Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Looking for a fabulous resource for igniting discussion about having a growth mindset with your kids? Look no further! These 10 TEDTalks are guaranteed to inspire children at school or home to reach their goals despite any difficulties or obstacles they may encounter.

I had the great privilege of facilitating a staff workshop on growth mindsets for the teachers and staff at Carlos Rosario International School and more recently at ISTE 2015.

Participants were given access to the slide deck in order interact with the slides and resources during the workshop.



What follows are the activities along with some of the resources used during the workshop.

Reading can be a very fraught topic for parents, teachers and students. Strong reading skills are essential for accessing later curriculum, so teachers put a lot of emphasis on it early. But the pressure and angst of getting students reading on schedule can sap the joy out of an activity that many young children love. At its heart, reading is a way to access stories, which in turn make readers wonder about the world. In the race to get kids reading, it can be easy to treat reading like a procedure, instead of the complicated experience that it is.

In her ten years of teaching, Courtney Rejent has had many students pass through her classes who claimed they hated reading, but rather than forcing them to read books they hate or making them fill out reading logs to show they read at home, Rejent has taken to heart an approach to reading that is much more relationship-based. Her sixth grade classroom runs on a reader's and writer's workshop model, which means students are doing the majority of their reading and writing in class, where Rejent can help them.

Our second-grade team works hard to nurture a growth mindset in our students. We begin the year with morning messages about how our brains can grow and change. We read and discuss books about characters who learn from their mistakes. In our classroom makerspaces, we explicitly teach lessons on persistence and flexibility, and in math class our students work collaboratively to solve problems with multiple solutions or multiple paths to the solution.

Despite these efforts, there are still kids who hate to have a mistake on their paper. They will go to great lengths to eliminate any trace of an abandoned math strategy or the first attempt at an ending to a story. They will erase and erase, trying to make the paper clean again. Sometimes they erase so much that the friction from the eraser wears a hole right through the paper.

As we look at how we see and “do” school, it is important to continuously shift to moving from consumption to creation, engagement to empowerment, and observation to application.7 It is not that the first replaces the latter, but that we are not settling for the former. A mindset that is simply open to “growth”, will not be enough in a world that is asking for continuous creation of not only products, but ideas.

One easy way to help children develop a growth mindset is to introduce them to books which promote persistence, love of learning, learning from mistakes and other key growth mindset ideas. Here's a list of our favorite and most popular books which do just that. 

How do you teach a Growth Mindset? By letting students struggle and share. This activity has been used by thousands of educators to teach Growth Mindset.

Reading can be a very fraught topic for parents, teachers and students. Strong reading skills are essential for accessing later curriculum, so teachers put a lot of emphasis on it early. But the pressure and angst of getting students reading on schedule can sap the joy out of an activity that many young children love. At its heart, reading is a way to access stories, which in turn make readers wonder about the world. In the race to get kids reading, it can be easy to treat reading like a procedure, instead of the complicated experience that it is.

We associate the word “struggle” with something that is challenging or difficult. The instinct of a teacher is to make mathematical tasks and concepts easily achievable, but that instinct sometimes favors surface-level mastery over more in-depth and rigorous problem-solving ability. While we hate to see our students struggle, the level of struggle achieved by students can be beneficial when it is productive. 

Knowing what you are teaching and how you plan to teach and assess each academic standard along the way is key to promoting productive struggle in your classroom. This, in turn, will empower students and boost their growth and achievement, creating a generation of learners who are geared to persevere and problem solve. 

I had just pressed the glowing submit button on my screen. After two and a half years, I finally finished my Masters in Computer Science. As the immediate thrill of being done with my coursework…

What if your true learning potential was unknown, even unknowable, at best? What if it were impossible to foresee what you could accomplish with a few years of passion, toil, and training? According to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, this isn’t some hypothetical situation, dependent on any manner of factors from genes to environment. It’s a mindset. And it’s one you can cultivate at any point in life.

A “growth mindset,” as Dweck calls it, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a tendency to believe that you can grow. In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she explains that while a “fixed mindset” assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way, a growth mindset thrives on challenge and sees failure “not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities.”

She writes:

“Believing that your qualities are carved in stone creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character, well then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.”

"How school leaders and teachers can encourage a growth mindset at school and in the classroom
Creating a Growth Mindset
For over twenty years, researchers have been studying the concept of growth mindset, the belief that an individual’s “most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work” rather than being something that is set and unchangeable. We have the power to choose to have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset about ourselves. We can develop a growth mindset not only in our personal lives, but in our professional lives as well.

Embracing a growth mindset is impactful in education because it creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for accomplishment. But how can having a growth mindset impact a school’s culture? How can school leaders create a growth mindset culture in their schools? And how do educators encourage growth mindsets in their students?"

For the most part, American children aren't great at math.

But Chinese children tend to be excellent.

Testing half a million students worldwide, the Program for International Student Assessment is one of the most widely cited measurements of global education, and it's consistently found Chinese students at the top of the academic pile ... and Americans much nearer the bottom. Some experts argue that the PISA assessment, like any standardized tests, primarily measures a student's ability to take the test, not their knowledge, but hardly anyone disputes that the American education has some work to do when it comes to math. 

In Lenora Chu's new book "Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve," she begins to unearth the cultural differences that lead to this gap — and it's not just about what happens at school.

Explore curated collections of resources related to building the skills, mindsets, and necessary supports to help young people confront adversity, cope with challenges, and demonstrate perseverance to attain goals.

Now the tools in my classroom match the teaching. Instead of using pencils and erasers to hide their mistakes, my students use pens to document the effort they put into their work. In math, I teach them that the changes they make show evidence of flexibility and persistence as they try different strategies to solve problems successfully. I teach my students that, in their writing, revisions document their commitment to the craft of writing. They learn that even inked corrections to simple errors like miscalculations and misspellings provide evidence of attention to accuracy and detail.

In her celebrated book ‘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success’, Stanford university psychologist Carol S. Dweck makes a strong case backed up with  scientific evidence for the power of mindset in shaping one’s success or failure in almost every facet of our life.Those with a fixed mindset mentality tend to be limited in their learning scope believing that their inner traits and abilities are biologically determined. On the other hand, people with a growth mindset embrace change and tend to learn more from life experiences because for them concepts such as skills, abilities and competencies are not fixated  and can be developed through a process of error and trial.

In today’s post, we are sharing with you this handy infographic we created based on Marcus Guido’s post ’10 Ways Teachers Can Instill a Growth Mindset in Students’. Guido walks you through the different strategies you can use with your students to cultivate a growth mindset in your class and ultimately enhance students learning.  Read his post to learn more about each of the strategies featured here.