Cultivating a Growth Mindset—Not Just for Students, but for Faculty Too

Teaching Growth Mindset, Living Fixed Mindset

As educators, we often encourage our students, especially first-generation college students, to believe they can grow their intelligence through effort, feedback, and persistence. We tell them that mistakes are opportunities, not failures.

Yet, somewhere along the way, many of us stop giving ourselves that same grace. After years in the classroom, it’s easy to settle into routines that feel safe. The lecture that’s “always worked,” the assignment we’ve used for a decade, or the course we can teach on autopilot. But a fixed mindset can creep into our own professional lives quietly, disguised as experience.

Experience Can Be Our Comfort Zone

After thirty years of teaching physics, I can say that experience is both a gift and a trap. It gives us confidence, but it can also make us resistant to change. When I moved into instructional design, I saw that some of the same faculty who coached students on resilience hesitated to try a new LMS tool or rework an outdated assessment. Not because they didn’t care, but because change threatens our sense of competence.

The irony? The very mindset we’re trying to instill in our students, openness to learning, willingness to fail, eagerness to grow, is exactly what keeps us relevant and energized as educators.

Modeling the Mindset We Teach

Students learn more from what we model than what we say. When faculty experiment with new technologies, try active-learning techniques, or redesign a lesson based on student feedback, we show that growth doesn’t end with a diploma. It’s an ongoing process.

One of the most powerful things we can say to students is, “I tried something new in this course—and I’m still learning too.” That simple statement normalizes growth and vulnerability in the learning process for everyone involved.

Designing for Faculty Growth

As an instructional designer, I think a lot about how to design not just courses—but opportunities for faculty learning. Creating safe spaces for instructors to explore, fail, and reflect is just as important as designing them for students. Faculty learning communities, peer observations, and teaching innovation showcases can reignite that sense of experimentation we once had as new teachers.

The goal isn’t to change everything overnight. It’s to stay curious, to ask, What if I tried this another way?

The Physics of Growth

If I borrow a metaphor from physics, growth mindset is a kind of acceleration. It’s the willingness to keep applying force, even when inertia sets in. Every time we adjust our approach, try a new method, or reflect on feedback, we add energy to our professional motion. The alternative, standing still, only leads to equilibrium, and in physics, equilibrium is a nice word for no change.

Closing Thoughts

Growth mindset isn’t a message for students alone, it’s a call to all of us who teach. Every semester is another experiment. Every new challenge is data we can learn from. When faculty see themselves as learners first, the classroom becomes a place of shared discovery rather than performance. And that shift might be the most powerful lesson we ever teach.