Table of Contents
A) Galinsky's "Mind in the Making"
In 2010, Ellen Galinsky published her well-researched book, “Mind in the Making—The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs.” Here’s her list of 7 targeted life skills and the positive benefits to be achieved when children learn them. This is all still perfectly relevant today.
| Life Skill | Benefits for Children | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Focus and self-control | Concentration, multitasking, patience, improved listening | |
| 2. Perspective taking | Reduced aggression and conflicts, empathy, understanding others | |
| 3. Communicating | Understand what to communicate, how and why | |
| 4. Making connections | Improved creativity, better decision-making | |
| 5. Critical thinking | Improved reasoning and reflection | |
| 6. Taking on challenges | Growth mindset, look for challenges, resilience, calmness | |
| 7. Self-directed, engaged learning | Improved active learning, not passive |
Galinsky suggests that the life skills of perspective taking, making connections, and taking on challenges are often not given enough importance by those teaching life skills. She also makes the point that, “the life skill of focus and self-control is maybe just as important in today’s modern world as IQ.”
Galinsky explains that children can become better overall learners if we help them engage their executive brain functions, which are cognitive (mental) processes that the prefrontal cortex of the brain uses to manage attention, emotions and behaviors to achieve goals. These processes consist of attentional control, inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility, as follows:- Attentional control - focus on something in a way that maximizes the information we get out of it.
- Inhibitory control - over both distraction and our own personal behaviour (e.g. impulse control).
- Working memory - holding information in your mind while mentally working with it; this includes mental arithmetic and prioritizing tasks.
- Cognitive flexibility - to see a situation in different ways; to flexibly switch perspectives or the focus of attention, and flexibly adjust to changed demands or priorities.
Teaching that focuses on giving children learning opportunities to use their executive brain functions, leads to better, deeper learning outcomes. This can also be beneficial to children with learning difficulties.
Some key observations from Mind in the Making:
- Children learn better when they are ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS rather than passive ones.
- Children need to have MULTIPLE EXPERIENCES reinforcing the same ideas and building memory.
- Children learn better when there is a MIXED CONTEXT - some cognitive, some emotional and some behavioral. Thus, a lesson that teaches both chess skills and life skills offers that mixed context.
- Children are CURIOUS about anything NEW, so extending their learning with new information as they build knowledge and skills helps maintain their motivation to practice.
- Children learn better when they have to EXPLAIN THEIR REASONING to others.
- PRACTICING is most effective when it encourages a child to work TOWARDS a new level of PERSONAL BEST.
- To teach children to become CRITICAL THINKERS, the teacher needs to talk about complex problems while in the classroom, and then come at these problems from different perspectives.
At CIC, we support Galinsky’s list of life skills and the expected benefits, and we continue to seek new opportunities to apply her recommendations in our programs. We also note that Galinsky’s 7 individual life skills can be lined up with one or more of the UNICEF LS categories.
Chess is well-suited to executive brain function use, and we try to give our students opportunities to develop and flex their executive functions in our programs. Executive brain functions also appear to be also linked to both STEM skills (science, technology, engineering and math) and transversal skills (employability skills for the 21st century). Several studies by researchers on these relationships are underway.
Here’s a great YouTube video from Stephanie Carlson that explains Executive function skills in children.
B) Mindset and Improvement in both Life and Chess
In our view, Galinsky’s sixth life skill—taking on challenges—is extremely important. But, the willingness to take on challenges depends on having the right mindset.
Carol Dweck’s Theory of Mindset (2006) has shown that as children’s minds develop, they may possess greater tendencies towards having either a ‘fixed mindset’ or a ‘growth mindset.’ (Here is a link to a 2014 YouTube video Dweck did called Developing a Growth Mindset.)
Those that have a fixed mindset see their abilities as a fixed trait and they will often give up in the face of stress or a challenge. Others who have a growth mindset see their abilities as something to develop and they will continue to pursue a challenge until resolved. Mindsets emerge during early years but they’re not immutable. Children respond to their situations. If they’re praised for their effort and the strategies they’re using, they’re more likely to want to learn and try harder. If they’re praised for their intelligence, they often make less progress.
