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Omar Gomez

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Eric Skoog
This is something that could be put in the classroom and referenced to help the students to have a better perspective and to know what a growth mindset is and how it can help them to succeed. AND IT HAS A PICTURE OF YODA! My daughter is 4 and has never even seen Star Wars, but she already love Yoda!

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A nice Poster to have in a classroom to remind students it is ok to fail.
-Cormac

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Mindset Works: Many great resources for Growth Mindset

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Mindset Works: Many great resources for Growth Mindset

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Website Homepage: http://www.mindsetworks.com/
Including this article for students to read...
-Carolyn

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A series of videos about growth mindset for a classroom. Anne Duletski

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A series of videos about growth mindset for a classroom. Anne Duletski

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Growth Mindset video for Kids - Hannah Hayes

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Growth Mindset video for Kids - Hannah Hayes

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This would be a really fun read-aloud for the beginning of the year to start a conversation about a Growth Mindset

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This strategy is great to use when a student is stuck on a math problem or concept. Instead of just asking for the answer, the student can explain where he or she is at and can seek further guidance to better understand an approach.

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http://funes.uniandes.edu.co/1578/1/Molina_and_Ambrose_TCM.pdf

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Stephanie Listoe

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The Importance of Permission in Creativity

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I like the idea of using books to look for examples of mindset. The post its would be a good reminder for students during all other content areas... like math :)

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Teacher to Teacher Ideas in the Top Teaching Blog | Scholastic

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Exciting lesson ideas, classroom strategies, teaching tips, book lists, videos, and reproducibles in a daily blog by teachers from the classrooms of extraordinary mentor

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Promoting a Growth Mind Set - Kylie Jager

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Promoting a Growth Mind Set - Kylie Jager

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I like this chart because it gives elementary aged children the opportunity to critique their own work. This can be used as a self-reflection activity and it gives the students a chance to really see where they have "glowed" and where they can "grow" as the school year progresses.

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Pep Talks from the Kid President (2)- Abbey Galt

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Pep Talks from the Kid President (2)- Abbey Galt

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I really like these videos! Not only would your students get a positive outlook on things, but they also get to listen to and see a child talk about these positive outlooks. Also, these videos are just cute and funny.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/567453621780003890/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/11118330309682984/

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Revisiting the Growth Mindset- Taylor Floming

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Revisiting the Growth Mindset- Taylor Floming

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This is a really interesting article! It discusses the issue of educators latching onto the term "growth mindset" without actually reflecting that in their practice, and how to avoid that.

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Opinion

For many years, I secretly worked on my research. I say "secretly" because, once upon a time, researchers simply published their research in professional journals-and there it stayed.

However, my colleagues and I learned things we thought people needed to know. We found that students' mindsets-how they perceive their abilities-played a key role in their motivation and achievement, and we found that if we changed students' mindsets, we could boost their achievement. More precisely, students who believed their intelligence could be developed (a growth mindset) outperformed those who believed their intelligence was fixed (a fixed mindset). And when students learned through a structured program that they could "grow their brains" and increase their intellectual abilities, they did better. Finally, we found that having children focus on the process that leads to learning (like hard work or trying new strategies) could foster a growth mindset and its benefits.

So a few years back, I published my book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success to share these discoveries with educators. And many educators have applied the mindset principles in spectacular ways with tremendously gratifying results.

This is wonderful, and the good word continues to spread. But as we've watched the growth mindset become more popular, we've become much wiser about how to implement it. This learning-the common pitfalls, the misunderstandings, and what to do about them-is what I'd like to share with you, so that we can maximize the benefits for our students.

A growth mindset isn't just about effort. Perhaps the most common misconception is simply equating the growth mindset with effort. Certainly, effort is key for students' achievement, but it's not the only thing. Students need to try new strategies and seek input from others when they're stuck. They need this repertoire of approaches-not just sheer effort-to learn and improve.

