7 Strategies to Help Students Adopt a Growth Mindset in Your Writing Course

The difficulty of writing-intensive courses and the sting of honest feedback can leave students questioning their ability as writers and dissuade them from continuing to improve their writing. But we can work to avoid this outcome by helping our students develop a "growth mindset" about their learning. By encouraging students to adopt the right mindset in our courses, we can help them thrive and motivate them to keep challenging themselves well after the semester ends. A "growth mindset" is the belief that our abilities are malleable and that we can gain knowledge and improve our skills over time with hard work and focused effort. The growth mindset (correctly) sees the brain as an adaptable body part that responds to challenges—just like a muscle that gets stronger through strenuous exercise (Yeager et al., 2019). The opposite is a "fixed mindset"—the belief that our intelligence and abilities are largely innate and can’t be changed much, no matter how hard we try (Dweck, 2016).