[Header Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash]

Like many academics working in higher education, I spent several days over my holiday break preparing my courses for spring (two first-year writing seminars and one upper-level writing/research course) and then an intense three days writing and submitting a scholarly chapter on growth mindset and grit for an upcoming book.

I am fortunate, I think, because my teaching life and my writing life continually inform each other. Especially when teaching my writing-intensive courses, I teach as a writer and scholar, fore-fronting my writing/scholarship in my teaching.

My chapter on mindset and grit gave me a perfect opportunity to think deeply about and prepare new materials for my courses this spring (access those artifacts in this folder: Scholarly Essay Process).

As a writing teacher, I have been struggling throughout my 40-plus-year career with the negative impact of templates and scripts for students developing the skills and knowledge they need to be autonomous and compelling writers.

I have rejected, for example, the five-paragraph essay model, and I have challenged the mechanical implementation of the writing process as a sequential series of steps.

The problem is that this crusade against templates and scripts is not as simple (or effective) as I initially believed many decades ago.

Another problem with rejecting templates and scripts is that a significant amount of scholarly and academic writing is bound by scripts, word-count limits, formatting requirements, and citation/style guidelines.

My evolved and more nuanced position on templates and scripts in writing instruction and assignments acknowledges that beginning writers need opportunities to read widely in order to develop their own “scripts” for a wide variety of writing types. Of course they also need structure, but starting with the rigid template does far more harm than good for emerging writers.

Then, as students-as-writers move into high school and college, they need more experiences with authentic templates and guidelines found in much of academic and scholarly writing.

The editors of the chapter I just completed, for example, sent writers an content outline for chapters to follow as well as a word count limit and citation/style sheet requirements (APA).

When I write reviews for a think tank, I receive the same structures and very rigid expectations for staying within those limits (including their own in-house style sheet).

The irony, then, is that this spring, my first-year writing seminar will focus on challenging scripts and “rules” for essays and writing while my upper-level writing/research class will be writing a strictly scripted major scholarly essay (I assure upper-level students that this experience will prepare them for graduate school, and I recently received an email from a former student in this course telling me “thank you” for just that).

While I feel like my teaching of writing has better bridged the gap between helping students acquire the broad concepts of effective and compelling writing (versus imposing on them artificial templates and “rules”), I continue to struggle with fostering in students the sort of writing process that would better serve them.

Similar to my stance on the essay form, I teach that the writing process is not sequential or a rigid template, but a set of concepts that most writing addresses to help produce a writing final product needed for the purposes of that project. In other words, these broad concepts are fairly stable but the so-called “steps” may differ and the time spent on each “step” likely will vary for different writing purposed.

For scholarly writing, the writing process includes much more than composing sentences and paragraphs. Here, then is a brief overview of my recent process this week writing and submitting my book chapter on mindset and grit.

Let me start with a caveat that I think should be shared with students.

When most scholars start a writing project, we are dealing with content that we have expertise in; my project on mindset and grit has years of blogging and gathering research behind the brief process I followed over three days.

My first steps included revisiting the chapter guidelines sent by the editors, confirming formatting, citation, word count, etc.

Then, as I stress to students, I prepared my Word document, conforming to APA guidelines and inserting the subheads, etc., along with the chapter template required by the editors. One concern I have with students is they tend to address formatting last, and I urge them to address this tediousness first. (See my submitted and not yet edited copy here.)

Next, I put the required page break in the end of the document and prepared my working references list. To create the list, I reviewed my many blogs on the topics, searched through my library data bases, reached out to other scholars for recommendations, and carefully culled sources from the references of the sources I had gathered (working from the most recent publications).

Let me stress here that as I detail my process, as I worked, these “steps” became more and more recursive in that as I worked in one “step” I would invariably return to and revise other “steps” (I caught simple formatting edits and typos, for example, in many of the “steps” being detailed here even as that is considered the editing “step”).

One goal as I worked was to create a compelling opening that included a thesis paragraph clearly aligned with the subheads and organization of the chapter. I drafted that opening on the first day and then I carefully edited and formatted all of my references, checking APA and loosely thinking about removing or adding needed sources. See the opening here:

Literacy educator and scholar Lou LaBrant (1947) asserted almost eight decades ago: “A brief consideration will indicate reasons for the considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods” (p. 87). While valid in the mid-2020s, a slightly more nuanced argument needs to be proposed: Scientific research on teaching and learning is often lost in translation once it is packaged by the education marketplace and reduced to legislation and policy. In other words, what is popular, packaged, and mandated in education is too often an oversimplified and even misguided version of scientific findings, nothing more than a fad. An even more complicating problem, as well, is that classroom practices likely should be guided by more than experimental and quasi-experimental research (Wormeli, n.d., The problem).

