Towards Fostering Growth Mindset Classrooms: Identifying Teaching Behaviors that Signal Instructors’ Fixed and Growth Mindsets Beliefs to Students

26 Jul, 2025

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11218-022-09689-4

Less evaluative concerns create more behaviors that create more academic success.

Students who perceive their instructors to endorse growth (vs. fixed) mindset beliefs report better classroom experiences (e.g., greater belonging, fewer evaluative concerns) and, in turn, engage in more behaviors that promote academic success (e.g., class attendance and engagement)

Literally used the analogy of planting a seed in fertile (growth mindset, with the right conditions, including their own attitude toward the material and positivity and respect toward the learning environment (aka, someone who struggles in school is more likely to hatefully describe people as a nerd to evade and avoid detection of their own academic failures)) soil vs. infertile (fixed mindset, I'm just born this way instead of a product of multigenerational massively computationally complex compounded ecosystem effects) soil

For example, in one large-scale, nationally representative study, researchers found that the treatment arm of a direct-to-student growth mindset intervention only improved students’ end-of-term math performance when treated students were taught by math teachers who personally endorsed growth mindset beliefs (vs. fixed mindset beliefs; Yeager et al., 2021). The researchers used the analogy of planting a seed in fertile (vs. infertile) soil.

Fixed mindset tend to originate with people who want to be admired and rewarded as "just having" their talent for positive social attention and may not be mature enough to teach when they still want and need admiration and attention from their students as opposed to actually serving their students to get positive educative results from their students. They don't have a strong comprehension of how the multigenerational, computationally ecological complex factors came into existence so they just attribute it to "just having it" due to having low comprehension of the origins and how hard, difficult and expensive they probably were (the history of the effective environment and its products). Growth mindset results in good and effective strategies, where coordinated response and effective strategies are the winning factors for actually creating positive and receptive learning where before it wasn't occurring ("a) high quality, b) strategically planned, c) effectively coordinated; Basch CE. Healthier students are better learners: a missing link in school reforms to close the achievement gap.J Sch Health. 2011; 81. 593-598)

College students who think that their teachers view intelligence as a fixed, unchangeable trait experience greater psychological vulnerability in the classroom (e.g., less belonging, greater imposter feelings) and, in turn, exhibit worse achievement outcomes, including lower class attendance, poorer grades, and greater dropout intentions compared to students who think their teachers view intelligence as a malleable trait that can develop with hard work, persistence, and good strategies (Canning et al., 2021, LaCosse et al., 2021; Muenks et al., 2020).

Even just the disposition of the teacher as negative, hateful, hostile can have an effect on learning. The student can tell if the teacher actually believes they can learn or not, or if they teacher is primarily doing things for themselves and the admiration they receive (not really ready to teach just yet, r/zeronarcissists ) as opposed to for the student.

How do people infer the beliefs of another? Behavioral observation is one pathway. People routinely and spontaneously infer the dispositions of others from behavioral observation (Uleman et al., 1996)—so it is quite likely that this extends to how students’ inform their perceptions of teacher dispositions. Indeed, field studies in actual classroom settings reveal that there is relative consensus among students in the same classroom environment (taught by the same teacher) that their particular teacher endorses more fixed (or growth) mindset beliefs—and those perceptions are distinct from their perceptions of other teachers in different classroom environments (Kroeper et al., 2022).

Fixed mindset teachers show a verbal environment more related to "demonstrating" their talent as opposed to a growth mindset environment more related to "developing" their mastery. Learning is not a time for a performance of superiority, it is the time for developing comprehension. If it is all performance of superiority and no real growth, that isn't learning. The high achiever needs to hold themselves to higher standards to truly learn new material.

For example, more fixed-minded teachers tend to encourage students to demonstrate their abilities (e.g., emphasizing the importance of earning high grades), while more growth-minded teachers tend to encourage students to develop mastery (e.g., focusing students on their learning and improvement; Park et al., 2016).

Low achieving students do have a bad habit of using violence to draw the norm back to their level which is not fair to the high achieving students. However, a high achieving teacher will focus as much energy as they can on their low achieving students without losing their high achievers or putting them at their expense while they're still learning. A fixed mindset teacher won't even try with the low achievers and may even parasite the high achievers, taking credit for them, when they were high achieving naturally and it had nothing to do with them as teachers or managers. In fact, I won a case with a company where the design and management was doing just this. Schools may even pull out talented kids, as young as 5, 6 or 7 and have them take tests and then claim the result was with the school. It is essentially the same thing. That is disgusting.

