Teachers know to praise the students’ efforts and effective strategies. The days of describing a student’s “natural ability” as the reason for a high grade in, say, geometry are gone; but what happens when that same geometry student gets home, and the praise they hear for that high grade sounds different? “I’m so proud of you, honey! You’ve always been so smart in math.”
When parents have what Stanford professor Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset,” they attribute a child’s academic successes to natural ability rather than effort and strategies. They may also attribute failure to innate deficiencies. This can undermine the work teachers are doing to promote a growth mindset at school.
At St. Luke’s School (CT), we heard about this disconnect all the time from teachers. One parent told an English teacher, “My daughter’s just not a good writer, and let’s face it, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—I’ve always hated writing.” As the teacher said later, “It’s as if writing ability were inherited like eye color—encoded in your DNA and unchanging!”
But how are parents to know about the research on mindsets? We recognized that our parents were doing the best they could with the tools they had, believing that bolstering a child’s self-esteem (“You’re so smart”) or cushioning a child’s failures (“I was bad at that, too”) were the best ways to go. We needed to give them better tools.
Our Approach
During the 2014–2015 school year, we launched “Cultivating a Growth Mindset,” a five-week parent course on mindsets. The purpose of the classes, which have been co-taught by the head of upper school, the director of studies, and an academic technologist, has been to teach parents about Dweck’s pioneering research and help them explore what it means for raising children.Knowing that parents are busy, we took a blended approach to the class, doing 50 percent face-to-face and 50 percent online. St. Luke’s uses blended models extensively with students. All of our level one World Language classes, for example, follow this model, with students completing half the classwork in the online space. Our teachers have reported that students master new content more quickly because they receive more individual feedback. It also gives students more flexibility in a busy day. By structuring our parent course the same way, we gave parents a firsthand experience of what high-quality blended learning can be. The online classes are asynchronous, so parents complete them on their own time, using tools such as VoiceThread, Google Drive, and discussion boards.
We share articles about Dweck’s research and short videos from the Greater Good Science Center, which apply the research to parenting. The course includes lots of journaling (“keep a log of any criticism or praise you hear your child receive over the course of a week”). A discussion-based model puts parents in small groups to share experiences and apply the mindset work to specific challenges. And we explicitly built in time to correct misconceptions about the growth mindset, taking care to distinguish praising effective effort from an “everyone gets a trophy” approach.
The course has been offered every winter since the launch, and during the spring semesters, we’ve hosted reunions for everyone who has completed the course. Many parents tell us that, with the distance of time, they see the impact the course has had on their parenting.
What We’ve Learned
To change ingrained behavior, a course is more effective than a one-off speaker or workshop. The course creates a parent cohort, and there is magic in the cohort. They feel a sense of “we,” a trust that breaks down the isolation of parenting. Experts don’t need to run this course, but administrators and teachers can position themselves as passionate amateurs, investigating the research alongside parents. It helps if one of the people running the class is a parent, too. Being able to relate to parents’ struggles with their own stories builds rapport and trust quickly.Parents are hungry for tools. They welcome guidance from their child’s school, especially when it is based on research. What we didn’t expect was how important the online piece would turn out to be for the parent experience. We heard from parents that they didn’t know how to create and share a document in Google Drive. They had never been part of an online discussion. They felt tremendous anxiety about recording a 30-second video comment in VoiceThread. Our parents were unfamiliar with the basic tools their own children were using every day. Over the years, parents have received tech help from their kids, and we’ve also offered walk-in tech support during morning drop-off and added instructional videos online.
The full name of our class is now “Cultivating a Growth Mindset: A Blended Class for St. Luke’s Parents,” and we have come to believe that the blended approach is integral to its overall success. It reduces the time that parents must commit to being on campus for the course, and many parents say they feel more knowledgeable and confident with technology that their kids are using. Parents get a kick out of telling their kids, “I have to share my homework with my teacher in a Google Doc.” The model has already created demand, and last spring we offered a new parent course: “Gaining Techspertise,” designed to help parents process the flood of research and opinion about kids, technology, and social media.
Positive Feedback
Parenting is hard, and parents have so many questions about how to support their children through adolescence. There was immediate interest four years ago when we sent a letter to the school community pitching the course. We’d hoped to get eight to 10 parents for the first cohort, but the enrollment reached 20 parents, which is the capacity for the course. Almost 80 parents have participated to date, and the effects of that learning are bubbling through our parent body. Alumni of the parent course email me often, forwarding an article about mindsets or sometimes sharing a personal story.One mother emailed me that her daughter had been unhappy with her initial SAT score, so she worked with a tutor and retook the test. When she got her score in the mail and it was identical to the first score, she texted her mom: “I guess it was pointless for me to do all that test prep. And sorry if that’s not very growth mindsetty of me!” As the mom observed, “I’m not sure if this is a win or not, but at least she knows I want her to focus on process instead of product.”
Another parent forwarded to me a teacher’s progress report. “Wow, I love all the growth mindset language in this comment!”
This course has been offered in parallel with continuing professional development for our faculty on teaching with a growth mindset. The net effect is that teachers feel a greater partnership with parents, and there is more opportunity for us to speak the same language when talking about a student’s progress.
We gave parents the tools, and they have been using them. St. Luke’s parent Shawn Regan summed up his experience: “I certainly have developed a more nuanced, accurate, and precise understanding of the goals and values that I wish to embody as a parent and develop in my children. This class has taken what had previously been a primordial soup of instincts and notions and given them a nomenclature—making them easier to retrieve.”
Teaching parents what we know about the power of mindsets is an important resource to help them find north.
Program at a Glance
- Five-week free class, offered end of January to beginning of March
- Enrollment capped at 20 parents (we use a lottery system, with a waitlist)
- Three co-teachers
- Blended model: three face-to-face meetings, three online classes
- Face-to-face meetings offered in the mornings, right after drop-off, 75 minutes each
- Online coursework can be done at the parents’ convenience. A typical week of online work might include reading two articles, participating in an online discussion about them, watching a video, and writing a journal entry.
- Use existing learning management system to build out a course page with all materials and links