The Power of a Growth Mindset

A new year brings with it a spirit of change. Many of us promise ourselves more time at the gym, a renewed effort for healthful eating, or a commitment to spending more time with our families. In the spirit of New Year's Resolutions, we at Nexus are aiming to promote a shift in mindset, one that will help all of us become better learners and happier investors in our minds.

Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford and the world’s leading researcher into motivation describes two basic mindsets, one that restricts progress and one that leaves us open to growth and learning.

Jacob FeldmanJanuary 2, 2017Comment

Noteworthy This Week

This week we consider some of the challenges facing the fields of education and standardized testing as well as the actions being proposed to address them.

Guest UserDecember 15, 2016Comment

Finding Clarity

The first of a five-part series exploring concrete approaches to each of the Five C's for Happy Teens, this post looks at vision boards as a way to promote clarity.

Guest UserDecember 12, 2016Comment

Noteworthy This Week

In this week's news round up, we focus on standardized testing. The college board updates its policy on providing test accommodations, recent research questions over-reliance on exams such as the SAT, and Mr. Bean provides some comic relief.

Guest UserDecember 8, 2016Comment

The Five Cs for Happy Teens and Happy Parents

Parents (and I am among you) expend a lot of energy worrying about whether their children will succeed. Success is certainly important, but it serves a more important and more deserving god: happiness. Ideally, happiness should be the objective for all of our pursuits, intellectual, professional, personal, even parental. We invest ourselves in the subjects we do because they are the ones that excite us, and that excitement fulfills us emotionally as well as intellectually. The same goes for our professional endeavors: we apply for jobs, start businesses, forge relationships, and build careers based on which among them bring us joy, in whatever form. Obviously our personal relationships should make us happy; the ones that don’t are soon ended. As parents, we find great joy in seeing our children learn, grow, and discover their future selves. No pursuit is worthwhile if pleasure cannot be derived from it, from the ends if not, ideally, from the means as well.

We all want our children to be happy. They are, after all, children. Despite that desire, balancing happiness with achievement is a difficult task for a parent.

Jacob FeldmanDecember 5, 2016Comment

Noteworthy This Week

Katrina Schwartz of KQED's blog Mind/Shift wrote this week about fostering positive mindsets in students.

Nicole Garman at Education World discusses why schools in Singapore better prepare students in math and science than do schools in America.

Stanford's Dean of Freshmen, Julie Lythcott-Haims, challenges parents and educators to examine how they approach the education and development of their children and students in a TED talk titled, How to raise successful kids - without over-parenting.

Jacob FeldmanDecember 1, 2016Comment