Growth Mindset Reaction

Initial Response: 
Regarding the Ted Talk video I found her lecture very interesting and informative. I've never heard of the Growth Mindset prior to watching the video but after thinking about the information that was presented I became more interested in hearing what kinds of things a critic might say. I think that it was great that Carol Dweck  was able to provide some sort of statistical evidence to back up the Growth Mindset she was promoting because often times, in my opinion, when someone tries to push theory like this they have no evidence of its success. That being said I can imagine that a critic might look at these statistics and say yeah these are great results but the sample size here is very small and may not be representative of a national community. In short, the results were good but was the sample size large enough to infer statistical significance? I think the Growth Mindset is a great theory to integrate into the school system personally but I can see those criticisms posing a barrier to its acceptance.

Simple trophy. Found on publicdomainpictures.

After watching the second video it made me think of what I like to call the "participation award syndrome" that is plaguing a lot of young individuals today. The "participation award syndrome" I'm referring to is the idea that kids have grown up being told that just because they tried, they won and they succeeded at that task. What Carol Dweck talks about in this video is essentially this: we need to stop rewarding kids for simply completing tasks with ease and instead when they do complete a task easily we must find something more challenging for them to tackle. For too long society has been raising kids in a way that awards them for being able to do things they should have been able to accomplish initially. I'm not saying that we shouldn't use positive language and show support for kids as they accomplish things in life but by doing what we have been doing we are culturing an attitude of complacency. Like she mentions in the first video, this way of raising kids without challenging them causes them to think with a "now" mindset instead of one that yearns for the feeling of overcoming a challenging obstacle.