When students with a “fixed” mindset are faced with a difficult or unfamiliar problem that they can’t solve, they tend to take it as a judgement on their own intelligence. In her talk, Dweck distinguishes between two student mindsets that she has encountered in her research: “fixed” and “growth”. This talk resounded with our beliefs regarding learning and education, so we thought we should share it with you, and explain some of the ways in which we, as tutors and you, as parents, can use these ideas to help our students reach their full potential. I recently came across a TED talk by Carol S Dweck, a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, that explained the profound potential of the simple word “yet”. Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design - plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.įind closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Last Spring, the White House held an conference on her work and both President Obama and Michelle Obama refer to her work in their speeches on education. She recently won the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, one of the highest awards in Psychology, as well as six other lifetime achievement awards. She has also held professorships at and Columbia and Harvard Universities, has lectured to education, business, and sports groups all over the world, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

More specifically, her work has demonstrated the role of mindsets in success and has shown how praise for intelligence can undermine students’ motivation and learning. Her research focuses on why students succeed and how to foster their success. Dweck is a leading researcher in the field of motivation and is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great introduction to this influential field.Ĭarol S.

In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” - the idea that we can grow our brain’s capacity to learn and to solve problems.

Carol s dweck ted talk