You may have heard that Chinese students are succeeding in academics than other students in the world right now. How can your child succeed in academics like the Chinese? There’s a new research that reveals their “secret.”
Now, let’s jump right into this latest discovery and why you must not ignore it. This report titled “Chinese children crush Americans in math thanks to a mindset Americans only display in one place: sports” was published by the renowned Business Insider on September 7th 2017.
It comes down to this: Chinese people are displaying a psychological concept known as a “growth mindset” at school … while Americans only display this mindset in sports.
So, what is growth mindset?
It can be tempting to explain what a growth mindset is and what a fixed mindset is and then simply tell students that they “should” have a growth mindset.
That approach is sure to backfire – students won’t accept a completely new way of thinking just because someone tells them to.
Present the scientific evidence and help students come to their own decisions.
In other words, “show them, don’t tell them.”
The growth mindset is about growth, not just about effort.
When people first learn about growth mindset, some think it means to believe that “you can succeed if you just try harder.” There’s more to it than that. For students to have a growth mindset, they should understand that trying harder —and trying new strategies—not only helps them succeed at the current task but also helps them succeed in the future by strengthening their brain.
Here at Greensprings, the growth mindset is at the core of our curriculum. Even our teachers are not fixated on teaching approach. We have even intensified this mindset by becoming the first Thinking School in Nigeria.
03 What is a Thinking School? from Thinking Matters on Vimeo.
While it is great for your child to have great grades while in school, the growth mindset will help your child succeed at anything later in life. In our school, the mindset has helped our students to achieve many successes.
For example, Honour Olatunji is a student of Greensprings School who won the world best in mathematics in the 2016 IGSCE exam. How did a Nigerian achieve this impossible feat? Remember that Chinese students also wrote this same exam.
Our students have won the best in the south African Olympiad mathematics competition. And in 2017, our students, Ugochukwu and his team members, won the apprentice competition organized by Microsoft and Business Day.
This 2019, the growth mindset has helped our IB diploma students to win scholarships worth $1.3 million and got admitted into top universities all over the world. Also, five of our secondary school students were rewarded by the British Council for recording “Top in Country” in various subjects.
Beyond academics, our students have excelled in sports, public speaking, music, and acting. While we are happy about all these successes, we are even more excited about the impact of the growth mindset for their life in future.
So, how does this research help your child?
Every inventor and innovator has been said to have a growth mindset.
Growth mindset has pushed the frontiers of all of today’s development, and it’s sad that a lot of schools are not teaching this to students. If the growth mindset is this important, why would any parent disregard it?
As a parent, endeavour to study it, learn it, and instil it in your children. It will help them in future.
