Thinking Outside the Box: Growth Mindset and the Role of Metacognition
We often encourage people to think outside the box, challenge conventional wisdom, see things in a new light, break the mold, or look at something from a different perspective. Educators ask students to challenge familiar approaches, question assumptions, and reconsider how they understand what they are learning. Most of us recognize the intention behind these expressions: to encourage people to move beyond ways of thinking that have become established.
But what does that actually require of the person being asked? These expressions are so familiar that we can easily overlook the work we are asking learners to do.
Here, thinking outside the box means deliberately moving beyond established ways of thinking. The box represents the assumptions, interpretations, expectations, and habitual approaches that shape how we understand and respond to situations. Moving beyond them deliberately requires engaging with those ways of thinking as something we can examine and reconsider.
This brings together two areas of interest in learning and development: growth mindset and metacognition. They concern different aspects of human thinking, but both can help us understand what it takes to move beyond established ways of thinking.
Growth Mindset and the Possibility of Change
Growth mindset concerns our beliefs about whether abilities can develop. A person with a stronger growth mindset orientation toward a particular ability believes that ability can develop through learning, practice, effective strategies, and support. A more fixed mindset orientation reflects a belief that the ability is relatively stable or difficult to change.
These beliefs exist along a continuum and can differ across abilities. A learner might believe they can become a more effective writer while viewing their mathematical ability as largely fixed. Another might see their problem-solving ability as developable but regard their ability to think creatively as something they either possess or lack.
Dweck and Yeager (2019) emphasize the importance of context in understanding when beliefs about ability development influence behavior. For example, a learner who believes mathematical ability can develop may respond differently to challenges depending on whether the learning environment encourages experimentation, supports learning from mistakes, or makes failure feel threatening. The belief may be present in each situation, but the conditions in which the learner is working can influence how that belief is expressed.
Both the beliefs learners hold and the contexts in which they are learning are relevant when we encourage them to think outside the box. Believing that an ability can develop may influence someone's willingness to question familiar assumptions, explore different approaches, or persist through the uncertainty of reconsidering established thinking. When learners regard development as possible, they may be more inclined to treat their current ways of thinking as open to examination rather than as fixed limits on what they can understand or accomplish. A more fixed orientation toward that ability may make such reconsideration less likely.
These are possible influences, not inevitable responses. A growth mindset does not guarantee that someone will reconsider their thinking, just as a fixed mindset orientation does not prevent them from doing so. More importantly for our discussion, neither those beliefs nor the context in which they are expressed tells us whether or how a learner actually examines and revises an established approach.
Why Thinking Outside the Box Requires Metacognition
At B Optimal, we are particularly interested in what learners actually do with their thinking.
We define metacognition as follows:
Metacognition involves actively working on and with our own cognition and learning in order to understand, direct, regulate, evaluate, or extend it.
Consider a learner who has approached studying in much the same way for years. They repeatedly reread material, associate familiarity with understanding, and assume that additional reading is the best response when something remains difficult.
To deliberately move beyond that established thinking, the learner must engage with some aspect of it. They might examine how they determine whether they understand something, question why repeated reading feels productive, or reconsider the assumptions guiding their study decisions.
What makes this significant is not simply that the learner might choose a different strategy. They are examining how they judge understanding and how those judgments shape their learning decisions. This is active work on and with their cognition and therefore involves metacognitive activity. Thinking outside the box, as defined here, requires that work.
The reverse does not necessarily follow. Learners engage in metacognitive activity for many purposes, including understanding their learning, monitoring comprehension, evaluating strategies, and deciding whether an existing approach remains appropriate. Metacognition does not always involve attempting to move beyond established thinking.
This distinction helps clarify what we are asking of learners. The invitation to think outside the box calls for a particular kind of cognitive work, even when we provide little guidance about what that work involves.
What Does the Metacognitive Work Involve?
Once we recognize the role of metacognition, a practical question follows: What might a learner actually do when deliberately working beyond established thinking?
The Metacognitive Moves System™ (MMS), developed by B Optimal, distinguishes eight forms of metacognitive activity: Task Framing, Strategy Selection, Resource Allocation, Monitoring, Interpretation, Adjustment, Evaluation, and Transfer.
These are distinctions, not steps. They describe different forms that metacognitive activity can take, and their relevance depends on what the learner is working on and what the situation calls for.
