English
Creating classrooms with culturally inclusive growth mindsets
Project funding
Supported by the Yidan Prize project funds
Education theme
Equity, access, and diversity
Learning/teaching methods and environments
Contents
Overview
Background
About the idea
Related projects
More to explore
Transforming classroom experience for diverse students using teaching practices that foster culturally inclusive growth mindsets
Culturally inclusive growth mindsets (CIGM) in the classroom improve students’ academic experiences through trust and belonging. Led by Professor Stephanie Fryberg, Professor Mary Murphy, and Professor Megan Bang, a research team based at the University of Michigan is building an openly accessible online platform supporting teachers to deliver a CIGM curriculum.
Laureate(s)
Background
Fostering a classroom culture that helps students reach their full potential
Professor Carol Dweck has spent much of her career challenging the longstanding idea that human intellectual potential is fixed. She’s shown how untrue this is: in the right environment, almost any student can build a growth mindset, and improve their intellectual abilities.
Building onto Carol’s growth mindset theory, Professor Stephanie Fryberg, Professor Mary Murphy, and Professor Megan Bang developed the Enhancing Cultural Toolkits and established the Student Mindsets Teacher Training Institute to coach teachers to nurture culturally inclusive growth mindsets (CIGM) in their classrooms.
CIGM embeds strong beliefs about students’ capacity to contribute ideas and grow their abilities regardless of their background. And it focuses on learning as a continual, iterative process, with plenty of room for trial and error.
Growth mindset combined with cultural inclusion shows the greatest benefit
From 2016 to 2018, the research team compared three different teacher training approaches. The first was based on growth mindset theory, the second was based on cultural inclusion theory, and the last one combined the two of them together. The results showed that the combined approach had the most positive impact on students’ academic life, as well as their social and emotional well-being.
The next step involved working with hundreds of educators and thousands of students across the US to understand how schools can build culturally inclusive growth mindset classrooms, backed by social and psychological research.
The team developed a teacher training curriculum and tested it with 170 teachers and more than 1,700 students. They found that the curriculum shaped teacher beliefs about diverse students and the practices they would use to teach and motivate these students.
About the idea
CIGM learning environments are inclusive, collaborative, and build confidence
Students with diverse cultural backgrounds will have different motivations and frames of reference. CIGM training helps teachers reflect on this diversity and tailor their framing, feedback, assessment, and other approaches to put learners at the heart of classroom practice. It also promotes inclusion and growth for students from marginalized groups.
CIGM teacher training acknowledges that the needs of every classroom are different. That is why it’s focused on teachers and classroom cultures, rather than working on individual student’s mindsets.
In a CIGM classroom, students can take risks, embrace challenges, and support one another’s learning and growth. All students feel valued, included, and respected, and they make (and learn from) mistakes without fearing that they will be judged. Rather than focusing on perfect performance, students understand that learning involves growth, and teachers celebrate all students’ progress as evidence of learning.
The inclusive approach is especially valuable for racial-minority and low-income students, who might otherwise feel marginalized from education systems. With their teachers using CIGM practices, they can feel a sense of belonging and have a positive attitude about their school.
Research meets practice to create a valuable resource for teacher development
The team is working on creating an openly accessible online platform with CIGM training materials, where teachers can engage with the curriculum and practices on their own terms. Crucially, the team is working closely with teachers to understand their needs and make research findings accessible to educators. Collaboration between researchers and practitioners is key in this project to ensure teachers can easily take what they’ve learned back into the classroom.
The project will also look into whether schools can scale up psychological interventions for teachers by making use of online training.
Professor Carol Dweck is using part of her Yidan Prize project funds to support this project from January 2018 to December 2024 (extended due to disruptions caused by Covid-19). This project is led by Professor Stephanie Fryberg (Northwestern University), Professor Mary Murphy (Indiana University), and Professor Megan Bang (Northwestern University).