Guest Blogger: Heather Danforth

Heather, an elementary school teacher in rural Wyoming, is working with The Art of Learning and sharing her classroom experiences…

Lesson One: Two Theories of Intelligence

I introduced my first lesson from The Art of Learning. After a lot of thought, I decided to introduce the principle of incremental vs. entity theories of intelligence first. I felt that this would be a good foundational principle to build upon – unfortunately, many of my students develop an intense fear of making a mistake, or even appearing to work at something, because they wrongly equate intelligence with ease – if they have to work at something, they’d rather not do it, because then people might see them working hard and decide that they’re really not as smart as they originally thought. They end up going into difficult tasks, far too often, with a performance rather than a learning mentality – they want people to see them do well, rather than taking pleasure in the learning of a new skill, which they might not excel at right away. So I set out to teach these two theories of intelligence to my students. I knew that I needed to make this idea fairly concrete. While their abstract thinking skills are advanced for their age, they still need to link abstract ideas with concrete images.

The lesson began with a discussion. I asked students what they told themselves when they did well on a test or assignment, and what they told themselves when they did poorly. My students are familiar with the concept of self-talk – it’s something we discuss regularly. We discussed the different things that you might tell yourself: “I must be really smart!” vs. “I worked hard and it shows!” or “I’m dumb at math.” vs. “I guess I didn’t study very hard for this test. I’ll have to work harder next time.” After our brief discussion, I shared an object lesson with my students, using a wooden dowel to represent fixed intelligence and a ball of Play-Doh to represent malleable, incremental intelligence.

We discussed the difference between these two items, and then I used them as a metaphor for the two ideas of intelligence. The malleable Play-Doh is like malleable intelligence – it can be shaped and molded into whatever task you need it for. On the other hand, the wooden dowel is fixed – it can’t be changed. And if a person with this fixed idea of intelligence makes a mistake (here I broke the dowel into two pieces) it is difficult to recover from it. It feels like the intelligence that you had before wasn’t real – you just had less intelligence than you thought you had (showing one half of the dowel, while putting the other half to the side). It doesn’t take too long before you’re left with a tiny little piece of “intelligence” (breaking the dowel a few more times), and you don’t feel confident to try anything new. On the other hand (breaking the Play-Doh and then putting in back together, molding it into a new shape) the malleable intelligence can take a hit when you make a mistake or fail at something, and bounce right back. In fact, you can easily add to it (here I took another container of Play-Doh and molded the two together into a bigger ball) if you need to, by working hard at something and learning something new. Interestingly enough, one of my students told me at this point that she thought she had the fixed view of intelligence, but that she could see why the “Play-Doh intelligence” was better, and that she thought she’d work on changing her perspective through some different self-talk.

After the object lesson, I shared a story with my students about something that I was unusually bad at – ballroom dancing – but that I stuck with until, while not about to win any national titles, I am definitely better than the average person. It was something outside of my ability, but that I developed ability for through effort, time, and the willingness to persevere. I invited students to share their own stories of persevering at something difficult. They had a lot to share.

With my older elementary students, I then shared some of the research that shows that students who have an incremental theory of intelligence actually do better in school over the long term, so they could hear about some real-life applications of this theory. I finished up the lesson by giving each student a sheet of paper on which I’d copied a clip-art style picture of a brain working out with weights. Silly, but I wanted to reinforce the lesson. I told them that the brain, while not a muscle, is like a muscle, and its capacity can be increased by working it, just like our capacity to run fast or lift a heavy weight is increased through physical effort. We discussed ways to increase the brain’s capacity, and I asked each student to think of something that he or she is currently not good at, but would like to become proficient at. They wrote these down on the papers that I gave them, along with a way that they could become good at this thing – increasing their ability in an area where it is currently weak. They put these papers in a place where they would see them regularly to remind themselves of this lesson.