Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Rafe Esquith teaches Los Angeles second graders from poor areas plagued with crime. Many live with people who have drug, alcohol, and emotional problems. Every day he tells his students that he is no smarter than they are—just more experienced. He constantly makes them see how much they have grown intellectually—how assignments that were once hard have become easier because of their practice and discipline.

Unlike Collins’s school or Esquith’s school, the Juilliard School of music accepts only the most talented students in the world. You would think the idea would be, You’re all talented, now let’s get down to learning. But if anything, the idea of talent and genius looms even larger there. In fact, many teachers mentally weeded out the students they weren’t going to bother with. Except for Dorothy DeLay, the wondrous violin teacher of Itzhak Perlman, Midori, and Sarah Chang.

DeLay’s husband always teased her about her “midwestern” belief that anything is possible. “Here is the empty prairie—let’s build a city.” That’s exactly why she loved teaching. For her, teaching was about watching something grow before her very eyes. And the challenge was to figure out how to make it happen. If students didn’t play in tune, it was because they hadn’t learned how.

Her mentor and fellow teacher at Juilliard, Ivan Galamian, would say, “Oh, he has no ear. Don’t waste your time.” But she would insist on experimenting with different ways of changing that. (How can I do it?) And she usually found a way. As more and more students wanted a part of this mindset and as she “wasted” more and more of her time on these efforts, Galamian tried to get the president of Juilliard to fire her.

I9;s interesting. Both DeLay and Galamian valued talent, but Galamian believed that talent was inborn and DeLay believed that it was a quality that could be acquired. “I think it’s too easy for a teacher to say, ‘Oh this child wasn’t born with it, so I won’t waste my time.’ Too many teachers hide their own lack of ability behind that statement.”

DeLay gave her all to every one of her students. Itzhak Perlman was her student and so was his wife, Toby, who says that very few teachers get even a fraction of an Itzhak Perlman in a lifetime. “She got the whole thing, but I don’t believe she gave him more than she gave me … and I believe I am just one of many, many such people.” Once DeLay was asked, about another student, why she gave so much time to a pupil who showed so little promise. “I think she has something special.… It’s in her person. There is some kind of dignity.” If DeLay could get her to put it into her playing, that student would be a special violinist.

High Standards and a Nurturing Atmosphere

Great teachers set high standards for all their students, not just the ones who are already achieving. Marva Collins set extremely high standards, right from the start. She introduced words and concepts that were, at first, way above what her students could grasp. Yet she established on Day One an atmosphere of genuine affection and concern as she promised students they would produce: “I’m gonna love you … I love you already, and I’m going to love you even when you don’t love yourself,” she said to the boy who wouldn’t try.

Do teachers have to love all of their students? No, but they have to care about every single student.

Teachers with the fixed mindset create an atmosphere of judging. These teachers look at students’ beginning performance and decide who’s smart and who’s dumb. Then they give up on the “dumb” ones. “They’re not my responsibility.”

These teachers don’t believe in improvement, so they don’t try to create it. Remember the fixed-mindset teachers in chapter 3 who said:

“According to my experience students’ achievement mostly remains constant in the course of a year.”

“As a teacher I have no influence on students’ intellectual ability.”

This is how stereotypes work. Stereotypes tell teachers which groups are bright and which groups are not. So teachers with the fixed mindset know which students to give up on before they’ve even met them.

More on High Standards and a Nurturing Atmosphere

When Benjamin Bloom studied his 120 world-class concert pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists, he found something fascinating. For most of them, their first teachers were incredibly warm and accepting. Not that they set low standards. Not at all, but they created an atmosphere of trust, not judgment. It was, “I’m going to teach you,” not “I’m going to judge your talent.”