Check out this cool Zaption on Angela Duckworth’s TED talk: http://www.zaption.com/tours/5306e72721a59a5e600002b1

Now that I have pulled growth mindset into the forefront of my imagination this year, I have been seeing its implications everywhere: from how I consider the first weeks of school to how I have been thinking about my own Cohort 21 research this year.

I had a mini-panic moment wondering if I’m investigating growth mindset in grade 7 because it is a familiar area or if it will push me and challenge me to new understandings. I think this is a question we should be asking ourselves more (for example: am I designing this project because it will be easy to mark / I’ve done it before / it is safe or it is the best challenge for my students?).

It is probably fair to say that topics like growth mindset, appropriate praise, and grit have been making their rounds in hallways and staff rooms for some time now.  While I don’t think the idea that intelligence can be grown is new or challenging territory for me, I don’t yet have a road map for how to share this perspective with my students. I was certainly soothed when I was re-watching Angela Duckworth’s TED talk and she said, “…to me the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little sciences knows, about building it.”

From my reading, I know that exposing students to this research and giving them a working understanding of how the brain works is one step in the right direction, but I also want to embed ideas of growth mindset into the projects I design this year. I want the “interventions”, yes, but I also want to design a classroom that lives, breathes, models, and expects students to demonstrate their grit, growth, and perseverance in the face of challenges. I think I owe that much to the children in my care this year.

So, my research to-do list (what to do before my action plan gets hammered out) is getting a little brush up:

In order to investigate how to foster an academic / growth mindset in my grade 7 students, I will…

1) Investigate how academic / growth mindsets fit into the positive psychology framework (something I’m curious to learn more about)?

2) Figure out what technology resources exists that could support the development of growth / academic mindsets?

3) Research what other educators are doing in their classrooms / school to embed this philosophy into their pedagogy?

4) Design the first Grade 7 project to foster a growth mindset and reflect on the results.

6) I’ve read a bit about growth mindsets, I’m seeing people write about “academic mindsets”, but are there other mindsets that I should consider exposing my students to?

6) What would a best-case scenario look like in my classroom / my school after embarking on this year of action research?

My intention is to explore one of these above questions in a blog post over the next 2 months of school (I’m going to be a busy girl).

While I am gearing up for this I need your help: how could project work support growth mindset ideas? What have you done in your classroom (other than just explaining the different mindsets) that helped your students through first-hand experience see that their success is linked with sustained effort? 

All of your ideas are needed…they will help my intelligence about growth mindsets grow!

By no means do I think that I have ever been (or ever will be) the “smartest” person in any class I have ever taken. I think this fact has actually made me quite fortunate as a learner. In high school I knew, without any wavering, that if I put forth effort, I could grasp even the most challenging subjects (specifically, at that time, math and physics for my brain). I remember looking at the 86% printed on my final report card in Grade 12 math, beaming from the inside out, knowing that it was earned through hours of sweat and tears with Ms. Tarr at her morning extra-help sessions. My success was directly linked with my effort.

So it is no surprise to me (or anyone who knows me) how quickly I took to Carol Dwek’s work on growth mindsets. I took to this book like a plant takes to the sun. Or the light to darkness. Or a struggling math student to an extra-help session. Okay. You get the point.

What Dwek’s research explains brilliantly is something that teachers, I suspect, have known intuitively for some time: effort and success go hand in hand. However, there are messages delivered at students (from teachers, parents, the media, their peers) that hint at the contrary. What Dwek points to with this book is how important it is for students to learn about their own minds and simply by discovering that students with a growth mindset outperform those with a fixed mindset, they can improve.

So right now, the precious week of peace before the excitement of August PD starts up, before the winds of planning and meetings and timetables sweeps my focus to other affairs, I wanted to articulate my intentions for this year of learning and growth ahead.

This year, I will investigate how to foster an academic / growth mindset in my grade 7 students. 

While I have some ideas about “sub-goals” or ways to move towards my desired destination, first I think I need to answer these questions for myself:

Understanding the bigger picture is the only way I survive day after day as a teacher. Coming back to the reason why (I think) school exists, what my big goals are as a teacher, and even the purpose of “Middle School” as an entity at BSS help me see the forest for the trees, especially on those days that challenge me to my core. One of the 10,000 reasons why I am drawn to the work of Dwek, is because it so resonates with my ideas of the purpose of school. Yes, learning how to read deeply is important and certainly knowing how to read a map and have an understanding of our nation’s founding matters. Of course it matters! But if you don’t know how to learn, how can you realize your fullest potential? I hope that by really digging into mindsets this year, I will also be improving my students’ learning of social studies and grammar and all that other curricular goodness.

So, are you ready to dive in with me and get messy with mindsets?