Morning Keynote: Cultivating a Growth Mindset

Please welcome to the stage the CEO of Instructure, Steve Daley. Let's get some energy into the room. We got a few more, empty chairs. I sense that some people probably haven't paced themselves here in Vegas. Had a little I had a little too much fun last night. So how was day one? Yeah.

Good? Awesome. Who made it to Hack Night last night? I'm here. Oh, yeah. So they're the ones that had too much fun. Couldn't make it to the morning keynote.

How about the opening reception? How was that? Good? Alright. How, and and did you all make it down on the floor to visit some of the partners and things like that? Was that good? How'd you what'd you think of that tent? The team has done an outstanding job, creating the, you a great environment for us. This morning, we're gonna switch gears a little bit though. So yesterday, we spent a lot of time talking about our history, about where our vision is. Today is gonna be focused, on you, on your teams, on the culture of your teams.

We're gonna talk a little bit about how cultures of growth and innovation start with the mindset of curiosity, and innovation. And so in order to have this conversation, it's my distinct pleasure to invite out somebody that I have really One of the the joys of my journey here at Instructure has been getting to know this person. We love to just sit in the conference room and just geek out on, you know, what's happening in the industry. And I have learned so much from her. So please welcome out to the stage our chief academic officer, Melissa Lobel.

What? There aren't as many empty seats as you said, Steve. This is pretty impressive. I'm impressed so many people could, could get up early this morning. So good morning. Good morning.

Okay, good, good. I'm so excited to be here. This is my twelfth InstructureCon. Twelve. Pretty crazy, right? So I'm curious, how many of you have been to twelve or more InstructureCons? Do We have some people out there? Really? I am not the only O.

G. In this room. I know we've got some shy people out there. Well, twelve Instructure cons have brought a lot of change, and I think you've probably noticed that. You know, we talked a little bit about that yesterday.

And there's change is a good thing. And so this morning, I have an opportunity to talk not only about change with you all, but also to dig into a little bit about this ecosystem behind me. So you probably noticed something looks a little different, right? And something sounded a little different as Steve introduced me. So this last year has been a really interesting year for me and for Instructure. Not only have I taken on this new role, many of you have known me in the past as our Chief Customer Experience Officer but I've taken on this new role, I've also gotten into a bit of a new obsession: diving.

Do we have divers out there? Anybody scuba diver? Okay. I hear some cheers. Okay. You're my people. Apparently, I didn't know you were my people a couple years ago, but you are my people now.

And, and part of my own personal journey, and and as I think about the the shift in the kind of work that I'm doing both professionally and personally has been to not only do, a bit of diving, but a bit of cave diving. So I have a a couple of couple of pictures that I thought I would share with you all, so that you can see a little bit about, a little bit of my adventure in the caves. And I also have a video that I'm going to share in just a moment. But with that diving experience, I've learned a lot about this ecosystem behind me, and I've really uncovered some significant alignment to what the coral reefs in particular are doing, to what we all, as a group, are doing as well. So you'll see here a couple of pictures.

This is my adventure into the world of caves. Now I'm going to warn you, those are GoPro pictures. I kind of thought our teams here might make those pictures look a little better. My husband's not the best photographer, so they're kind of a little dark, but you'll see in some of those pictures, this gear has actually been in sixty meters deep in water. So for the feet people out there, that's close to one hundred and sixty feet deep, and it's also been about seven hundred meters deep into a cave.

That's actually what it's doing that's some of those pictures you see there. That cave dive, for context, that's about an hour of moderate swimming in or an hour away from your exit. Scary. Absolutely scary. But again, so many interesting parallels to how we think about education today and what these experiences and this ecosystem behind me has.

So I'm going to share a quick video with you and I'm going to take this off because you don't want to hear me jingle the whole time we're talking and it'd be kind of awkward as I bring out a really special guest sitting in this gear. So I've got a little bit of a video so you can see going into the depths, and if we wouldn't mind playing that video while I take this off. And again, this is a GoPro video. There's nothing fancy about this, but you'll see, diving into a cave that has Mayan ruins in the background. I think you'll be able to see them.

Thank you. And, oh, caught myself. And it has the ability to did I catch it? Oh, thank you. I got it. Amazing.

