a lot of focus from the idea that something is "100% fixed."  Music is a life study, which means that we don't need to achieve robot perfection in our playing.  Our goal is to be better than we were.




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