Whistling in the Wind
Culture change, Active Intelligence, and why policy alone won’t do it.
A few years ago, I was working at a school which had a glowing inspection report. The head’s response was both brave and enlightened. Rather than accept the validation and sit back, he drew on the collective confidence we were feeling and saw it as an opportunity to explore some radical changes.
Carol Dweck’s book Mindset was pretty new and a number of us had read it and been inspired by its message; it became the framework we used to discuss ways of developing the school’s provision. Lots of innovative ideas were generated and, in some areas, we made real progress, not least in sport.
Inevitably, the initial burst of enthusiasm waned somewhat. A while later, with another inspection looming, we audited the progress we had made and the results were rather sobering. To use the sporting idiom, we still talked a good game; every departmental handbook had a prominent paragraph declaring faith in the philosophy of the Growth Mindset. But, had our classroom practices changed accordingly? Had we embedded the principles into tangible practice?
Well, not so much.
At least we weren’t alone. Many schools that had embraced the ideas with similar enthusiasm found a comparable dilution in practice.
Still more that had latched onto the vocabulary and the mantras of Growth Mindset without, perhaps, investing the necessary time to develop a deep understanding, became totally disillusioned. A friend at my school used to have a dog which he had trained to an extraordinary level of obedience using a whistle. When another colleague, bright bloke, Chemistry teacher, PhD from Cambridge, complained about the unruliness of his own dog, my friend gave him a whistle. Three days later, he returned it.
‘Doesn’t work!’ he said grumpily as he slapped it down on the desk.
I think that reflects the way many schools approached the Growth Mindset. Stick up a few posters and hope the practice will follow automatically and effortlessly.
Carol Dweck saw the same phenomenon herself and, by the mid 2010s, had started to write about the ‘false growth mindset’, an idea supported by Kathy Liu Sun’s 2018 paper, summarised here, which demonstrated that where teachers endorsed a growth mindset through their language but without any accompanying change in their practice, their students actually trended towards a fixed mindset, not a growth one.
To be clear, I don’t think this diminishes Dweck’s work and I remain a staunch advocate of the guiding principles. But it does highlight the difficulty of instituting real culture change in institutions as complex as schools.
John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan explored this concept in their 1977 paper, Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony where they argue that, rather than coordinating and controlling work efficiently, most organisational structures are there to signal conformity to expectations. They ensure the organisation looks like a ‘proper’ one. The policies and procedures exist on paper but are routinely ignored in practice. At a recent conference, one deputy head candidly admitted,
‘We do have an AI policy in case we get inspected, but I doubt if anyone’s read it.’
Meyer and Rowan’s central claim is that organisations bearing this weight of social expectation don’t try to align the formal structure with actual daily activity. Instead, they deliberately loosen the connection between the two because tight alignment would expose every gap and inconsistency to public view. They call this decoupling and suggest that it is often evident in schools.
Carol Dweck famously warned that ‘the path to a growth mindset is a journey, not a proclamation’. In thousands of classrooms, however, the poster became a proxy for practice.
The early-stage conditions that produced growth mindset’s dilution are visibly present with AI: a converging, slogan-driven vocabulary, a gap between policy-adoption and governance, unequal access to the training that would enable the stated principle to become real practice.
Every new infographic or aphorism about AI that pops up on Linkedin signals to me that we are in the process of repeating the same behaviour we saw with the growth mindset.
My current favourite, by the way, is ‘AI won’t replace teachers, but teachers who use AI will replace teachers who don’t’. Ironically, this is such a perfect example of a ‘snowclone’, a copy-paste phrasal template, that I have to assume it was AI generated.
I understand why this happens. We are talking about major shifts that teachers will have to make to their long-established practices. Teaching is really hard work and when ‘getting through the day’ is often the most you can hope for and you already have a scheme of work that enables you to do that, where is the incentive to re-think it all? Equally, Meyer and Rowan are explicit that the decoupling they describe is not ‘fraudulent’ but an understandable consequence of an unspoken agreement to take good faith for granted.
But there’s a categorical difference between AI and the growth mindset.
Growth mindset is complementary. It might augment the way a student completes a task but it doesn’t replace the task; the student still has to do it.
AI, on the other hand, can be a substitute; it can replace the task itself.
The dilution many of us saw with the growth mindset might have weakened the student engagement we were hoping to inspire; it didn’t remove the process altogether.
This makes it all the more important and urgent that we effect a genuine culture change in response to AI.
But, paradoxically, the urgency of the situation demands that we do not rush. Rushing is what creates the very ‘myth and ceremony’ Meyer and Rowan described and which we should be trying to avoid. To prevent AI policies from becoming mere paper shields for inspection, we have to move at the speed of teacher confidence.
At one of the schools I’m working with, we’ve begun a pilot project looking at the way NotebookLM might be used effectively with students in the classroom. This is a great school with a history of excellent results and the teachers involved are thoughtful, experienced and highly motivated. But, it’s taking them time to fully grasp the potential of the tool and to see how it might be woven into schemes of work and practices which they are understandably reluctant to chuck out. There is a world of difference between sitting through a demo and being shown ‘what it can do’ and having the time to first imagine how it might be used purposefully and then implement it practically with a class full of students.
We’ve also created a Google Chat space where the staff can discuss anything to do with AI. My initial fear was that it wouldn’t be used, that I would make a couple of posts and there would be an echoing silence. That hasn’t been the case. It has seen some very lively discussions with teachers being impressively willing to share their experiments and their failures. Importantly, they’ve been able to do that with colleagues with whom they might not normally share a coffee or a chat in the staff room. It is fuelling the kind of organic growth that is necessarily slow but which has a chance of lasting.
There is a fundamental difference between urgency of inception and speed of execution. We can’t delay the difficult work of responding to the challenge of AI but we must build the foundation slowly so it doesn’t collapse.