And you'll see as in this video, you're able to get into some really incredible small places that only about, you know, maybe a thousand or so people have been into. But what I love about these experiences, again, is the reef experience, these cave experiences have really given us the ability to think differently about the world around us. So, many of you have seen and read about reefs in general and how they are dying around the world. If you think about Australia, you think about Florida, there's a number of different effects that are having on our reefs, and they're everything from global warming, the rising temperature of the oceans, the rising temperature of our planet. There are things like human intervention, more and more people journeying into seeing these incredible things.

I'm part of that, right? Trying to protect some of the work that, you know, is there as I am diving, but still, I am contributing to that. And some of it is just the general way we think about protecting our environments. This is so similar to education, and I'm struck all the time when I'm off diving about these parallels. We think about it, we as educators every day are facing significant challenges, right? We are facing continued human intervention that isn't always good human intervention. Think about all the bad actors out there trying to steal data, trying to do bad things with technology.

We are facing challenges with diverse populations and distractions and resource limitations. This is all similar to the coral reefs. The good news is just like the coral reefs, education has a positive future. And I am really struck by the fact that, as we've seen in the last couple of years, there was a lot of doom and gloom in the media around how reefs were dying, and like this beautiful ecosystem, we'd see bleached, white bleached coral, and we'd see all of these effects in the media and the news. But reefs are actually transforming themselves.

It's really interesting. They are going deeper. They are finding new places to live. They are morphing their own ecology. And governments and organizations are creating new policies and protections for reefs.

And even more than that, we're seeing that humans are intervening and saying, We need to protect these ecosystems that are so special to us. Well, we're doing the same thing as educators, right? We are thinking about this every day. We are all here in this room together to do just that, to be able to, as a collective education community, say, We are going to continue to transform and change and have the biggest impact we possibly can on learners around the world with our actions, the work that we do every day. We are going to influence governments, We are going to ensure that those bad actors can't be bad actors in our space. We are going to build technologies that protect our learners.

We are going to build policies and practices that enable people to be lifelong learners and to have the most successful impact and the most cherished impact they can have on the world. So this is exciting. And part of this excitement for me is that we can actually extract out a couple of key things or calls to action that I hope you can all think about over the next day and a half that we have left of our conference, and often to your own workplaces and environments around how we can be just like coral reefs, how we can be the transformation together of the work that we're doing, and our work can be the most important work on the planet. So my first, and I have five of these that I wanted to quickly encourage you all to think about and how you can take action in your own environments. And the first is we have an opportunity to truly unlock all voices.

Everyone has a voice. This is about equity and access, this is about giving people the space for them to be themselves. Right before I came out on stage, Steve and I were chatting about how important it is to allow people to see us, right? He's kind of laughing at me in my gear a little bit, like, What is she doing wearing all of that and bringing that out on stage? But that's me, that's who I am. And we need to feel like we have every opportunity whether it's on a stage, whether it's in a one on one conversation with somebody else, whether it's in our families, whether it's the environments that we create, but we need to have a place and an opportunity for every voice to be heard. Second, we need to think about our pedagogy, our traditional pedagogies in particular, right? I chuckled yesterday as, Matt Patinsky talked about his own social world and or his sociology world and how he would love to nerd out.

You know, and and as Steve mentioned, I love to nerd out around things like constructivism and challenge based learning and all of the different traditional pedagogies and even more modern pedagogies that we've used forever. The interesting dynamic here though is those pedagogies are now being combined with space. Are we teaching in a virtual environment, in an in person environment, in a, you know, in the metaverse? What does this look like? And we need to think about how we merge those together and get the best of both together. Third, we need to be thinking about how we're motivating learners. I'm a firm believer and especially as we see more alternative credentials and awareness of lifelong learning, I am a big proponent of thinking about extrinsic and intrinsic motivation together.

So if we think about our own teaching practice, I am in my, gosh now, twenty seventh year of teaching online. It's crazy. And I started when I was twelve. So, you know, if you are going to do the math, please know I started teaching at twelve. And online did exist.