We also need to remember that effort is a means to an end to the goal of learning and improving. Too often nowadays, praise is given to students who are putting forth effort, but not learning, in order to make them feel good in the moment: "Great effort! You tried your best!" It's good that the students tried, but it's not good that they're not learning. The growth-mindset approach helps children feel good in the short and long terms, by helping them thrive on challenges and setbacks on their way to learning. When they're stuck, teachers can appreciate their work so far, but add: "Let's talk about what you've tried, and what you can try next."

Recently, someone asked what keeps me up at night. It's the fear that the mindset concepts, which grew up to counter the failed self-esteem movement, will be used to perpetuate that movement. In other words, if you want to make students feel good, even if they're not learning, just praise their effort! Want to hide learning gaps from them? Just tell them, "Everyone is smart!" The growth mindset was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them. It is about telling the truth about a student's current achievement and then, together, doing something about it, helping him or her become smarter.

I also fear that the mindset work is sometimes used to justify why some students aren't learning: "Oh, he has a fixed mindset." We used to blame the child's environment or ability.

Must it always come back to finding a reason why some children just can't learn, as opposed to finding a way to help them learn? Teachers who understand the growth mindset do everything in their power to unlock that learning.

A few years ago, my colleague in Australia, Susan Mackie, detected an outbreak of what she called "false growth mindset." She was seeing educators who claimed to have a growth mindset, but whose words and actions didn't reflect it. At first, I was skeptical. But before long, I saw it, too, and I understood why.

In many quarters, a growth mindset had become the right thing to have, the right way to think. It was as though educators were faced with a choice: Are you an enlightened person who fosters students' well-being? Or are you an unenlightened person, with a fixed mindset, who undermines them? So, of course, many claimed the growth-mindset identity. But the path to a growth mindset is a journey, not a proclamation.

Let's look at what happens when teachers, or parents, claim a growth mindset, but don't follow through. In recent research, Kathy Liu Sun found that there were many math teachers who endorsed a growth mindset and even said the words "growth mindset" in their middle school math classes, but did not follow through in their classroom practices. In these cases, their students tended to endorse more of a fixed mindset about their math ability. My advisee and research collaborator Kyla Haimovitz and I are finding many parents who endorse a growth mindset, but react to their children's mistakes as though they are problematic or harmful, rather than helpful. In these cases, their children develop more of a fixed mindset about their intelligence.

Kathy Liu Sun: Stop Killing Kids' Math Curiosity

How can we help educators adopt a deeper, true growth mindset, one that will show in their classroom practices? You may be surprised by my answer: Let's legitimize the fixed mindset. Let's acknowledge that (1) we're all a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, (2) we will probably always be, and (3) if we want to move closer to a growth mindset in our thoughts and practices, we need to stay in touch with our fixed-mindset thoughts and deeds.

If we "ban" the fixed mindset, we will surely create false growth-mindsets. (By the way, I also fear that if we use mindset measures for accountability, we will create false growth mindsets on an unprecedented scale.) But if we watch carefully for our fixed-mindset triggers, we can begin the true journey to a growth mindset.

What are your triggers?
Watch for a fixed-mindset reaction when you face challenges. Do you feel overly anxious, or does a voice in your head warn you away? Watch for it when you face a setback in your teaching, or when students aren't listening or learning. Do you feel incompetent or defeated? Do you look for an excuse? Watch to see whether criticism brings out your fixed mindset. Do you become defensive, angry, or crushed instead of interested in learning from the feedback? Watch what happens when you see an educator who's better than you at something you value. Do you feel envious and threatened, or do you feel eager to learn? Accept those thoughts and feelings and work with and through them. And keep working with and through them.

My colleagues and I are taking a growth-mindset stance toward our message to educators. Maybe we originally put too much emphasis on sheer effort. Maybe we made the development of a growth mindset sound too easy. Maybe we talked too much about people having one mindset or the other, rather than portraying people as mixtures. We are on a growth-mindset journey, too.

Published in Print: September 23, 2015, as Growth Mindset, Revisited

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Carol Dweck Revisits the 'Growth Mindset'

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Opinion For many years, I secretly worked on my research. I say "secretly" because, once upon a time, researchers simply published their research in professional journals-and there it stayed. However, my colleagues and I learned things we thought people needed to know.

