The great thing about teaching art, is that there really is no way to make art other than to “just do it.”  Even in the most shallow, “monkey see, monkey do” art projects, kids have to be the ones to pick up the materials and create the thing, whatever it is.  Aside from taking the supplies into my own hand and doing it for students, there really is no shortcut for making art.  There is no app for that.  So students eventually make art.  Eventually.  The bummer thing about art is that there is this weird belief that you either have artistic talent or you don’t, so I spend a lot of time trying to convince students that they have everything they need, already, to do well in art class.  This is where growth mindset comes in.  I think I’ve been teaching growth mindset (to some extent) for my entire teaching career without really knowing it was a philosophy, by trying to train the way my students thought about their own potential, their strengths, and their weaknesses.  For instance, when students would tell me, “I’m just not naturally good at art,” I would say something like, “Art is very much like sports, you have to train your eyes, your mind, and your muscles to work in a new way.  You have to practice it like a sport and you will become good at it over time.”  Now that I am familiar with Carol Dweck’s work, I have added more to my repertoire, especially on the other end of the spectrum.  I have learned that positive feedback for my students requires some care, too, to reinforce the growth mindset and to help students deal with grappling with concepts at another time in their learning.  So, now, I say, “Wow, you really worked hard to learn this technique!”  or something like that.  One of my favorite painting professors, Stanley Sporny, always said “you really understood that (chair, horse, person… whatever the subject matter was) on a deep level.”  I always thought that was a strange way to provide feedback, but now I understand what he was doing.  He wanted to underscore the specific thing that brought the success, and not just the success, itself.

I love the idea of “Yet.”  I created some huge paper letters that say “YET” in one of my classrooms, as a visual reminder.  Whenever a student says “I can’t,” or “this is dumb,” or “I will never be able to…” I simply point to the “yet” and my students know to walk over and write a rephrased version of what they just said onto the “YET.”  So, if a student says, “I can’t draw,” they might write, “I can’t draw yet, but I will practice until I am better at it.”  I started this as an experiment at the beginning of this year, and I think I will make one for every classroom next year, because it is a great way to reinforce growth mindset in a very short and chaotic class period, and provide a visual reminder for my students.  The idea has caught on — I noticed that the fourth grade hallway has a big bulletin board with the YETi, standing on top of a mountain with some reminders about the growth mindset.  I can’t take credit, but I would be really excited if I found out that my students carried that idea back to their classrooms.

Cheating isn’t a big problem in art class because one of the biggest rules in art class is that the “right answer” will look different than everyone else’s right answer, but I do have some problems with students having a hard time with feedback.  The growth mindset has helped with that immensely because it turns feedback into growth opportunities.  In fact, I have borrowed Dr. Thibodeaux’s favorite term, “feed-forward” because when students hear that word, they know that the next thing they hear is a prompt for learning, not an insult or exposure of flaws.  When I do have a student who has a hard time with feedback, we visit the “YET” together and work out, emotionally, what’s going on with the negative response.  Usually it has nothing to do with the feedback, itself, and we come up with a good “yet” statement and get back to making good art.

Again, because art is one of those weird classes where grades don’t count, I don’t have any student preoccupation with grades.  Quite the opposite — because my grades don’t count, students assume the class doesn’t count and that it doesn’t matter if they take the work seriously or not.  To a certain extent, I want them to enjoy the freedom of not having grades, in a sort of “what would you do if you knew you could not fail,” ambitious way.  And some students do just that.  But other students need help finding the motivation to actually care enough about their work to struggle with it and make something awesome.  The Growth Mindset helps me to frame the work in a way that some of my more reluctant students see art as an opportunity to work hard and become awesome at something, as well as to make things that are valuable.  For the students who are not motivated in this way, I try to find out what they are motivated by, and connect it to art (because, let’s face it, everything connects with art — I haven’t found anything, yet, that doesn’t.)  I have been able to reach some reluctant learners this way, by encouraging them to grow toward their goals through skills they will only find in art class.  The Growth Mindset helps when I use the language of the Growth Mindset to show students a practical path toward their goals and interests through art.  For example, one of my most art-resistant girls really loves makeup and fashion.  She wouldn’t work at art centers, other than to play with things and then take them apart.  I introduced a fashion design center that showed examples of designer’s sketches and some videos of designers and makeup artists at work, and she suddenly was all about learning human figure and facial proportions.  Now she can create amazing portraits of people.  She is probably my hardest-won victory this year.  It took a lot of visits to the “YET.”

I think the challenge with the growth mindset is that it can be implemented in a way that is merely lip-service.  I see students try to get by with saying the words, but not putting them into action.  I also see a lot of cute things on Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers to implement the growth mindset in  a classroom.  Heck, I’ve been guilty of hanging up motivational posters and not backing them up with actions.  The trick is to live it, model it, and create a classroom culture that supports the growth mindset at all times.  (You know you’ve achieved this when you say something really fixed-mindset and your kids correct you.)  This means keeping the growth mindset, but it also means keeping expectations for quality of work and rigor high because without that, there really is no growth, even if kids are parroting growth mindset language.

 

References:

Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House Publishing Group.