Anyway, so if we think about how we motivate our learners, right? There's extrinsic motivations: grades, the certificate or the degree. But then there's also intrinsic: making ourselves naturally improved, better, more interesting, more excited, more inspired humans. And balancing those two becomes really, really important. We're going to get into that in just a few minutes. Leveraging game thinking.

And I think Doctor. Jordan does a really good job talking about this in the work that he does as well, but how do we think about making learning fun but using the principles? Games work for a reason. We learn through games and using those foundational principles to make learning the best experience it can be. And then finally, leading with a growth mindset. And I'm not going to dig too deeply into this one because I have somebody special that's going to come out in just a minute, that we're going to talk a lot more about this.

But I'm hoping that these five calls to action or five things that you all can think about in your own practice will inspire you to go back to your own organizations, your own classrooms, your own, you know, communities, your own ecosystems, and think how we can be the change together. Now, speaking of change, I have one exciting announcement before we dig into growth mindset, and that is you probably noticed this year that we didn't have an Educator of the Year award. And this is because we wanted to take a step back and say, we want to do more than that. We want to acknowledge educators of the year, but we also want to expand our collection of awards. So launching in August, you'll see a QR code here.

It will send you to a web page and that's where we'll be giving information about these awards. But we're going to have three awards open up in August, one for educators or for courses, one award category for programs or initiatives or projects that you're working on, and one award category for tools, things that you've built alongside, your broader ecosystems to make them most impactful. So make sure to check this out. It'll open up in August. We will have a panel of you all as judges and we'll be announcing the winners early next year with opportunities to come to InstructureCon.

So this is all about being that collective change. Now let me jump in though because the exciting part of this conversation is my special guest. And I got to know this special guest through an exchange that we had around some really incredible research and work that she has done so that we can have the best impact possible in our classrooms. And what's interesting, and it's through a nonprofit, some of you may be aware of it, it's called Terracotta, and they have built an open source tool that plugs into Canvas and other environments to enable some testing, some just rapid testing within your environments so you can learn what's best for how you teach. When I got to know her, she was so much the background, her experience, and her depth around thinking about cultures and organizations and mindset is incredibly impressive.

She's the Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. She is the founding director of the Summer Institute I heard an Indiana chair I love it, somebody from IU is here. Beautiful campus, by the way. Founding director of the Summer Institute of Diversity at the Center of Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

I know we have Stanford folks here too. She is the founder and CEO of Equity Accelerator, a really interesting consulting organization that supports other organizations in educational research around how to create equity. And finally, and this is so impressive, in two thousand nineteen, she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. This is the highest award, that is a presidential award for engineers early engineers and scientists. So please welcome with me to the stage, Doctor Mary Murphy.

So Mary, let's get going and, thank you again for being here. I'm Mindset and, growth mindset. I think some folks are familiar with this work, but I think we should start with a level set. So what is the definition of a fixed mindset and growth mindset? And and I know you think about it as a continuum. So would you walk us through that? Yeah.

First of all, I am so happy to be here. Education and educators run deep in my family. My grandparents were both educators. My mom my mom went back for her master's to do instructional technology, teaching teachers how to use technology in the classroom across districts. So I'm so happy to be here.

It's so good to have you here. Thank you for thank you for this. How many people have heard of the fixed and growth mindset? Can I see a raise of hands? Okay. Many people but not everyone. So generally speaking, the fixed mindset and the growth mindset were coined by Carol Dweck in the mid seventies is when she sort of started this work.

And the fixed mindset simply holds that things like talent, intelligence, ability, these are things that are relatively fixed. You either have them or you don't. You can think about it as you hear people say things like I'm a math person or I'm not. Right? That's the fixed mindset in action. And the growth mindset simply holds that talent, intelligence, ability.

This is something that's a potential that can be grown with good strategies, help from others when we're stuck, and persistence. Right? Making sure that we're actually pushing through some of the challenges that we face on the way to learning. So those are the ideas in general. I love that. You know, as I read your book and and having that foundation, you talk about we need a mindset reset.

Yes. Right? And I think this is really powerful because we have gotten things wrong about understanding what mindset is. You started to allude to that. Why does this matter? And in particular, like, thinking about this audience of education and instructional technologists, why does this matter? Yeah. Well, I think we've gotten mindset wrong in maybe three ways.