Over the past decade-plus, two examples of research lost in translation include growth mindset and grit. Carol Dweck (2008), often publishing with others (Dweck & Yeager, 2019) examines the role of mindset is academic success. Grit is grounded in the research and advocacy of Angela Duckworth (2018); however, a great deal of the popularization of grit occurred through the journalism and advocacy of Paul Tough (2013) who promoted “no excuses” charter school practices, specifically the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter chain (Abrams, 2020). While growth mindset and grit are distinct concepts and educational movement, they tend to share similar spaces and problems in practice.

This chapter explores the central claims of growth mindset and grit before considering the validity of those claims in the context of the following critical questions: How are growth mindset and grit grounded while also perpetuating bootstrapping, rugged individualism and meritocracy myths? What are the roles of deficit ideologies (word gap, victim blaming, racism, sexism, classism, etc.) in popular advocacy for growth mindset and grit? As well the research and popular claims about growth mindset and grit are interrogated at three levels: (1) research validity and robustness, (2) evidence-based or ideologically based, and (3) racism and classism.

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The next morning I reviewed and organized all of sources to comply with the structures required in the chapter. Here, I think, is where students are lost because of their previous experiences writing inauthentic research papers (in which many students gather the required number of sources and then simply walk the reader through their sources, writing about the sources and not their topic).

I created a table by my topics, mindset and grit, and then by the three major themes/patterns I planned to address; the key here, for students, is recognizing the need to focus on the patterns in their discussion and to cite multiple sources for those patterns.

I also created a listing of sources by my major topics, and then carefully reviewed them all to be sure I had classified them correctly and to identify the few I wanted to cite or quote more fully (I stress to students who have more experience with MLA and textual analysis that quoting is only one way to give evidence in scholarly writing and is often discouraged in many disciplines when not doing textual analysis).

Analyzing and organizing my evidence is designed to creating writing that offers a compelling generalization that is valid followed by a representative source or two to support the pattern; for example:

However, the current public discourse around mindset has made a significant turn to being critical and even skeptical (Study finds, 2018; Tait, 2020; Young, 2021a, 2021b). This shift is spurred by the growing research base that fails to replicate the primary claims of mindset advocacy or shows negative correlations or harm in implementing mindset intervention over other aspects of learning and achievement (Brez et al., 2020; Burgoyne et al., 2020; Burnette et al., 2018; Dixson et al., 2017; Ganimian, 2020; Li & Bates, 2019; Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023; Sisk et al., 2018; Schmidt et al., 2017). Brez at al. (2020) conclude: “The pattern of findings is clear that the intervention had little impact on students’ academic success even among sub-samples of students who are traditionally assumed to benefit from this type of intervention (e.g., minority, low income, and first-generation students)” (p. 464). And Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) make a more problematic assertion:

Taken together, our findings indicate that studies adhering to best practices are unlikely to demonstrate that growth mindset interventions bene t students’ academic achievement. Instead, significant meta-analytic results only occurred when quality control was lacking, and these results were no longer significant after adjusting for publication bias. This pattern suggests that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely spurious and due to inadequate study design, flawed reporting, and bias. (p. 163)

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Again, I need to emphasize that students must understand that several of these steps require and prompt continuous revision and editing. I returned to my title and the thesis paragraph for revision as I drafted the two major subhead sections and the subheadings under those. In other words, I was then in a constant state of seeking coherence in the chapter whereby all the parts match and create the whole (which then is reinforced by the final section/closing of the chapter).

For students, I will stress that I drafted an opening on the first day, drafted the first major subheading section the second day, and then drafted the second major section and closing the third day. But the writing parts were embedded in a great deal of reading, cataloguing, and organizing.

I also completed a full initial draft, but then let that sit for a while before doing a full re-read, revision, and editing session with the entire chapter in front of me; I did several re-read-revise-edits along the way as well.

For students, then, here is what they should see as elements of a writing process for academic/scholarly writing:

• Identify writing assignment guidelines, formatting requirements, and citation style.
• Prepare your Word document per those guidelines, creating your initial title, subheads, and any guiding bullet points or questions detailed in the assignment.
• Create working references list, addressing citation formatting before working further.
• Create an initial compelling opening (multiple paragraphs) with a thesis paragraph that correlates with the title, the organization, and subheads of the essay.
• Read, re-read, organize, and catalogue (patterns/themes) references based on the organization of the assignment; identify the representative anchor sources that will be used to elaborate on the patterns identified and cited with multiple valid sources. Be sure to carefully identify direct quotes and include citation, page or paragraph numbers, etc., when creating a matrix of patterns and analyses of the evidence.
• Revise and edit throughout these steps, even significant revisions such as addressing the title, the thesis paragraph, or organization if the review of the evidence prompts those revisions.
• Create a full first draft, and then let that sit. The final step should be a careful re-read to revise and edit before submitting.

The essay form and the writing process are important concepts for developing writers and students to understand, and that understanding must come from authentically engaging with both in supportive environments.

The challenge with teaching students to write generally and then as academics/scholars is that there are too many moving parts and simply no hard and fast “rules” to govern either the essays they write or the process they use to write them.