If it’s broken, don’t fix it — grow it

Speaker shows advantages of growth mindset
By: 
Lee Pulaski
City Editor

BONDUEL — Blake Brandes visited the Bonduel School District on Thursday and Friday to talk with students, staff and parents about adopting a growth mindset in everything that they do.

In order to do this, it requires not only being passionate about some things but also realizing that improvement is a process and not a plateau.

Brandes, a motivational speaker and music producer, said he was convinced at a young age that he wasn’t born to be a singer when others felt he didn’t have the talent. Today, he uses music, especially hip-hop, to talk about the concept of the growth mindset after receiving his doctorate in hip-hop and global youth cultures from the University of Kent. Brandes just released a motivational hip-hop album called “Remix Your Reality.”

The ability to have perfect pitch in music, the ability to hear a note once and be able to sing it, is something that commonly impacts one in 10,000 people, he said. Using the growth mindset, a team of Japanese researchers worked with a group of students with no musical training, and all of them had perfect pitch by the end of the project, Brandes said.

“The implication of this is huge, because most of us get intellectually that you can get better at learning a language. You can better at math. But there are some things where you think, ‘I’m good at it,’ or ‘I’m not good at it,’” he said. “This study was so good at blowing this idea off its hinges.”

People’s brains commonly seek the comfortable situation in what they do, but Brandes suggested that the way to constantly seek improvement is to find new ways to be in those scenarios. The growth mindset is based on 40 years of neuroscience research from Stanford University, according to Brandes.

“What it shows that was so revolutionary is that how good students are when they started something is no indication of how good they can eventually get at it through hard work, persistence and asking for help,” Brandes said. “This was so powerful because many of us, I suspect, including myself, grew up with the opposite idea, something called the ‘fixed mindset.’”

The fixed mindset, he said, is where people who try something and are good at it right away believe those skills are something they are “born with” and the only areas in which they can thrive. Brandes said the mindset tends to lead students to limit themselves in what they’re willing to try.

He suggested four things for developing a growth mindset — praising the process and not the person, realizing it’s OK if you can’t do it yet, turning “I can’t” into “How can I?” and connecting with passions in order to help growth and learning.

Joe Dawidziak, the district’s superintendent, said Thursday night that Brandes’ ability to keep students focused, no matter the grade, was impressive. Brandes had four sessions, each with a different age group, and he was able to captivate them all.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and it’s very rare that you can find somebody who is able to relate to a first-grader and to a 12th-grader, someone who is able to change the message up on their audience and someone who was able to read their audience in the heat of the moment while it’s happening,” Dawidziak said. “You would have seen students super engaged, and it didn’t matter if they were in second grade or juniors in high school.”

lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com