First, if you actually Google fixed and growth mindset and then you go to the Google images, what you're gonna see usually is some meme that has these two heads. Right? And it's usually the fixed mindset in one and the growth mindset in the other. The fixed mindset might be a lock, right, in the brain and of the plant growing in the brain. And, you know, this dichotomy really sets up the a false dichotomy around mindset where we think that we either have the fixed mindset or the growth mindset. Right? You can see the irony of this.

It's like a fixed way of thinking about fixed and growth mindset. And so, you know, that false dichotomy, what we know from research is that we all have both. Right? Every evening when I am exhausted at the end of the day, I have a quite a fixed mindset about the right way to load that dishwasher. Right? Like, that is the fixed mindset. And, you know, we all have it.

And so everyone has both and it exists on a continuum. And the other problem with thinking about mindset and how we've used it is actually thinking that mindset is only in the mind. Right? And actually what we know is that mindset is influenced by who we interact with and the context that surround us. The mindset culture actually shapes our mindset and where we are in the mindset continuum in any different learning environment or interaction. And the last thing is that mindset really, if we think about it as only in the mind, only at the individual level, then the solution becomes change your mind.

Which we know is much easier said than done, right? And we also see it actually being applied to students. I I do a summer institute with k twelve teachers every summer. And, we learn how to create these mindset cultures. And one of the things we see is that teachers sometimes say, oh, yeah. You know, that kid, he just has a fixed mindset.

There's nothing I can do about it. Right? So, it becomes a label. Right? Whereas, if we know that mindset's actually a cultural feature, then yes, we wanna help shape individuals to move toward their growth mindset more of the time, but we do that by shaping the environment around them. That's so incredible. And I think about even my own story I was sharing earlier.

I have always had a fixed mindset that I'm not courageous. Oh, yeah. And so I think about that and that's a choice. And broken through that this year. Yep, that's right.

It's broken through that. It's a choice, right? Yeah. We make these choices, which is so powerful. And speaking of being courageous, Carol Dweck writes the foreword in your book. This is pretty cool.

And in that, she talks about how you came into her office Yes. With this idea. Yes. Set the state. Like, how did this all happen? Yeah.

And and and where did this idea come from? Yeah. Well, I was a graduate student at Stanford in the psychology department, and Carol Dweck had just arrived from Columbia to Stanford. And so I didn't know much about the idea of mindset. It was kind of started to be in the air when she arrived, on campus. And, I was attending what's traditional is in the PhD program.

All the PhD students have to present their research to their various faculty groups, once a year. So I'm sitting in the audience supporting a friend of mine who's a fourth year PhD student and he's talking about his life's work. And I think we've all been in meetings like this or in seminars like this where, you know, he's up there presenting and then all of a sudden on the right hand side, this professor doesn't raise his hand, and of course it's a him, doesn't raise his hand and instead says, well, it's clear the fatal flaw is x y z. He goes on to it. And my friend gets a little flustered.

He starts to try to engage the professor. And then on the other side of the room this other professor says, no. The fatal flaw is in x y z. It's clearly a b c. And suddenly they start fighting amongst each other.

Who's the smartest in the room? How can they take down this idea with the most like, cutting remark? Right? And I see what it's doing to my friend. He's trying to engage, but he's stressing out even though he knows his work the best and he chokes. But more importantly, he didn't even want to touch that work months down the road because that experience in what came to be known as this fixed mindset culture, this culture of genius. Who's smart and who's not? You're only as good as your last performance in these environments. Right? He actually had to put that whole line of research to the side because he just couldn't work on it after that.

And so this kind of, situation was contrasted two weeks later when I go to a different seminar, equally eminent faculty. But instead, they are engaging with the student presentations totally differently. Right? What we see is that they are still finding the problems in the different research projects. But now instead of competing to see who's the smartest in the room, they're competing to see how to improve the ideas the most. So saying things like, oh you should work with this other population or include this new measure or you know, brainstorming ideas.