To ignore that students who are narcissists do not have a detrimental effect on the learning of others is unfair, incorrect and wrong. I have several people describing living evidence of the toxic, often horrific, effect of just these students. What I went through on X is an example of just this. Taking away my block button because "I'm a lifeline" which is clearly disparate treatment without pay or recognition is a clear "ineffective strategy" teaching people that it's ok to be corrupt and disparate to get what you need and that you don't have to give back or take care of the resource. That is the picture of something that is going nowhere. That is another example of low performing students just helping themselves to a high performing student paying just because they're high performing. That's like looking at someone who looks like a celebrity and deciding you have a right to look at them just for looking like that when you don't treat other people in a similar way. This fits incel behavior where they say "they need it" (meaning sex) from people they're attracted to but suddenly they don't need it if they're not attracted to them. That's not a real need. This fits the profile of talentcelism which is corrupt, entitled and parasitic. No high functioning teacher would even flirt with normalizing, enabling or allowing those values to fester as part of their teaching.

"The law compels them to attend school, but they make little or no progress. The result is a general slowing up of work in the room in which they are placed. It is only nature that the least promising child sets the pace for the room and in this case, the pace is of that of a proverbial snail."

"The result is that this school is always behind the other two. It is outclassed in matters of study, sports or decorum for not only does the subnormal child lower the average, but the average child does not do as good work in an atmosphere which is far from stumulating, and which falls to call forth his best efforts."

"Hence a large number of subnormal children in the community cannot but have a deterimental effect on the mental standards and intellectual attainments of the community."

However, a low performing student that fights to get the right environment and takes responsibility for a positive attitude towards the learning environment should not be viewed as at the expense of high performing students as long as they have the receptivity and positive attitude to learn and abundance creating designs by what excellence there is should be designed to get them the most help they can through the "coordinated response" and "effective strategy" pathways.

Fixed-minded teachers also focus more attention on highachieving students, presumably because focusing on low-achieving students is viewed as a waste of time and resources by fixed-minded teachers who believe students either have the skills and abilities to do well or they don’t; by contrast, growth-minded teachers often devote more attention to low-achieving students to ensure that they are keeping up with the material and developing their abilities (Rissanen et al., 2018)

Teachers with a growth mindset will focus on the effective development of the student, whereas an ineffective fixed mindset teacher will focus on perfection, flawlessness or other ineffective strategy verbiage. No student is perfect or flawless and it is horrific and suffocating to suggest that they should be simply for being the top performer, even if you can demand more from them and they often like it that way. That doesn't mean that the world is entitled to their perfection. It is not.

Value Placement: when teachers place value on student learning and development by showcasing improvement or commenting on students’ development (vs. placing value on effortless, flawless performance and “natural” brilliance) students infer their teachers’ growth mindsets.

Effective strategy is more critical than ever when being realist about the horrific and damaging effects of narcissism in the classroom for those trying to learn must be balanced with keeping a positive eye to the fact all students can learn. The importance of effective strategy is clearly currently underweighted.

It is critical that low performers do not feel safe to just help themselves to high performers without pay, recognition or respect simply because they're high performers while at the same time high performers should not feel safe to say that there is no hope for low performers and that they're fundmentally incapable of learning.

Parasitism of high performers should not be allowed for a second even while fixed mindset should also be a sign of attitudinal failure that will lead to a de-intelligencing effect long therms in otherwise high performers. In this way the high performer could low performing in an ecological return, attitidunal perspective sitting on their laurels with a "demonstration" perspective, infecting their local environment with fixed mindset beliefs that actually have a de-intelligencing effect where otherwise people though this high performer would have an intelligence increasing effect.

Thus some high performers can actually be low performers in the end due to fixed mindset and other effects given the attitudinal infection they create that has a de-intelligencing effect. This would be a low performing high performer which is strange phenomenon but happens relatively often by shutting more people down than they actually helped to learn and get results, having an overal de-intelligencing effect and where intelligence can be measured by whether they want to create more intelligence (high performing) or just point to themselves and/or people like them as the only intelligence in the room, leading to more people shutting down and less overall intelligence (low performing).

Consistent with the focus group research, this study revealed that when students perceived teachers to suggest that everyone is capable of academic success, when they provided opportunities to improve, offered reassurance and support for struggling students, and valued learning, students perceived their teachers to have more growth mindset beliefs.