Our Growth Mindset Journey - Part I
I decided to go back in time to document our mindset journey at BSE. We are starting Part II of our journey this next school year using Mary Cay Ricci's book, "Mindsets in the Classroom - Building a Culture of Success and Student Achievement in Schools".
We started discussing Carol Dweck's book, "Mindset - The New Psychology of Success" in August of 2015 as a faculty. I started out by giving my teachers a survey to complete and bring to one of our first faculty meetings.
Do
you have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset?
Answer these questions about your
intelligence mindset. Read each
statement and decide whether you mostly agree (A) with it or disagree (D) with
it and write your answer in the space provided.
_____1. Your intelligence is something very basic
about you that you can’t change very much.
_____2. You can learn new things, but you can’t
really change how intelligent you are.
_____3. No matter how much intelligence you have, you
an always change it quite a bit.
_____4. You can always substantially change how
intelligent you are.
Now, look at these statements about
personality mindset and decide whether you mostly agree (A) or mostly disagree
(D) with each one and write your answer in the space provided.
_____1. You are a certain kind of person, and there
is not much that can be done to really change that.
_____2. No matter what kind of person you are, you
can always change substantially.
_____3. You can do things differently, but the
important parts of who you are can’t really be changed.
_____4. You can always change basic things about the
kind of person you are.
We started our meeting with the following quote from Carol Dweck:
It is not just our abilities and talent that bring
us success, but whether we approach our goals with a fixed or growth
mindset. Praising our children’s
intelligence and ability doesn’t always foster self-esteem and lead to
accomplishments but may actually jeopardize success. With the right mindset, we can motivate our
kids and help them to improve in school, as well as reach our own goals,
personal and professional. Great
parents, teachers, CEO’s, and athletes already know about how a simple idea
about the brain can create a love of learning and resilience that is the basis
of great accomplishments in every area.
Carol Dweck
The first obstacle that was obvious to all of us is that we had a fixed mindset in how we dealt with those students who were not able to learn as quickly as other students. These were the students that we felt we spent hours of time working with and getting nowhere.....teachers would say, "They don't want to learn"....."Their parents never help them"......"They are doing the best that they can"......and on the other end of the spectrum we were "praising" our high level students all the time for their great intelligence and their ease at learning what we were teaching in a quick manner. We were fixed at both ends of the spectrum and did not even realize it!
Every week I send out a faculty newsletter called The Bailey Times with news and information for teachers and staff. In August of 2015, I sent out the following information about Growth Mindset.
Picture Thomas Edison and what kind of
person you think he was based on your present knowledge? Many people think that Thomas Edison was a
loner and had a brilliant idea one day to make the light bulb! That is not exactly how it happened. Edison in fact had about thirty assistants,
including well-trained scientists who often worked around the clock in a
corporate-funded state-of-the-art laboratory!
The light bulb did not just happen, but was in fact a whole network of
time-consuming inventions that came together giving us the light bulb. Edison
was a savvy entrepreneur who knew how to publicize himself to get people to buy
his inventions. We think of Edison as a
genius but in reality he was not always a genius. He was really just a regular
boy who was taken with experiments and mechanical things. What eventually set him apart from the others
was his mindset and drive. He
never stopped being the curious, tinkering boy looking for new challenges. So what are the real ingredients in
achievement? From Carol Dweck’s book Mindset – The New Psychology of Success.
Teachers and Staff,
Each week I have been putting information in the
Bailey Times that comes from the Mindset
book by Carol Dweck. What I hope to
accomplish in giving little pieces of information to you about the fixed vs.
growth mindset is that you will start looking at what you are doing in the
classroom. We do not want to LIMIT our
students based upon what we think about them, their grades, their behavior,
etc. Changing the mindset of our students
by changing our own mindset could create an atmosphere in our school that could
change the world! One of these kids who
we think is just an ordinary student might invent the cure for cancer IF we
teach and model a growth mindset that spurs this child to greatness. Same thing for those that are the brightest
students who are praised day in and day out about how smart they are, how great
they are and then they leave college and they never live up to their potential
because they are afraid of failure!
To a great year,
Cindy
What started out as just reading and discussing growth mindset turned into a life changing thought process for our faculty. We were not reaching our lowest kids because they challenged our abilities to teach them and we were not preparing our highest kids for the perseverance they would need to do well in the real world because we were too busy praising them for every move they made in the room. What were we going to do to help start a change in ourselves in how we see learning in the classroom?