And the students are able to participate in that and then they were leaving this with new strategies and really strong motivation to actually get to work the next day and who made better progress, right, on their work. So I took this idea down the hall to Carol, who had just arrived, knocked on the door and she's like, hi, Mare. Like, what's going on? And so I told her, you know, Carol, I know for thirty years we have thought about mindset as a quality in our minds. What's your mindset? How does it affect you? What's my mindset? How does it affect me? But has anyone ever thought of mindset as a quality of groups, as a cultural feature of teams, environments, classrooms, schools, organizations, and how does that mindset culture influence the people inside those groups? And she looked at me and she kinda thought about it for a minute. She said, No, mayor.

No one's ever considered that. Let's do it together. And that was back in two thousand four, two thousand five And so we've been doing the research on this ever since. And thank God she responded from her growth mindset, right, rather than shutting me as a junior as a junior, graduate student just down with these ideas. Completely.

And I can think of stories. I mean, I started my career in in the k twelve classroom, and I can think of being in other classrooms and probably my own where I let that first scenario happen. Yes. And that one split second moment can have such an impact on somebody's entire life and how they see themselves. How powerful.

So okay. So let's let's talk through this. You you have this idea. Carol's in. Yep.

You're You're gonna do this research and see where this goes. That's right. You took a decade to do this research. Yes. And you did it all sorts of settings, right? Yes.

Meanwhile you know, you're teaching and doing other things. You know, you did it in schools, teams, organizations. And and you realize that this this could be studied in these environments. What did that what did that look like? What did that decade of research look like? Yeah. Well, I mean, many, many, many studies with many schools, many teachers, many students.

But what we basically did, there's this kind of controversy argument in sort of the organizational culture literature where people say what is culture? Is it what we say? Is it in our mission statements and our value statements? Is that our culture? Or is it actually what we do on the ground? And so how I know I'm in more of a culture of genius, a fixed mindset culture or a culture of growth is I look at the cultural artifacts in the environment. I'm looking at what people are saying and doing. What are the norms for interaction with each other among the peers in the classroom and also between the teacher and the student? I'm looking at the practices and the policies, right, that really guide the way in which we are gonna learn across a term. Right? I'm looking at all of these various things that are actually behaviors on the ground because I'm kind of a strong believer that what culture is is not necessarily just what we say in these statements, in these value statements, in these mission statements. It's actually what we do.

And so culture can be found in those interactions. Anytime two or more people are together, there is a mindset culture present. And the question is, do you know what that mindset culture is and do you know how it's affecting you? So those are the questions that really our research dove deeply in, looking at all different kinds from eye tracking, looking at how students pay attention in the classroom, what kind of information they use to determine whether their teacher has more of a fixed or more of a growth mindset for the students, and many other kinds of, methods and technologies. So interesting. I think about, you know, the work that you all do, whether you're instructional designers, you're teachers, you're leading teams that are doing instructional and, educational technology.

Some of you are developers of tools. Yeah. We're all creating these spaces in which that doing happens and in which that culture can be established. So fascinating. Speaking of that, like, how does a growth mindset culture then impact things like collaboration and innovation? Yeah.

Well, this really goes to the comparison between on that mindset culture continuum, a culture of genius, the fixed mindset on one side and the culture of growth on the other. When you think about a culture of genius, right, it's you're smart or you're not. And who's the smartest in the room, right? Those are the ideas. And so what happens in those environments is that people are always looking over their shoulder because a new star is constantly being born and I have to focus on maintaining my status to be seen as the smart one, the capable one, right, the intelligent one in the room. And so that actually creates, we've seen this in some neuroscience studies, divided attention where I'm focusing on that status and having divided attention for my work at hand.

So ultimately we see actually underperformance in the culture of genius. And we also see that people are less likely to want to collaborate because they want credit. They want to be seen as the star. Why would I work with a team if I'm not going to get the credit of it? Right? They're also very concerned about taking intellectual risks because any mistake in the culture of genius is taken as a sign that maybe you don't have it. Right? Maybe you're not smart.

Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe, you know, it's an imposter situation. And so people don't put forward their best ideas. They're worried they're gonna get stolen in the culture of genius or they're worried that if that mistake actually, if that innovation, that creative idea falls short in some way, that it's gonna be taken as a sign that they're not smart or capable. And in the culture of growth, it's different because the idea is all about learning and development and potential.

