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I've started using a reflection journal for myself, and I have also asked my students to complete their own journals. Our prompts are regarding the wonderful things we have done, but also reflecting on how to work on our errors. I ask them to give me suggestions to improve as well. It has created a wonderful atmosphere in the classroom.

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How can we ALL embrace failure as part of the learning process & better cultivate a mindset of growth in our school?

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"It was one of those classes where the bell rings and you don't want to leave. You want to keep discussing," Rodriguez said. "And it's what I want to do now for a career. I really love biology."

In the summer between her junior and senior year, Rodriguez even took a college-level genetics class for fun, although she found out later she'd get college credits for it.

Rodriguez may have found her growth mindset in science class, but she's applying it to all of her life. Take math, one of her least favorite subjects: "It's not my strength, but I have to get through it to get to where I want to be," Rodriguez said. "Sometimes you have to learn to love things you aren't as good at. It will be hard, but you will get through it."

Rodriguez has also taken a whole new approach to class participation. She now sees that when she participates, she's helping shape the direction of the class. She recognizes that it's hard for teenagers to speak up and risk being wrong in front of their peers -- she always worried about being judged for getting the wrong answer -- but when that brave student speaks up, it empowers everyone.

"Don't be afraid to be the first one, because you can make that change in someone else and that would be awesome," Rodriguez said.

Perhaps most importantly, the growth mindset Rodriguez has learned at Arroyo will be a big help to her when she leaves high school.

"I'm a senior, I'm going to go out into the real world soon, by myself," she said. "We're not always going to have teachers or friends or parents to depend on. And sometimes you will make mistakes on your own, and knowing how to grow from that has really helped me."
GROWING CONFIDENT STUDENTS
Rodriguez is the product of four years of messaging from her high school teachers. The Academy of Health and Medicine, a small learning community within Arroyo High, has been pioneering a focused approach to teaching growth mindset that starts with Strong Start, a summer institute that incoming ninth-graders are highly encouraged to attend.

"We'll purposefully try to put them in situations where they'll be uncomfortable, and yet not feel vulnerable -- it's a kinda fine line we walk -- and then provide opportunities for them to work their way through it and find some success," Clark said.

Students deconstruct how working through something challenging felt. Returning sophomores lead the program, many of whom the ninth-graders know from middle school, and who have already been through a year of practicing growth mindset themselves.

Students also talk about the definitions of fixed and growth mindsets and then talk through various challenges from each perspective. When the school year starts, those lessons continue in the classroom. Every teacher in the Academy of Health and Medicine has read Carol Dweck's book, "Mindset," and has discussed how to implement it in their classrooms. The school has moved to standards-based grading to emphasize that mistakes are part of learning and that understanding will come.

"It just reinforces the fact that understanding the first time you hear something isn't the goal," Clark said. "Smart isn't being right fast. It's working through things and understanding things eventually."

Clark brought the idea of growth mindset to Arroyo after a chance encounter with Dweck at a conference. The idea that intelligence grows with effort is one that comes naturally to him as a teacher because of his experiences as a basketball coach. Now, he's trying to get students to approach academics with the same dedication to practice and risk-taking that they bring to sports or other extracurriculars.

"At the end of the day we're trying to create successful kids, some of whom will grow up to do science and some of whom won't," Clark said. "But if they can take what they learn in our classrooms and apply it somewhere else, that's kind of what we're here for."

'When you believe it, they believe. If I didn't believe this, they wouldn't buy what I'm selling.' Arroyo health teacher India Rodgers

He's clear that his job is to teach science, but it's also his job to nurture the individuals he teaches.

The kids at Arroyo often have a lot of challenges outside the classroom. Many of these students will be the first in their families to go to college. Clark knows this and it makes him even more passionate about growth mindset.

"Redefining smart as something that's more effort-based than genetics-based has opened the door for kids," Clark said. "They don't feel like they're behind other kids any longer because they feel that their future is in their own hands, and if they just work through their problems they're going to be OK."
GROWING AS TEACHERS
The multiyear effort to infuse growth mindset into every class is paying off in a big way for students like Rodriguez, and in smaller ways for all students. Health teacher India Rodgers said she notices slight behavior changes in her freshmen first: Quiet but competent kids speak up more and struggling kids receive help from peers more readily.

She also knows that for some kids, the message can take awhile to penetrate. She says students have come back to her years later after having an experience that finally drove the concept home. It's also tough for some kids to transfer the idea that "it's OK to fail" to the academic subjects students find most difficult.

"It's really easy to start with my stuff, and then I try to use what they can do here and help them in other classes," Rodgers said. Students discuss a lot of life issues in her class, so she often has strong relationships with them. She uses those to help them shift their mindsets about classes like math.

She also tries hard to model a growth mindset to her students by being open about her own struggles as a parent and a teacher.

"They're not used to teachers apologizing," Rodgers said. "But I tell them I'm going to make mistakes all the time. And I think showing that helps them realize they can actually make mistakes."

When teachers and administrators say they want kids to have a growth mindset, the school environment has to back up that rhetoric. At Arroyo, the emphasis on growth mindset came alongside a shift to standards-based grading. Kids can see that mistakes along the way aren't negatively affecting them and keep working to master the concepts.

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How To Weave Growth Mindset Into School Culture | KQED

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Teachers at Arroyo High School are seeing how years of integrating growth mindset messages into every class have changed student attitudes about learning.

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In what specific ways do you help students to embrace failure in your class / content area?