Consider a learner who has come to interpret a complex assignment as a search for the correct answer. The assignment, however, asks them to compare perspectives, examine evidence, and develop a reasoned position. Their established understanding of the task has shaped how they approach it.
Thinking outside the box in this situation might begin with the learner examining how they have framed the assignment. Have they assumed that this assignment requires a single correct answer? How has that assumption influenced what they read, what they look for, and what they consider relevant? That examination can involve Task Framing.
The learner might also consider what their approach reveals about their expectations for learning. Perhaps they have come to associate successful academic work with identifying and reproducing an expected answer rather than developing and supporting their own interpretation. Working to make sense of that pattern can involve Interpretation.
Recognizing these assumptions may lead the learner to consider alternative ways of working with evidence through Strategy Selection or deliberately change their current approach through Adjustment.
What matters is that the learner is working with their own understanding and approach rather than simply continuing to work within them.
Can Metacognition Also Influence Growth Mindset?
So far, we have considered how growth mindset orientation may influence someone's willingness to reconsider established thinking. There is another relationship worth examining.
Could engaging in metacognitive activity also influence someone's beliefs about what they are capable of developing?
Consider a learner who has long believed they are simply poor at solving complex mathematical problems. Through examining how they frame those problems, select strategies, and interpret difficulty, they may begin to recognize that some of what they regarded as an unchangeable limitation reflects established ways of thinking and approaching the work.
That recognition provides information about their learning, but it does not automatically change their beliefs about mathematical ability. Recognizing that an approach can change is different from believing that an ability can develop.
This suggests a possible reciprocal relationship. Beliefs about developability may influence whether learners engage in metacognitive activity, while metacognitive activity may provide information they use to reconsider those beliefs. Neither influence should be assumed simply because the relationship is conceptually plausible.
Helping Learners Think Outside the Box
Asking learners to think outside the box does not tell them how to examine the thinking that constitutes the box. Supporting them requires identifying what warrants examination and helping them engage in the relevant metacognitive work.
Having the skills to examine one's thinking does not necessarily mean engaging those skills when a situation warrants it. A learner may be able to question assumptions, evaluate familiar approaches, or consider alternatives but may not recognize an occasion to do so or initiate that examination independently. This distinction matters when we consider what educators can do to support learners.
A practitioner might help a learner reconsider how they have framed an assignment or examine the assumptions behind interpreting difficulty as evidence of limited ability. Such questions can create valuable occasions for metacognitive activity. Their developmental value, however, depends partly on what learners come to understand about the work those questions invite.
The larger educational aim is not simply to prompt examination in a particular moment. It is to help learners recognize what they are examining, understand how they are engaging with their own thinking, and develop the skills and judgment to undertake that work more deliberately in other situations.
The Metacognitive Moves System™ helps practitioners and learners recognize different forms of metacognitive activity and consider which may be useful in a particular situation. Over time, the aim is for learners to become more able to select and engage in that work themselves.
This developmental concern also informs the design of B Optimal's Study Strategy Swap Bingo™ (SSS Bingo). The facilitated, game-based experience invites learners to identify study strategies they already use, exchange approaches with peers, examine their own learning, and decide what to continue, adapt, reconsider, or try.
As a social learning activity, SSS Bingo also helps establish a context in which reconsidering familiar approaches becomes a shared and supported experience. Students encounter strategies used by their peers, hear different perspectives on learning, and have opportunities to question assumptions about what works for them. This returns us to the importance of context discussed earlier: rather than asking students to reconsider their approaches in isolation, Bingo provides a structured environment in which alternatives become visible and facilitated discussion can support metacognitive activity.
The invitation to think outside the box extends to practitioners themselves and carries a developmental responsibility: How can we help learners recognize when their established thinking warrants examination, develop the skills to examine it, and become increasingly able to initiate and direct that work themselves?
Explore the learning experience
Study Strategy Swap Bingo™ offers educators a facilitated experience for helping students examine their study practices, exchange approaches, and make more deliberate learning decisions.
Author's Note
This article is a conceptual examination of what it means to “think outside the box” and the metacognitive activity involved in doing so deliberately. It is not intended as a comprehensive review of the research literature on growth mindset, metacognition, or their relationship.
References
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