And so in the culture of growth, good ideas come from everywhere. And so that collaboration, what people bring, their backgrounds, their experiences, their histories to the project at hand, people know that that's how they're gonna create the most creative and innovative solutions. Risk taking and making mistakes is not so stigmatized in this area. In fact, they know that that's the only way that you actually get the most creative and innovative solutions. There's this really cool study out there that looked across many different studies, kind of a meta analysis, that looked at animal studies, human studies, AI algorithms and machine learning.

And they found that across these different contexts, fifteen percent was kind of the magic number for the best, most optimized learning, fifteen percent of mistakes. So if you are not making fifteen percent mistakes in what you're trying and developing, you're really not pushing yourself to that optimized limit to be able to learn the most in the context. And so that's what the culture of growth allows for. It's that kind of psychologically safe environment where we can, go to the edge of our capabilities and then push a little beyond. It's so interesting.

I don't know about all of you, but I'm already auditing. Am I making it fifteen percent, right? Like that, such a good check for myself. That's right. And I think about some of my own personal experiences as I was sharing about the diving and how, I just feel so comfortable making all the mistakes Yes. When I'm learning.

Yes. But that's not necessarily the case in every other environment I'm in which is so fascinating. Such a great way to think about how this is impacting you individually. One of the interesting effects of teams and school's mindsets in particular is on culture of integrity, sort of ethical behavior. Yes.

Where does this, like how do we Yes. Where does this all play out? Yes. This is the most robust and replicable finding we found in all of the studies that we've done. We find it over and over again that in a culture of genius, we just see more subtly and sometimes not so subtly unethical behavior. Why do we see that? Again, it's this prove harsh prove and perform environment.

Right? You're only as good as your last performance. And so people start to take shortcuts. Right? We see this in studies with students as young as five years old. If they are shifted by the environment into their fixed mindset, they are more likely to cheat in order to show the experimenter or the teacher if we're in the field that they are smart, they're capable. I wanna show you that I have what it takes to be seen as capable and smart in that environment.

And so we see this over and over again. In the adult world, we see this, it looks like, you know, subtly leaving people off calendar invites or hoarding information because information is power. Right? Or not being willing to share data with people who are requesting it because I wanna hold the data. That's where the power is. Right? And so we see this strongly in these cultures of genius.

And in the culture of growth, we see much less of these problems. Why? Because when we engage in these shortcuts, in this kind of unethical behavior, it short circuits our potential to learn. We can't learn what actually worked and what didn't, right, when we're sort of cheating in these subtle ways. And so it's kind of not seen as a, appropriate kind of behavior in the culture of growth because it stymies learning. You know, fascinating.

I know. I can see some heads nodding in the audience already thinking about this. We at Instructure deeply care and we've talked about this about diversity, equity, inclusion. Yes. And this is a very controversial space in the world right? Yes.

Right? What do we do? What do we don't do? How does growth culture inside an organization just sort of naturally create inclusivity? Yes. Yes. Okay. So let's see if we can do this here. We have a ton of people.

But, if you were to Google the the idea of genius, you put genius into Google, and you look at the images, who are you going to see? What faces? Tell me a person. Einstein. I hear a million you're going to see probably pages of Einstein. Anyone else? Steve Jobs? Elon Musk, I heard? Anyone else? Yes? Yes, absolutely. So, what do these individuals have in common? Yes.

Yes. They are. They're men. And so, we tend to think we have a cultural prototype of who genius is. It has a certain gender, a certain race, a certain class background, a certain educational background.

Right? And what we know through many studies in many different contexts is that when you're in this culture of genius, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, what we're doing is we are trying to match to that prototype of genius to discover who are going to be the geniuses in this context. And so these are the people we recruit. These are the people we evaluate positively in the environment. And these are the people we promote in workplace environments, for example, are those that closely match that cultural prototype. So that means we're going to be creating more and more of these homogeneous environments with this cultural prototype at the center.

