Mindset Check In

Today, I gave my students some sticky notes and they were asked to write their reactions to 5 statements.

Here are the statements that were put up on the board.

Statement 1

Your intelligence is a fixed thing

Statement 2

You can’t get any smarter

Statement 3

You can learn skills up to a certain level then stop

Statement 4

You can’t learn how to do everything - we are only good at
certain things

Statement 5

I can’t get any better at things I am no good at

Here are their responses. They wrote them onto the sticky notes and I typed them up as they wrote them.

"Educators who value the importance of providing challenging opportunities for students find that students react to the challenge in different ways. Some students have a “Bring it on!” approach and embrace the challenge with enthusiasm. These students realise that they may not be successful and might even fail at a task or two, but want to take the risk and stretch themselves. Other students feel threatened by the challenge, are afraid they will not succeed, and will often give up before they put much effort into it. It is imperative that teachers develop a climate in their classroom where failure is viewed as an expected and very important part of the learning process and students learn to reflect and redirect so that they can approach a challenging task in a new way or with more effort." 

(from "Mindsets in the Classroom: Building a Growth Mindset Learning Community" by Mary Cay Ricci)

The student responses were interesting. They started off with quite short answers and as we were getting to the last one they were getting more and more away from being totally positive in their mindset towards the statements. It is good to see a lot of positivity in their thoughts. There is room to work with them and try and get them to apply that positivity to their design work. That is where we come to our wall, when they are designing. I need to work through some strategies with them. Drawing is a skill. They all see that anyone can learn a skill and spend time to improve it. We need to work through strategies about the designing / thinking / analysis part as this is where we stick.