I've recently been reading this book that speaks to the definition of success. Carol Dweck sets out to show how your mindset can influence your response to perceived success and failure. She says,
Is success about learning - or proving you are smart?...This leads us back to the idea of "potential" and to the questions of whether tests or experts can tell us what our potential is, what we're capable of, what our future will be. The fixed mindset says yes. You can simply measure the fixed ability right now and project it into the future. Just give the test or ask the expert. No crystal ball needed... People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower. Recently, I got an angry letter from a teacher who had taken one of our surveys. The survey portrays a hypothetical student, Jennifer who had gotten 65 percent on an exam. It then asks teachers to tell us how they would treat her.
Teachers with a fixed mindset were more than happy to answer the questions. They felt by knowing Jennifer's score, they had a good sense of who she was and what she was capable of. Their recommendations abounded. Mr. Riordan, by contrast was fuming. Here's what he wrote.
To Whom It May Concern,
Having completed the educator's portion of your recent survey, I must request that my results be excluded from the study. I feel that the study itself is scientifically unsound...
Unfortunately, the test uses a faulty premise, asking teachers to make assumptions about a given student based on nothing more than a number on a page....Performance cannot be based on one assessment. You cannot determine the slope of a line given on ly one point, as there is not line to begin with. A single point in time does not show trends, improvement, lack of effort, or mathematical ability
Sincerely,
Michael D. Riordan
... An assessment at one point in time has little value for understanding someone's ability, let alone their potential to succeed in the future... Is there another way to judge potential? NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected people who had significant failures and bounced back from them." (pp. 27-29)
I guess my question after all of this is, how much is the mindset relating to failure and success feeding into the perceived success of Finland in comparison with other countries? For example, if I am a teacher that makes a mistake in front of the class, I can choose to dwell on it and beat myself up in front of the class, or I can use it as a learning opportunity and model to the class how to deal with failure...and what success is.
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