Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

For thirty-five years, Sheila Schwartz taught aspiring English teachers. She tried to set high standards, especially since they were going to pass on their knowledge to generations of children. But they became indignant. “One student, whose writing was full of grammatical mistakes and misspellings,” she says, “marched into my office with her husband from West Point—in a dress uniform, his chest covered with ribbons—because her feelings had been hurt by my insistence on correct spelling.”

Another student was asked to summarize the theme of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s novel about a southern lawyer fighting prejudice and (unsuccessfully) defending a black man accused of murder. The student insisted the theme was that “all people are basically nice.” When Schwartz questioned that conclusion, the student left the class and reported her to the dean. Schwartz was reprimanded for having standards that were too high. Why, Schwartz asks, should the low standards of these future teachers be honored above the needs of the children they will one day teach?

On the other hand, simply raising standards in our schools, without giving students the means of reaching them, is a recipe for disaster. It just pushes the poorly prepared or poorly motivated students into failure and out of school.

Is there a way to set standards high and have students reach them?

In chapter 3, we saw in the work of Falko Rheinberg that teachers with the growth mindset brought many low achievers up into the high-achieving range. We saw in the growth-minded teaching of Jaime Escalante that inner-city high school students could learn college calculus, and in the growth-minded teaching of Marva Collins that inner-city grade school children could read Shakespeare. In this chapter, we’ll see more. We’ll see how growth-oriented teaching unleashes children’s minds.

I’ll focus on three great teachers, two who worked with students who are considered “disadvantaged” and one who worked with students considered supertalented. What do these great teachers have in common?

Great Teachers

The great teachers believe in the growth of the intellect and talent, and they are fascinated with the process of learning.

Marva Collins taught Chicago children who had been judged and discarded. For many, her classroom was their last stop. One boy had been in and out of thirteen schools in four years. One stabbed children with pencils and had been thrown out of a mental health center. One eight-year-old would remove the blade from the pencil sharpener and cut up his classmates’ coats, hats, gloves, and scarves. One child referred to killing himself in almost every sentence. One hit another student with a hammer on his first day. These children hadn’t learned much in school, but everyone knew it was their own fault. Everyone but Collins.

When 60 Minutes did a segment on Collins’s classroom, Morley Safer tried his best get a child to say he didn’t like the school. “It’s so hard here. There’s no recess. There’s no gym. They work you all day. You have only forty minutes for lunch. Why do you like it? It’s just too hard.” But the student replied, “That’s why I like it, because it makes your brains bigger.”

Chicago Sun-Times writer Zay Smith interviewed one of the children: “We do hard things here. They fill your brain.”

As Collins looks back on how she got started, she says, “I have always been fascinated with learning, with the process of discovering something new, and it was exciting to share in the discoveries made by my … students.” On the first day of school, she always promised her students—all students—that they would learn. She forged a contract with them.

“I know most of you can’t spell your name. You don’t know the alphabet, you don’t know how to read, you don’t know homonyms or how to syllabicate. I promise you that you will. None of you has ever failed. School may have failed you. Well, goodbye to failure, children. Welcome to success. You will read hard books in here and understand what you read. You will write every day.… But you must help me to help you. If you don’t give anything, don’t expect anything. Success is not coming to you, you must come to it.”

Her joy in her students’ learning was enormous. As they changed from children who arrived with “toughened faces and glassed-over eyes” to children who were beginning to brim with enthusiasm, she told them, “I don’t know what St. Peter has planned for me, but you children are giving me my heaven on earth.”