INTRODUCTION

MINDSETS FOR LEARNING

The hidden curriculum … is the teacher’s own integrity and
lived conviction … It is the message which is written in a
teacher’s eyes throughout the course of his or her career. It is
the lesson which endures a lifetime.

Jonathan Kozol

You wouldn’t be reading this book today had it not been for the teacher who changed my life. As a youngster I was never a star student, though I always had a book in hand, often reading at night with a flashlight under the covers or hiding in the closet to finish a story long after my parents thought I was asleep. While I loved to read, school was often a struggle for me and I had little confidence in my own abilities. It was in graduate school that a single teacher, Dr. Bill Friedman, provided that magical combination of caring, connection, and intellectual conscientiousness wherein I was able to flourish. While Bill was demanding, he was also kind and patient, always letting me know he believed I could live up to the high standards he set for me. Over the years he helped me hone my natural curiosity into the kind of disciplined question asking that is the foundation of critical and creative thinking—and thereby contributed to the path that has become my life’s work.

Through Bill’s tutelage I made some of the most significant changes of my life—in my mindset and in the beliefs I held about myself as a learner, thinker, and as a person. The evidence for those changes showed up in sometimes unexpected ways. Once, when another professor deeply critiqued one of my papers, I surprised myself by easily responding, “Okay. What do I need to learn to fix it?” If, instead, my old mindset had been in charge, I would have drowned in a familiar downward spiral of self-reprisal. Of course, that would have prevented me from learning from that professor and going on eventually to turn in an excellent paper. Now I remember that incident fondly as my matriculation into “mindset school,” where we are all perennial students.

Almost everyone agrees that the overarching purpose of education is to prepare students for the future, yet never before has the future been more difficult to predict or prepare for. To borrow Neil Postman’s metaphor, students who “enter school as question marks and leave as periods” will certainly be ill-prepared to face the uncertainty of a future where there are no easy answers. Consequently, being a teacher today is more challenging and potentially more exciting than ever before. The key is helping students develop excellent thinking skills¹ and the capacity to engage in vigorous problem-solving to tackle the novel situations that the future has yet to reveal. While it is essential that we teach the core skills of literacy, numeracy, and technology, students will need to be more curious and creative than ever before. They will need to be resilient and have effective skills for interacting and collaborating with others in positive and constructive ways.

This is why our schools and classrooms must provide environments that encourage students to develop a lifelong love of learning. These proficiencies are so important to businesses and organizations that many emphasize “continuous improvement,” providing training focused on communication, decision-making, critical and creative thinking, building collaborative relationships, and general people skills.

Teaching interpersonal communication and thinking competencies is of a different order than teaching the ABCs or math, where “correct” answers are more easily tested. Even when students get all the right answers on subject area tests, it is no guarantee of their preparedness to pass the tests of life. Most of us recognize that answers typically close thinking while questions typically open it. Lest we forget, answers are only the end point of a process—they can be only as useful as the questions and thinking that precede them. In Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind, Doctors Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick write that we must be “ … interested in not only how many answers students know, but also how students behave when they don’t know an answer. We are interested in observing how students produce knowledge, rather than how they merely reproduce it. A critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information but also knowing how to act on it.”²

As fundamental as questions are for attaining knowledge and living our lives, it is easy to overlook the importance of the mindset from which a question is launched. One’s mindset will have a huge impact on any answers or results that might follow. In the words of Stanford University researcher Carol S. Dweck, “When you enter a mindset you enter a new world.”³ She cites compelling evidence for the impact of mindset in multiple areas, especially in learning and intelligence, and discusses how mindset interventions can even help resolve conflicts between longstanding adversaries.⁴

Dr. Dweck’s formidable research on the distinctions between what she calls the “growth mindset” and the “fixed mindset” is conceptually aligned with the Learner and Judger mindsets described in this book and in my two previous books, The Art of the Question: A Guide to Short-Term Question-Centered Therapy⁵ and Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work.⁶ An international bestseller, Change Your Questions was originally intended for a business and organizational audience but has acquired a wide readership among educators. These books illustrate how skillful “mindset management” can be strengthened through developing greater facility with the quantity and quality of the questions we ask ourselves and others.

