Let’s kindle the fire for discovery in our students

How best to promote a discoverer’s mindset among all or most undergraduates? The most important action is to consistently reinforce that they must lead their learning. That is our students’ power, no matter what, which educators must champion and enhance. 

I have taught students who were deaf, blind, or paraplegic. I have taught students whose parents were killed or deported, whose families disowned them or who grew up homeless. I have taught students recovering from brain injuries or addiction. I have taught students enduring prisons built to keep them down. And in every case, I have seen that learning begets more learning, that discovery gives people both interior freedom and some power over their circumstances. When students find themselves stuck or highly constrained, and thus deserve our care, we do them no favour when we offer only consolations without the support to create the growth that they seek. 

• To build resilience, we need to embrace failure in the classroom and beyond
• Flip the script on criticism
• Struggle, strength and growth: safety as an engine for change

With that belief in our students’ ability to learn, we also must invest in the resources for discovery – full-time faculty positions, student financial aid, research internships and high-impact learning experiences. Workshops to help faculty both learn about and activate growth mindsets are highly valuable, as research shows that college classes utilising growth-signalling practices and messages “can have a positive impact on learning, motivation, and engagement.” Expensive? Yes, quality costs money — although many teaching innovations that lead to active learning do not require massive spending. A bad bet? Hardly. Given the value of igniting the minds of the young, for one and all, for today and tomorrow, for prosperity and democracy and national strength, high-impact education at every level is still our most cost-efficient investment. 

Can new virtual classrooms and new uses of artificial intelligence help colleges to activate growth mindsets more effectively and efficiently? No doubt, if used well. By coping with COVID-19, colleges have learned a great deal, and many educators are now exploring the potential uses and abuses of AI. As technologies improve, faculty innovate, educators collaborate, digital divides close, and new assessment tools emerge, education will improve. Already, students are using AI to personalise their learning and power their explorations. Some now envision the wider use of holistic e-portfolios that document skills and credentials gained in college. More and more, they will be able to take galvanising virtual courses not offered on their campus. We should neither fear nor fetishise such change. That said, if our concern is to kindle the fire for discovery (and other growth mindsets) in our future leaders, if excellence in the holistic formation of young adults is a national need, then we must invest in opportunity-rich campuses that spur students to design and drive their learning, aided by mentors. New technologies can support, without supplanting, this approach. 

As the historian Steven Mintz writes, the top priority of our institutions should be “teaching that’s engaging, inspiring, thought-provoking and genuinely helpful”, by which he means responsive to the potential and real needs of each undergraduate. Developmentally, young people thrive from quality relationships with educators – in-person and mind-to-mind, forged in the crucible of free inquiry and growth. 

To catalyse original thinkers and lifelong learners, we must expose college students to the minds, methods, motivations, and standards of faculty-discoverers, while expecting and supporting teaching excellence at every stage of the faculty career, starting with the training future professors receive in graduate school. We must nourish the sensibility that moves from observation or inquiry to a heat-seeking search for knowledge combined with a dispassionate honesty about findings. We must work to lower the social and emotional barriers to intellectual flourishing that some students must deal with as they move toward adult life. We must inculcate the moral value of thinking through concepts that may seem off-base, disagreeable or unpopular, and of chasing down truth to its farthest frontiers, even though we may not like what we find. And we must help students experience the timeless rush of making a new known out of the synapses of their working minds.

If we believe in dignity, intrinsic to our species, equal within all, then we must fuel and fan the fire for discovery in our young, in this time and all times, so that each rising generation can awaken to its humanity and know and see and be its best with the time it has. We cultivate discovery in the young because they are human, and because we are too.

Daniel R. Porterfield is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute.

Extracted from ‘Mindset Matters: The Power of College to Activate Lifelong Growth’. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.