"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't — you're right." — Henry Ford
When Henry Ford first spoke these words, he couldn't have known the neuroscience behind them. As Ford aptly noted, human beings are not stagnant or fixed; they are dynamic and adaptable, with the ability to grow and change in response to their environment. It is this ability that makes learning such a wondrous journey. As educators, we have seen that if a student believes they can grow, learn, and push through difficulty, they're more likely to do exactly that. If they believe they can't — they'll disengage, avoid challenge, and confirm their own prediction.
We Can Change Our Brains
Through a process called neuroplasticity, the brain physically changes and reorganizes itself in response to experience, challenge, and learning, and this does not just happen in early childhood. Researchers have found that even brief learning experiences can produce real, measurable changes in brain wiring across one's lifespan (Xie et al., 2021). This is particularly true during adolescence, when the brain undergoes synaptic pruning, or the shedding of unused synaptic connections, to free up cognitive resources to support more frequently used connections.
During this time, the brain is remarkably sensitive to changes in its environment and to the messages it receives from peers and adults. For educators, this means it is the perfect time to teach young people about their brains and their remarkable ability to shape them (Fandakova & Hartley, 2020).
What Mindset Has to Do With It
Neuroplasticity explains what the brain can do. Mindset explains whether the student will work with the brain or against it.
Researchers define a growth mindset as the belief that abilities can be developed through effort and strategy. A fixed mindset is the opposite: the belief that you either have it or you don't. Students with a growth mindset tend to push through difficulty, whereas students with a fixed mindset tend to disengage. However, they do not do this because they're lazy, but because struggling confirms what they already fear: that they're just not capable (Yeager & Dweck, 2020).
Why Connecting the Two Matters
Good growth-mindset instruction doesn't just tell kids to believe in themselves — it teaches them how their brain works and how they can harness their brain's potential. Students should know that the brain responds to challenge in the same way a muscle responds to exercise. The more difficult the exercise, the greater the effect on muscle growth. Similarly, struggling through hard material isn't a sign you don't belong — it's literally how new neural connections get built (Maryati et al., 2020; Shi et al., 2022).
Understanding this can lead to a powerful shift in behavior. Students who see effort as the mechanism of growth, not just a personality trait of "hard workers," are more likely to remain committed to a task even when it gets difficult or uncomfortable.
How to Promote a Growth Mindset in Your Classroom
- Teach students about their brain — explicitly. Don't assume students know that their brains change when they learn. Tell them how their brains develop over the course of their lives and the concept of neuroplasticity. Doing so will help them take ownership of their learning and inspire confidence in their abilities.
- Reframe struggle in the moment. When a student says, "I don't get it" or "I can't do this," resist the urge to rescue them too quickly. Instead, name what's happening: "This is hard, which means your brain is working. That's exactly where growth happens." That one reframe, repeated over time, begins to shift how students interpret their own experience of difficulty.
- Change how you give feedback. Feedback that focuses on effort and strategy is more effective than feedback that focuses on ability. "You're so smart" feels good in the moment, but actually makes students more fragile.
- Normalize mistakes as part of the process. Students with a fixed mindset interpret mistakes as evidence of a permanent inability to perform a task. You can counter that narrative by treating errors as informative rather than definitive. Build in moments where students reflect on what went wrong and what they'd try differently, create a "mistakes jar," and reward the students when it gets full. When students see that mistakes are a natural part of learning rather than something to be ashamed of, they're more willing to take risks that produce real growth.
- Watch your language around ability. Phrases like "some people are just better at math" or sorting students by who "gets it" and who doesn't — even casually — communicate a fixed mindset to the entire room. Students pick up on those signals. Research is clear that teachers who communicate a belief in students' capacity to grow produce better outcomes than those who don't, regardless of instructional approach (Yeager & Dweck, 2020).
The Bottom Line: Neuroplasticity doesn't decide which students deserve to grow. The brain's capacity for change isn't determined by background, past performance, or zip code. Our job as educators is to build classrooms that prove Henry Ford right — where every student discovers that if they think they can, they will.