Teaching that Changes Lives focuses first on the teacher’s mindset and the impact of that mindset—Learner or Judger—on their students, and on their own satisfaction with the experience of teaching. As you read the pages ahead, you’ll also see how these same skills increase teachers’ job satisfaction, which according to reliable studies has hit the lowest point in a quarter of a century.⁷

The skills outlined in these pages help us stay calm and present in order to think clearly and strategically from moment to moment, including when leading a classroom. These skills also help us successfully manage difficult situations that are a part of everyday life in many classrooms. The focus is on cultivating the Learner mindset for professional development, enriching the climate of learning, whether it’s with whole classrooms, individual students and colleagues, parents, or professional learning communities.

In writing Teaching That Changes Lives, I chose to employ the same allegorical form as I used with Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. According to the Wikipedia, allegory is “a device in which characters or events in a story, poem, or picture represent or symbolize ideas and concepts.” Successful allegory takes us deeper into our own lives, empowering us with new thinking, skills, and possibilities. My readers often share how much they have personally benefited from the mixture of story and practical application that the allegorical form provides “lessons embedded in a page turner.”

The narrator of the story is Emma Shepherd, a sixth grade teacher who is a composite of many people I have known and worked with. Hopefully you’ll find the story of Emma’s struggles, insights, and breakthroughs to be engaging and enjoyable to read, while keeping in mind that her character is a vehicle for illustrating the Learner Mindset System at the heart of this book. Another main character is Dr. Sophie Goodwin, a university professor in a school of education. Dr. Goodwin’s early work developing the mindset system of tools had a powerful impact on Emma, when she had Sophie as her sixth grade teacher.

The mindset and questioning lessons woven throughout Emma’s story are rendered into 12 practical, easy to apply tools presented in a workbook at the back of the book. Throughout the story there are instructive graphics, pull quotes, and tables that augment the text. At the end of the book there is also a link to free digital tools for reinforcing the lessons of the book.

Much of Emma’s story takes place in her sixth grade classroom. I had very specific goals in choosing this grade as the setting for the story. First and foremost, this age group constitutes an important milestone, when students often develop their own intellectual interests and passions, sometimes independent of what they’re being taught at school. Many educators and brain scientists believe that if we can deeply engage students in learning and thinking by sixth grade, we can not only keep them in school longer but encourage their continuing intellectual, social, and emotional development. Almost everyone understands that we need to find better ways of accomplishing this end. Dropout statistics indicate that a quarter of American students drop out of high school before graduation, and in urban areas those statistics are even more distressing.⁸ Perhaps it’s not surprising that teacher job satisfaction has also declined significantly.⁹

As I’ve mentioned, many educators have already read Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. If you are one of them, you’ll find that these two books complement one another. While the settings, characters, and stories are different, both books focus on the importance of mindsets, thinking, and questioning to achieve desired results. Teaching that Changes Lives illustrates how the mindset tools that have proven so successful for readers of Change Your Questions can make a similar positive difference in the world of education. When teachers strengthen their ability to manage their own mindsets skillfully and intentionally, they become more effective and satisfied as educators. When students strengthen their ability to manage their own mindsets skillfully and intentionally, they become more effective and satisfied as learners.

Emma’s story illustrates how she uses her newfound mindset skills to great benefit with her students and colleagues, and for herself personally.

It is my heartfelt desire that Teaching that Changes Lives might contribute to each reader’s greater fulfillment and success as a teacher, educational leader, parent, or student. I can think of no better way to pay homage to my own teachers and what they contributed to my life. You can imagine how gratifying it was for me to find Bill—the teacher who helped change my life so long ago—and let him know I’ve dedicated this book to him!