In lieu of Digital Tool Tuesday this week, I wanted to post about a tool that is much more important than any digital tool I could give you: our minds. As we are getting into the school year, many of you may be feeling frustrated with some of your students. Why aren't they doing their work? Why won't they try harder? To get to the root of these problems, we can look at growth mindset. Carol Dweck developed the idea of growth mindset years ago, but it particularly resonates with education today as we strive for college and career readiness. In her research, Dweck discovered that "students who believed their intelligence could be developed (a growth mindset) outperformed those who believed their intelligence was fixed (a fixed mindset)." The idea is that we can nurture intelligence and it can grow, rather than it being something that we are born with and never changes. I love the infographic below from Gobrain.com. It shows the challenge we face as educators. How can we get students to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset? I can think of a lot of my former students who would fit under the fixed mindset category. It was hard to figure out what to do to help them. Admittedly, there is no one answer to this problem. My blog post is not meant to give everyone a solution tied up in a nice bow. Rather, I want to foster thinking about motivation and students. So what steps can we take? For starters, Dweck emphasizes that we as educators need to strive to have a growth mindset. If we don't, our students will struggle to get there as well. She goes on to stress that we can't use fixed-mindedness as a label, either. Doing so may consciously or subconsciously prohibit us from helping those students learn. We also need to make students think about thinking. Metacognition needs to be a part of their learning process. Additionally, we need to work on students' grit. This has been a buzzword for a while now, but for a refresher, Angela Lee Duckworth's TED Talk below explains the importance of grit and the growth mindset. Growth mindset is more of a process than a character trait or an aha moment. It is something at which we need to work. Dweck notes it is important to realize we all have a bit of both mindsets within us, and we just need to acknowledge the fixed mindset and continue striving for the growth mindset. How can you foster growth mindset in your students? Works Cited
Dweck, Carol. "Carol Dweck Revisits the 'Growth Mindset.'" Education Week. Editorial Projects in Education, 22 Sept. 2015, http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/09/23/carol-dweck-revisits- the-growth-mindset.html. Accessed 12 Sept. 2017.
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