In October of 2015 I wrote the following in our faculty newsletter:
One day Thomas Edison came home and
gave a paper to his mother. He told her,
“My teacher gave this paper to me and told me to only give it to my
mother.”
His mother’s eyes were tearful as she
read the letter out loud to her child:
Your son is a genius. This school
is too small for him and doesn’t have enough good teachers for training
him. Please teach him yourself.
Many, many years after Edison’s mother
died and he was now one of the greatest inventors of the century, one day he
was looking through old family things.
Suddenly he saw a folded paper in the corner of a drawer in a desk. He took it and opened it up. On the paper was written: Your son is addled (mentally ill). We won’t let him come to school any
more.
Edison cried for hours and then he
wrote in his diary: “Thomas Alva Edison
was an addled child that, by a hero mother, became the genius of the
century.”
Teachers and Staff,
We need to remember to enjoy each day
even with all the craziness that is part of our business. In the end we have the best job in the world
because we get to make an impact on the lives of children everyday and we get to
enjoy the hugs and laughter of having children in the building! I hope you have created a classroom climate
in which there is fun and laughter along with quiet and learning! The key is to create a balance in your room, but
at the forefront it is always about engaging students in the learning that is
presented in the classroom. Students
learn best when they are respected for who they are, they are given as many
opportunities to show their learning as possible, they feel that they can learn
if they try really hard, and they do not give up because the challenges seem
too hard! You as the teacher are the
foundation for how they feel about themselves and about school. Please do not take how important you are in
the classroom lightly! You as the
teacher in all honesty will make or break a student and determine how they see
their future. I hope you take this to
heart as you think about the students that cause you the most stress! Those are the ones that need you to set the
foundation and accept them for who they are!
I also hope that you will believe in the children that pass through your
classroom as Thomas Edison mother believed in him!
To children,
Cindy
The journey continued as we talked and discussed Growth Mindset throughout the year at BSE.
October 19, 2015
Mindset
and School Achievement in Middle School
The transition to junior high is a time of great challenge for many
students. The work gets much harder, the
grading policies toughen up, the teaching becomes less personalized. And all this happens while students are
coping with their new adolescent bodies and roles. Grades suffer, but NOT everyone’s grades suffer equally.
In our study, only the students with the fixed mindset showed the
decline. They showed an immediate
drop-off in grades, and slowly but surely did worse and worse over the two years. The students with the growth mindset showed
an INCREASE in their grades over the
two years. When the two groups had
entered junior high, their past records were indistinguishable. Only when they hit the challenge of junior
high did they begin to pull apart.
Here’s how students with the fixed mindset explained their poor
grades. “I am the stupidest” or “I suck
in math.” Many covered these feelings by
blaming someone else: “The math teacher
is a fat male…and the English teacher is a slob.” “The teacher is on crack.” These interesting analyses of the problem
hardly provide a road map to future success.
With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset
instead mobilized their resources for learning.
They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their
response was to dig in and do what it takes.
Our students with the fixed mindset who were facing the hard transition
saw it as a threat. It threatened to
unmask their flaws and turn them from winners into losers. So they mobilize their resources, not for
learning, but to protect their egos. And
one of the main ways they do this is by not trying. This low-effort syndrome is often seen as a
way that adolescents assert their independence from adults, but it is also a
way that students with the fixed mindset protect themselves. For the students with the growth mindset, it
doesn’t make sense to stop trying.
Adolescence is seen as a time of opportunity: a time to learn new subjects, a time to find
out what they like and what they want to become in the future.
Carol Dweck
Teachers
and Staff,
If you read the information above,
hopefully it has helped you to think about the students in your class and how
your students that have a fixed mindset try to protect themselves. Seeing through this is one way to start
having a conversation about their mindset and to help them to move to the other
side so that they can stop the blaming and start learning.
Cindy
This was the beginning of our journey with mindset. The discussions caused us to have to evaluate our thinking about children and it helped us look at our own though process both in and out of school. Growth mindset was not just about school related matters it also affected our parenting behaviors and our relationships with others. We had just started this process and we were just getting underneath the surface of the iceberg!