In the culture of growth, we see that it's just more naturally diverse because there is less of a strong cultural prototype as there is for genius when it comes to learning, growth, and development. And in fact, it's the people who've had to struggle to had to actually contend with growth over time, right, and overcome barriers that are gonna be really committed to that learning growth and development. And we know the past, you know, distance traveled is really going to predict the future distance, to be, pursued. And so what we see is that these cultures of growth, are just much more diverse, than the culture of genius. And so this has huge implications for equity, for, learning environments and then also for organizational workplace settings.

That's, that just is so near and dear to my heart and I think to this audience's heart because so much of the work we're trying to do every single day is to give every learner that opportunity to be the full potential that they can be that full You gotta take back genius. Yes. Absolutely. I love that. I love that.

We're gonna take back the transcript and we're gonna take back genius. I love this. Sorry. That was from yesterday. You didn't get to hear that yesterday, but I'm I thought that was pretty awesome.

So thinking about this audience. Right? We're educational and instructional technologists. How you know, what are the opportunities for them to think about leading and shaping? You know, I think often conversations happen around culture and mindset. Well that's set by people. I don't have the opportunity to have influence or contribute to that.

How can this room, you know, how can they have an impact on leading and shaping a mindset culture in their own organizations? Yeah. Well, I think this is many different aspects of this come to mind for me. So, you know, it's really important to realize that we are all culture creators. Regardless of our role, we all have the power to shape the culture around us. And especially in those smaller interactions, we can be embedded in these macro cultures of genius at a societal level, maybe at our school, maybe in our workplace, but we have the power to create micro cultures, right, within us and between us, that can really help shift the culture over time.

The example I like to give of this is, the Obama administration. They had very few women on the Obama administration, not surprising. In many different presidential administrations there have been few women and they would notice that women would basically, raise their hand, you know, give a particular idea or a particular, you know, directive and it would kind of go unnoticed. And then four or five minutes later, a guy would say the same idea or the same question, you know. And, people would be like, wow, Bill.

That was genius. That was a great idea. And they noticed this kept happening over and over again. And so what they decided to do was they actually started to, this was Valerie Jarrett and her team, to start to decide they were gonna uplift the answers and the, contributions of women. Oh, wow.

You know, Bill, that idea, that sounds like a lot of what Lisa said in the room. You know, Lisa, let's go back to that idea of Lisa, you know. And they started to change the culture, right, to have be more inclusive, to actually be learning and listening to different voices in the room. So we are all culture creators in this and especially if we're teachers, or if we're creating learning environments, that's what educational instructional technologists do is to imagine new learning environments and then bring them to life. What is the mindset culture that we are creating for our students in these different environments that we are creating.

We have a lot of power in that, in our micro environment of our classroom, into our interactions. So I want everyone to feel they have the power to do this, regardless of people's role. Yeah. I love that. And it's not even in your classroom or your organization.

It's in your life. It's the community. In your family. Right? Around their table. Right? Are we talking about, our highlights of the day? That's kind of a conversation topic that'll but how about your favorite mistake? What was your favorite mistake today that you made? And normalizing mistake, right, within our family environments, our community environments.

And figuring out what we're learning from them so we're growing and developing together. I love that. I love that. Also this audience is facing a pretty significant transformation in education or just in the world, in society, with AI. Yes.

I mean, this is such this is such the topic of the day Everywhere. In so many ways. What role does growth mindset culture have in AI? Or how do these things come together? How do we think about this? Yeah. I think about AI and the role of mindset culture maybe on two levels. One level is really thinking about, how do we use as teachers, administrators, education leaders, how do we decide that we are going to train in understanding how AI could be harnessed for good in the classroom.

Right? How can it be harnessed to help learners maybe at different levels, actually learn what they need to learn over time? And how do we actually harness AI for equity in the classroom? Being open enough to learn this new technology and to be able to experiment with it, knowing that, you know, we're gonna make mistakes. It's not gonna work all the time. Right? There's gonna be some bugs and some pickups. And AI technology is always gonna be developing, so it's gonna be one of these things that's gonna continue to push us on our growth edge. So moving toward the growth mindset as individuals who are really at the forefront of the use of this and the potential of it to transform education in America and around the world, I think this is a place for growth mindset.