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Kyla Reinbold

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I saved this as a file, you will need to download it to view it. Excellent article!

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growth mindset primary grades

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growth mindset in primary grades

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An example of something you could work from in your own classroom

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Jo Boaler's TED talk - must watch!

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How you can be good at math, and other surprising facts about learning | Jo Boaler | TEDxStanford

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How neuroscience is changing our mathematical future

Advances in neuroscience are revolutionizing our approach to education, and they have particularly weighty implications for the way we teach math. They challenge our basic assumptions about the subject, some of which have discouraged a lot of students from sticking with it.

The most popular and damaging of these assumptions has been that some people can do math and others just can't.

Parents believe it, some teachers believe it, and soon enough, the students believe it too. Luckily, the evidence against this notion is piling up, thanks to recent discoveries about human brain plasticity.

Some of you might have taken one of London's famous black cabs, but you may not know how qualified the drivers are. It turns out that to become a London cab driver you have to study for between two and four years. At the end of that time you take a test with the beautiful name, "The Knowledge," which requires that you know 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks in Central London. This process, neuroscientists have found, significantly expands the driver's hippocampus, the area of the brain that specializes in spatial information. When the drivers retire, their hippocampus shrinks again. We never knew that the brain was that flexible.

Around the same time as these studies were emerging, a nine-year-old girl had half her brain removed - a hemisphere - because she was having seizures the doctors couldn't control. The doctors and scientists expected her to be paralyzed for life, as that side of the brain controls your physical movement, but she stunned them by essentially re-growing the missing side. The connections came back so quickly that within months she was running around and playing again.

Another study that is very important for educators is a three-week training program, where people working for 10 minutes a day changed the permanent structure of their brains. Examples like this show that many of the limits we place on human capacity are self-imposed.

Every child can do well in math - all the way to calculus. Why don't they, then?

The simple answer is that we don't approach the subject in the right way, conceptually or philosophically. Schools continue to single out who is good at math - and who is not - at a very young age. That has to change.

Another myth I think is important to confront is this notion of a "wall" in math. According to this popular idea, you can take all the math classes you like until you hit your personal wall, and then you can't go any further. Big news: There is no "wall."

Carol Dweck, a Stanford colleague I work with, wrote an influential bestseller in 2006, which used a large body of research to demonstrate that everyone has one of two mindsets. People with a growth mindset believe that the harder you work the smarter you'll get; people with a fixed mindset believe that you're either smart or you're not. Approximately half the people in the U.S. have a fixed mindset, and the other half have a growth mindset. More people have a fixed mindset about math than any other subject. Carol has found that kids with growth mindsets achieve more. They do so because a growth mindset goes along with certain behaviors - they are more persistent and more willing to learn from mistakes.

The way we praise kids helps determine which mindset they develop. This is a big one for parents; I've had to change the way I talk to my own kids. Kids get a fixed mindset from fixed praise. When we praise kids for being smart, they think, oh good, I'm smart; and then, later, when they mess up, as they will, they think, oh, I'm not so smart. That fixed idea is damaging, either way.

It's very important not to praise kids for what they are, but only for what they do. It is fine to say, "It's great that you learned that," but not, "You are so smart."

We know that fixed mindset thinking affects kids from across the achievement spectrum.

The biggest group of students with a fixed mindset are high-achieving girls. Indeed, this is one of the big reasons girls opt out of advanced science and math courses.

We love the discourse of smartness and giftedness, but we have to let go of it. The more a field values the idea of giftedness, the fewer female PhDs are in the field. Claude Steele, a former colleague of mine at Stanford, found that when girls take math tests, just marking off their gender makes them more likely to underachieve. The stereotypes about women and math are so strong that they're in the air all the time.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) team at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has collected a lot of data on how kids approach math, their beliefs about math, and how that relates to their achievement. One of the big findings is that the lowest achieving kids in the world are the memorizers. The highest achieving kids are the ones who see math as a subject of big ideas. Those kids, incidentally, are also less afraid of making mistakes.