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For the last ten years, we've worked one-on-one with students from elementary school through graduate school. No matter their age, no matter the material, when you ask what they're struggling with, students almost universally name a subject: "math," "English" or, in some instances, "school." Doubting that all of school is the issue, we then ask to see their last test. After some grumbling, the student digs down, deep into the dark, dank recesses of his or her backpack, and pulls out a balled-up, lunch-stained paper that, once smoothed out, turns out to be the latest exam.

To a teacher, this should be incredibly frustrating. You spend a huge part of your life grading tests, commenting on essays, and providing thoughtful feedback on homework assignments . . . only to have them wadded up and ignored. (Yes, students look at their tests, but you shouldn't harbor any illusion that they look at anything but the red letter grade.) Before writing students off for being ungrateful or lazy, you need to understand why what they're doing makes perfect sense.

The Science Behind Mistakes

Telling students they need to take advantage of the feedback they get isn't just good advice -- it's established science. In the last few decades, researchers have discovered a lot about how people become experts. The main idea, made popular by everyone from author Malcolm Gladwell to rapper Macklemore, is the 10,000-hour rule. Ten thousand is the number of hours it takes to become an expert in almost any field. While it's wonderful that people are starting to understand how work leads to expertise, the most important part of that research is not how much practice someone needs to perform, but what kind of practice. This latter category is called deliberate practice and involves isolating what's not working and mastering the difficult area before moving on.

Picture a classical violinist rehearsing. He or she would not play a new piece start-to-finish, fudging through tricky sections and trying to "be done." That musician stops in trouble spots, figures them out, and then plays that measure over and over again, and only moves on when it's perfect. The same principle applies to schoolwork.

Mistakes are the most important thing that happens in any classroom, because they tell you where to focus that deliberate practice.

So why don't students view their mistakes as a valuable asset? Well, students don't think about their mistakes rationally -- they think about them emotionally. Mistakes make students feel stupid. "Stupid" is just that: a feeling. Specifically, it's the feeling of shame, and our natural response is to avoid its source. If we say something embarrassing, we hide our face. If we get a bad grade, we hide the test away. Unsurprisingly, that's the worst move to make if you ever want to get better. Academic success does not come from how smart or motivated students are. It comes from how they feel about their mistakes.

Changing your students' perspective on mistakes is the greatest gift you can give yourself as a teacher. Imagine having a classroom of students who are engaged and constantly improving -- it's every teacher's dream. Instead, teachers face too many students who are disengaged and really rather surly. That surliness is years in the making. By the time students walk into your classroom, they've likely already internalized their mistakes as evidence that they're just not smart. Getting a bad grade feels like a personal attack. No wonder they're giving the deliverer of those grades the stink eye.

A Fresh Take on Mistakes

To help your students rethink mistakes, help them be specific about their errors. Knowing that answer #3 is wrong doesn't mean much. Knowing that they didn't understand mitosis gives them a mandate for getting better. Often, when we go through tests with students, the mistakes they perceive as dire are either careless errors or a single concept applied incorrectly on several questions. Either way, the "fix" is usually smaller than how big the problem feels.

You can also help students view their mistakes as helpful. The red pen isn't the enemy -- when students understand how to deal with errors, red means go. One way to encourage that attitude is to take the most common mistakes that the class made on a test or quiz and analyze them together. The more open everyone is about the mistakes they've made and how they happened, the less significance any student will place on future errors.

Mistakes happen for concrete reasons. A student didn't memorize all the requisite facts, didn't execute the steps of a process, or perhaps just ignored the directions. The red "X" is just a simple assessment of the actions that student took -- actions he or she can easily fix next time. Sharing that clarity and causality with your students is the best way to teach deliberate practice, instill motivation and help them develop a more constructive relationship with mistakes. In short, this creates the class you and your students have always wanted.

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For the last ten years, we've worked one-on-one with students from elementary school through graduate school. No matter their age, no matter the material, when you ask what they're struggling with, students almost universally name a subject: "math," "English" or, in some instances, "school."

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What have your teachers done to help you feel OK about making mistakes? What methods might help you stress less about encountering obstacles during your learning?

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[VLOG] Overcoming the 'Math Myth' and Empowering Students with a #GrowthMindset: https://t.co/1C5XHlmORI #edchat

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This short presentation on supporting a growth mindset for kids in math (and all subjects) shares the difference between a fixed and growth mindset and featu...

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[VLOG] Overcoming the 'Math Myth' and Empowering Students with a #GrowthMindset: https://t.co/1C5XHlmORI #edchat https://t.co/XHu9N9a4pS

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[VLOG] Overcoming the 'Math Myth' and Empowering Students with a #GrowthMindset: https://t.co/1C5XHlmORI #edchat pic.twitter.com/XHu9N9a4pS
— Mashup Math (@mashupmath) September 24, 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.entities.urls[].description
This short presentation on supporting a growth mindset for kids in math (and all subjects) shares the difference between a fixed and growth mindset and featu...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
[VLOG] Overcoming the 'Math Myth' and Empowering Students with a #GrowthMindset: https://t.co/1C5XHlmORI #edchat https://t.co/XHu9N9a4pS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
[VLOG] Overcoming the 'Math Myth' and Empowering Students with a #GrowthMindset: https://t.co/1C5XHlmORI #edchat https://t.co/XHu9N9a4pS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
[VLOG] Overcoming the 'Math Myth' and Empowering Students with a #GrowthMindset: https://t.co/1C5XHlmORI #edchat

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].description
This short presentation on supporting a growth mindset for kids in math (and all subjects) shares the difference between a fixed and growth mindset and featu...