I would also say that particularly for those of you who are creating new services, new software, new platforms in your instructional technology work, I wanna challenge you to think about what the mindset culture is that you are building into that platform or into that service. So if I'm thinking about these platforms, a lot of them are around learning. They might be tutoring services, right, or learning kind of software and and, skills. So what are we building in when we think about rewards incentives for learning? Are we just rewarding the outcomes or are we rewarding the process? Are we rewarding effort? And is it any effort? Just trying a lot of problems and staying on, right? Or is it about effective effort? Using the right strategies? Pivoting and trying new strategies? Do you get points and credit, right, within the software or in the platform for doing those kinds of things? Can we show learners the distance they've traveled personally, knowing that seeing themselves as learners, that they're growing and developing is going to motivate them to engage further and to do more learning and development. So thinking about the mindset culture, your software, your services, they're going to have a mindset culture built in.

Let's make this intentional and let's make it more of a culture of growth than a culture of genius. I, you know, I think about even, something as simple. I I I do this in the own course, my own course that I teach. I haven't baked in feedback in quizzing or you know self testing or things like that. And are you telling them it's right or wrong or are you giving them detailed information as to why and where they can go get more information? Or what the right strategies.

Or what the right strategies are. Like there's just even little things as we think about how we're designing courses to big things like how are we designing these tools just as you said. So I have one last question for you Mary. Okay. Okay.

And one last question. Okay. So what are your biggest hopes and dreams? K, for creating a more equitable and inclusive world especially thinking about using growth mindset? Yeah. Well, wow. I'm getting a little Big period.

Up here. Well, I think, you know, one of the things, and this has been, one of the highlights of my career. The biggest honor of my life has been to work with Carol, Dweck and to actually be inspired by her and all the work she's done. And what I've learned from her most is that mindset is not something we do alone. Mindset is not just in our mind and it's not something we do alone.

We are all culture creators. And so my biggest, desire and goal for this work is really to start by knowing thyself. Right? Know your own mindset triggers. The book has four different mindset triggers drawn from the literature that to know your own and to know your students' mindset triggers or your users' mindset triggers, is gonna be really helpful for creating the environment. Right? Take our assessment that's online on the book website.

We have an assessment for your mindset triggers. We also have one to look at your culture. What is the culture that you're creating? And you can do it for many different groups. Your family culture, community culture, classroom culture, organizational culture, team culture, then I would say do this in community. Find your culture of growth pod.

Right? Take the a word from the pandemic, our pods. Right? Find your culture of growth pod. It could be someone at work. It could be someone in your family. It could just be a friend outside of these environments who you're really committed to when you notice yourself moving toward the fixed mindset.

You can talk to them about it. They can come up with strategies to help you reorient towards growth. And then the last thing I wanna say about this is really to it's it's kind of the advice that Carol gives her first year PhD students and undergraduate students in her seminar. So I'm gonna give you the challenge which is to think about today and over the course of the next week, maybe into the weekend, what is one outrageously growth minded thing, growth mindset ed thing you could do this week? I want you to challenge yourself to think about it. Right? What's one growth mindseted thing you could do for yourself this week? And notice the feeling you get when you're sort of engaged in that kind of blue sky thinking about how to, really lean into that learning, that growth, that development.

What's one thing you can take on today? I really hope that, you can take away that idea from our conversation. I love that. And, what a great thing to be not only doing for yourself personally, but to share. This is such an open environment to share that one thing. So please, I encourage you all to share that with one another.

Yes. For those of you, I I think I am just such a fan. I am such a fan. You have no idea. And I think we have a lot of fans out in this audience.

Mary's gonna be doing a book signing. I am. Right after this. It's directly I think it's directly diagonal, right over there. She'd be happy to sign books.

You can meet Mary. And I have put up here on the screen as well a link to the things that she was referencing, those Oh, great. Those assessments. Those assessments that she was referencing. I really encourage you to do that.

And with that, I am so happy to be able to set you off on your day two journey. Right after this, Martin Bean has a session going on, I believe right next door, that's gonna that's gonna build on this. He talks a lot about how to create, how to manage in turbulence and he's got a toolkit for turbulence collection of work, so that's right next door. Our product team and Sharon will be here later this afternoon in this audience as well. So I encourage you to continue to enjoy day two and thank you again.

Mary, please join me and thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.