Galinsky says that she originally thought that her life skill #6 was ‘resilience’ but she later changed it to ‘taking on challenges’ – being proactive rather than reactive when difficulties arise. Her mother called this
“getting back on the horse after falling off” and Galinsky says that this “momism” is quite appropriate. In her book, Galinsky recommends 13 different techniques that parents and others can apply to help children develop more of a growth mindset. Two biggies are: teaching children that the brain is like a muscle which gets stronger with use; and praising children for their effort not their intelligence.
In 2020, Barry Hymer and Peter Wells published their “clarifying” book, “Chess Improvement – It’s all in the mindset.” The theme of the book is that improvement in chess comes from having the right kind of mindset. Here are some of their most important conclusions:
- Parents and others need to understand the differences between fixed and growth mindsets and that they belong to a continuum.
- In situations of low challenge, easy success and praise, fixed mindsets work just fine and growth mindsets could even be a handicap.
- Chess players with a growth mindset believe they are capable of continuous improvement in chess, and will commit to serious study and are less likely to be upset when they lose to strong competition.
- We should avoid using either of the two mindsets (fixed or growth) as single statements of identity for an individual. Instead these mindsets should be viewed as different coping strategies.
- Some chess champions with long histories of success such as Kasparov and Carlsen are very good at rebounding from defeats. They appear to exercise growth mindset tendencies and both are resilient. Other chess champions (e.g. Capablanca) have had much shorter periods of success at the top, researchers believe, because they tended towards fixed mindsets once they got there.
- Even the best chess players have fixed mindset moments.
- Fixed mindset supports extrinsic motivators (reward or payoff); growth mindset supports intrinsic motivators (love of the game).
- Extrinsic motivators, kept within reasonable limits, can contribute to short-term success and not harm the process of learning.
- Don't confuse early enthusiasm in chess with long-term passion.
- Reward children when they win at chess by asking them to tell you how they did it.
- Make it clear that you can see if a child is restricting play to a few simple tactics - and disapprove.
- Look beneath the surface for an understanding and appreciation of how and why things happen.
- Encourage children to see that the game has an internal logic, e.g. see how building a good position led to the conclusion of a winning attack.
- Let children enjoy a sense of agency in playing chess.
- Introduce children to chess puzzles and variants at an early stage.
- Help children to enjoy thinking about chess by themselves.
C) Life Skills Recap
In the Life Skills – Introduction section, we reviewed the cognitive and “softer” life skills that can be taught to children when they learn chess. The categories were personal/self-awareness, interpersonal and behavioural/social.
In the Life Skills – Models section, we reviewed a couple of important models (Moreno and UNICEF) that show us that life skills may be grouped or classified in different ways. We also viewed UNICEF’s life skills continuum which shows which life skills categories are relevant at different ages.
Here in the Life Skills – Science section, we learned about a more targeted approach (“Mind in the Making”) to teaching life skills developed by Ellen Galinsky. That approach emphasizes focus and self-control, and getting children to more actively use their executive brain functions – mental processes that help them manage attention, emotions and behaviours to achieve goals. Carol Dweck’s theory of the need to develop a growth mindset is also seen as being very important. We also learned from Hymer/Wells about their latest insights into the role of growth and fixed mindsets in chess improvement.
It is interesting that different researchers, both talking about personal improvement in the context of teaching children (one researcher focused on teaching life skills and two researchers focused on teaching chess) – ten plus years apart – are both saying that having a growth mindset is extremely important. The major difference we see is that in the recent case of Hymer/Wells, there seems to be a little more willingness to accept a degree of fixed mindset as a short-term coaching/coping strategy.
D) Three Interesting Articles
E) References on Life Skills
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Evaluation Office, "Global Evaluation of Life Skills Education Programmes - Final Report", 2012, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)
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Galinsky, Ellen, "Mind in The Making - The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs", 2010, New York, HarperCollins Publishers
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Hoskins, Bryony, and Liu, Liyuan, "Measuring life skills in the context of Life Skills and Citizenship Education in the Middle East and North Africa", 2019, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank
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Hymer, Barry, and Wells, Peter, "Chess Improvement - It's all in the Mindset", 2020, U.K., Crown House Publishing
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Moreno, Fernando, "Teaching Life Skills Through Chess - A Guide for Educators and Counsellors", 2002, Baltimore, American Library Press, Inc. UNICEF, "Comprehensive Life Skills Framework", 2017, New Delhi – India
