How to prepare your kid for exams

'It's not always the people who start the smartest, that end up the smartest.' If you are a parent or a teacher, this statement could change the way you deal with your children forever. It will mean that rather than looking for short term gains (marks, scores, grades) you will start preparing your children for a brighter future. And this message is most important to remember when anxiety levels are rising and exams are round the corner. It is so easy to get lost in the rat race of 'this exam is going to determine your future'. The only thing that is going to determine your child's future is his/her mindset. And you play a big role in developing that.

Carol Dweck, from Stanford University, has proposed that it's not our grades that establish future success but whether we live our life with a 'growth' mindset or 'fixed' mindset. (Mindset, Ballantine, 2006). So a person with a fixed mindset would think that intelligence is fixed and that if children do not do well in their board exams then their lives are doomed. On the other hand, a person with a growth mindset would believe that intelligence is not fixed but grows through experience and learning and that exams are not a true judge of future success. The role models of growth mindset that come to my mind are Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi and many more. All these men may not have had a brilliant academic start but nobody can doubt that they changed the world.

Keep the faith
How do you follow the path of the growth mindset? Here are some good clues:

• Believe that no quality, trait, ability, intelligence or skill in us is fixed. All that is required is persistence, hard work and tenacity. Dweck's research has clearly indicated that children who are praised for their persistence (process feedback) are better primed for success than children who are praised just for their smartness (fixed feedback).
• Reframe difficulties, mistakes, low scores, as part of the journey rather than see them as signs of failure. It does not mean that you are lowering the standard for your children, instead it means that you are coaching them to keep growing and not be scared of trying different options to optimise their potential for the rest of their lives
• Motivate them to be committed to the process of learning and develop their mind and life at every step. Praise persistence and staying power, celebrate learning and curiosity, open their minds to seeing life as a way of experimenting and exploring, free them to take healthy risks and overcome challenges.
• As a parent help children turn around their failures. Motivate them to be committed to learning rather than just getting scores. And for that you need to believe in it yourself. Remember, each child is wired and inspired differently. Some might do well in school, whereas there are many others who will only blossom much later when they are in college or when they start working.
• The growth mindset is based on the belief that your skills, strengths and abilities can only be polished through effort and perseverance. The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (especially) when it's not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. As Albert Einstein remarked, "It's not just that I am smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."