According to a recent announcement by Equity Accelerator (EA), a research organization that developed the course, “Creating Growth Mindset Cultures in College Classrooms” consists of seven modules that instructors can complete on their own time.
EA founder Mary Murphy, who is also a professor at Indiana University, said research has found variation in how instructors think about students’ abilities. Some have a fixed mindset, based on a belief that abilities are innate. Others have a growth mindset, believing students’ abilities can be improved with effort and effective teaching strategies.
For years, Murphy said, the paradigm around these mindsets was focused on students.
“For the last 15 years or so, the way that it has been taught to people is that it’s a function of the students,” she said. “That it’s students’ own mindsets that matter for whether they’re going to take intellectual risks in class, raise their hand and ask a question, or how they’re going to recover from mistakes.”
Recently, this idea has expanded to include instructors, with research finding that teaching practices can impact students’ opinions of their own capacities for improvement.
Growth mindsets are becoming more important as trust in higher education wavers, and more students enter unsure of whether college is the right place for them, Murphy said.
“There are cultural stereotypes about who’s successful in college,” she said. “When you have these fixed mindset messages that ‘some have it, and some don’t’ … students can take that to mean that they don’t belong.”
The way instructors communicate directly to students can shape this mindset, as can a course’s structure. For example, a course that is graded solely around one midterm exam and one final exam can demonstrate a fixed mindset — you either know it or you don’t. Having several assignments across the course can encourage students to correct mistakes along the way and therefore grow, Murphy said.
A 2022 study by the Student Experience Project found that these kinds of faculty interventions can improve student experience and success. Across six universities and nearly 300 instructors, the study found a 10.5 percent increase in the number of students who reported “globally positive” experiences with instructors who had gone through growth mindset training. The instructors were taught to adjust syllabus language, course policies and feedback mechanisms to align with a growth mindset. As students’ experiences improved, so did their likelihood of earning an A or B, with the inverse true for likelihood of failing or dropping the course.
“When faculty use strategies that effectively convey that they believe in [students’ abilities to grow and succeed], and pair that with actionable feedback and opportunities for improvement, students’ engagement, performance and persistence improve,” Krysti Ryan, EA chief operating officer, wrote in an email to Government Technology.
In addition to the base of research, the course was developed with formal feedback from 30 faculty beta testers, according to Murphy. It consists of seven modules taking a total of three hours.
Modules include published papers showing the impacts of growth mindsets, classroom applications and a workbook to reference the suggestions when needed. The strategies offered in each module are meant to be low lift, taking 30 minutes or less to prepare for individualized classroom settings, Ryan said.
The work is self-paced, but Murphy said it can also be approached in a group setting.
“For many colleges and universities, the way that faculty get professional development training, especially around their teaching on interaction with students, is in communities of practice or faculty learning communities,” she said.
Two institutions have signed on to distribute the course to their faculty in 2026, Murphy said.
In K-12 education, where instructors go through formal educator training before teaching, growth mindsets are more commonly part of the curriculum, Murphy said. In higher education, many instructors haven’t heard of the concept unless they teach education or psychology.
“This is the first tool that has been created that put together all of this research in a way that’s accessible,” Murphy said.
