My question: How can teachers encourage their students to develop a growth mindset in the classroom?

3 main points:

• Students with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence is a fixed and inborn trait that cannot be changed, and they try to avoid learning opportunities that involve a risk in performing poorly or admitting they do not understand something. Students with a growth mindset believe that intelligence is dynamic and can develop over time, and they view challenging work as an opportunity to learn, grow, and discover new strategies.
• Teachers should be providing praise for the thinking process and strategies a student has engaged in, rather than just focusing on the final outcomes. Teachers should also be presenting challenging tasks as fun, exciting, and useful for our brains, and let students know how their brain changes and develops as they tackle something difficult.
• Teachers should also be working towards changing their own beliefs and mindsets about intelligence. If teachers don’t believe that their student abilities can change or improve, then they won’t be providing the students opportunities to do so.

Challenges/weaknesses:

• Praise itself, whether it is for a student’s ability or their effort, can be viewed as problematic. Eventually, the students might only be completing a task or activity just to receive the external praise or reward, and may not actually be interested in the topic anymore.
• In order to see results or effectiveness, I would have to follow the students’ progress over many years.

Next steps:

• How will I implement these strategies into the classroom? What will it look like?

Today I focused my inquiry research on looking for any challenges or resistance to the idea of growth mindsets in the classroom. As I started working on my Powerpoint presentation and handout, I was looking back through the requirements and remembered I had to include something about any challenges or issues that came up during my research. I came across a blog post titled “The Problem With Having a ‘Growth Mindset'” that explained how growth mindsets should not just be about the student “trying harder”, but that teachers really need to think about changing their own mindset and adjusting their own teaching practices. Should teachers be changing their practices to meet the needs of the students, or are teachers expecting their students to change to meet the needs of the teacher?

I have come across similar points during my earlier research, and I believe this is an important point that we all need to be thinking about. It’s great that we have so many expectations of our students and that all this research has been done that gives us insight into how we could unlock our students’ potential, but in order to get there, teachers need to realize that they also have to change and look at things from a new perspective. We should be trying to meet the needs of our students, and we need to be flexible and open to new ideas that will allow us to do so.

I need to think about how I will incorporate these points into my presentation. Most of it has been made already, I just have to tweak it slightly. I have my presentation next week, and I am excited to see how it goes, and to hear what kinds of questions my peers will ask me.