Two applications in the classroom

1. Dweck and Willingham each turn a claim about how learning works into a change a teacher can make in the next lesson.
2. Neither change costs a school any money, and both spread quickly through UK classrooms.
3. The two applications are cultivating growth mindsets, and teaching through meaning rather than learning styles.

Cultivating growth mindsets

1. Praising the effort and the strategy a pupil used tells them the success came from something they control, which builds a growth mindset.
2. Praising fixed ability, such as calling a child clever, pushes a fixed mindset, because the child then avoids hard tasks to protect the label.
3. Dweck calls the first process praise and the second person praise, and only process praise survives a failure.
4. Effort feedback keeps a pupil working after a setback, since it frames failure as a signal to change strategy.
5. Schools also teach mindset directly, telling pupils that the brain builds new connections when they struggle with something hard.
6. Blackwell et al. (2007) taught mindset in exactly that way, randomly putting 99 pupils in a New York secondary school into an eight-week workshop.
   1. The intervention group was taught that learning changes the brain and the control group was taught about memory.
   2. The intervention group ended with more positive mindsets, higher maths scores and better motivation ratings from teachers who did not know which group they were in.
   3. Some of the control group declined over the same period.

Teaching through meaning

1. Willingham tells schools to teach through meaning and to stop sorting lessons by a pupil's supposed learning style.
2. There is no evidence that matching a lesson to a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic preference raises attainment.
   1. Given a mix of words and pictures to remember, pupils labelled visual learners recall the pictures no better than anyone else.
3. Pupils differ in ability, interests and prior knowledge, and those are the differences a teacher can work with.
4. Most school content is meaning-based, because it is made of ideas and the links between them.
5. Material should be presented in whichever form suits the content, so a river system is drawn, a poem is read aloud, and the whole class gets the same version.
6. Willingham's line is that memory is the residue of thought, so a pupil remembers whatever the lesson made them think about.
7. Tasks that make pupils explain, compare, apply, or tie an idea to what they already know are therefore what fixes it in memory.

Intelligence in school practice

1. Both theories treat intelligence as something that develops through effort, experience and teaching.
2. Schools have grown more cautious about permanent ability labels, and more willing to move a pupil between sets part way through a year.
3. Planning follows the same logic, so gaps in prior knowledge are checked and filled first, because new meaning can only attach to what a pupil already understands.

Strengths and limitations

1. Blackwell et al. ran in real schools with real maths grades as the outcome, so the findings transfer to an ordinary classroom.
2. Praise has to be genuine and specific, because vague or constant praise loses its value and pupils see through it.
3. Praising effort on a task that was easy rings hollow, so the advice only works where the challenge is real.
4. Teaching for meaning needs careful planning and more lesson time than drill, which is hard to find in a crowded timetable.
5. The nature and nurture criticism applies too, since some pupils achieve on innate ability.
6. Blackwell et al. also measured only maths in one part of the USA, so the effect on other subjects and other school systems is untested.

Turning this into marks

1. When both applications are asked for, take one from praise and one from meaning rather than one point reworded.
2. Quote the praise a teacher would give, such as you tried three different methods, because saying the teacher praised the pupil does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is saying what a school should stop doing without saying what it should do in place of it.
4. Name Blackwell et al. for the evidence, and give a result as well as the design.