We now know that making math mistakes grows your brain. MRI scans of people taking math tests find that every time the test-taker makes a mistake, a synapse fires in their brain. There are actually two possible synapses; the first one comes from people making a mistake, and the second one comes from noticing they've made a mistake.

Further, we now know that those are the very best times for brain growth. Telling kids that mistakes are good for them, that mistakes are when their brains grows, can have a liberating effect. Also, it has been established that if you have a growth mindset, and you believe that mistakes are good, your brain will have an enhanced response to making mistakes.

This means that we need kids in math classrooms to do more challenging work, and to make more mistakes. Unfortunately, most math classes in the U.S. are set up so the kids get most of the answers right. Teachers really care about their students; they want them to get everything right, but that isn't good for them. They need to struggle.

They do not, however, need to be struggling with the clock. This is another crucial thing that neuroscientists are telling us: Math should never be associated with speed.

In fact, we know that timed tests cause a lot of the early onset math anxiety felt by students, especially girls. Mathematical facts are retained in the working-memory section of the brain, and when a person is under stress, the working memory is blocked. Mathematicians are not necessarily fast at math. In fact, some of our greatest mathematicians are not fast at all; they work slowly and deeply with math.

One example I would like to share with you is Laurent Schwartz, who felt dumb in school because he was one of the slowest math thinkers on his class but went on to win the Fields Medal in mathematics. In his autobiography, he wrote:

"Towards the end of the eleventh grade I secretly thought of myself as stupid, and I worried about this a long time. I'm still just as slow. At the end of eleventh grade, I came to the conclusion that rapidity does not have a precise relation to intelligence. What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other..."

We urgently need to dissociate math from speed in classrooms and stop dissuading those children who think slowly and deeply that they can't do math.

Another valuable discovery is that we learn most powerfully by crossing the brain, when different pathways light up. Researchers have found that the students who do best on math tests are those who use the connections between the brain hemispheres. The perfect brain crossing is when kids interact with numbers while also thinking visually. Short, closed questions convey fixed views of math to students. If we really want to give kids a growth mindset, we have to change the mathematics questions given in classrooms (see www.youcubed.org).

Teachers and parents have to send the right messages. That is critically important. We know that when mothers tell their daughters that they weren't good at math in school, their daughters' achievement goes down.

Teachers can be just as discouraging even when they are trying to help by saying things like, "Don't worry, math isn't your thing." But they can also be very encouraging, even with minimal effort. A recent experimental study demonstrates this well. Two groups doing high school English received critical feedback at the end of their English essay. The researchers added one extra sentence of feedback to half the students' essays. What they found was that kids who got the extra sentence were doing significantly better a year later, particularly students of color. The sentence they added was this: "I am giving you this feedback because I believe in you."

Teachers need to show students they believe in them, they need to give them opportunities to struggle and fail, they need to communicate that mistakes and struggle are good, and they need to stop deciding who can and who cannot do math.

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The Myth of Being 'Bad' at Math - Aspen Ideas - Medium

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Advances in neuroscience are revolutionizing our approach to education, and they have particularly weighty implications for the way we teach math. They challenge our basic assumptions about the subject, some of which have discouraged a lot of students from sticking with it.

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Learning with a Growth Mindset - Farsley Farfield Primary School.

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At Farsley Farfield Primary School, we are determined to be a 'Bully Free Zone.' This year's slogan is, 'Make a Noise.' Together we will be encouraging all the children to speak up, if they feel bullied or see anyone being bullied. If your child is unhappy or talks about bullying at home, please speak with a member of staff.

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So you want your students to have a Growth Mindset?

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There has been much talk about Growth Mindset the past few years. Many teachers recognize that there are a lot of students who exhibit a fixed mindset. I often wonder when we introduce another educational term into the mainstream how many different ways the term can be misinterpreted.

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Could you use something like this in your classroom?

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Love this reminder

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Bulletin Board Idea