The main ideas of the book:
- Everyone has hidden potential for growth and achievement, but standard approaches to studying, practicing, coaching, and organizing education often leave this potential untapped.
- The practices of high-achieving individuals (and a high-achieving school system) reveal the surprising skills, scaffolds, and systems that unlock potential. Even better, anyone can learn them, and anyone can teach them, too.
Why I chose this book:
More than a decade ago, Carol Dweck introduced educators to the benefits of the growth mindset. But in more recent years, Dweck herself has demonstrated that the growth mindset alone does little good without the right scaffolding to support it. A study of 15,000 high schoolers revealed that nurturing students’ growth mindsets only boosted their grades when their teachers recognized their potential, and their school environments encouraged them to embrace challenge. This is critical information for educators. Even with the right mindset, our students’ potential may remain locked up, barricaded by ineffective approaches and unproductive systems.
Organizational psychologist, Adam Grant, offers us the keys: the skills of character we need to teach our students, the best scaffolds educators can provide, and the larger-scale systems that set everyone free to achieve and succeed. I was personally surprised at some of the methods Grant’s research found to be most effective. They are far from the same old recommendations we’ve all heard before. But I think you’ll also find that while they are “outside the box,” they feel practical and doable. Read on, ready to think differently and discover new keys to achievement.
