Some of what she talks about is how she went into a classroom and did an experiment to try and increase and give them confidence in critical thinking and using a growth mindset. They got the students in the class to play non verbal reasoning games. This was to get the students to try and think in critical ways and for the teachers to see the students working and thinking in different ways.
"The addition of the games did something more than build the reasoning abilities of these students; the reasoning and problem-solving games contributed to a mindset shift in the teachers and, in some cases, the students as well. Many teachers reported that they saw potential in students that they would have never seen without the games. Some of the students who spoke little English flourished when the games came out. Some students who were functioning below grade level showed great strength in reasoning through playing these games. Teachers became more reflective about their own mindsets, viewed students differently, and raised expectations for many students." (from "Mindsets in the Classroom: Building a Growth Mindset Learning Community" by Mary Cay Ricci)
I wanted to try something like this to see if it would work in any way with my target group of students in my inquiry.
I had done a little of this last year - blog post here - so I decided that this same Towers of Hanoi game was a good place to start. I want to do this as my inquiry is about seeing if teaching the whole class in the same way as I am teaching my 4 scholarship students will improve the achievement of the whole class. This will involve the rest of the class feeling that they are able to do this level of work so I am wanting to do a lot of work with them about mindset.
Here is my collection of homemade games that we tried out today.
Here are my students having a go this afternoon when we had a lesson in the last period of the day. We worked in pairs today. One had to explain what to move where and the other had to follow instructions. They ended up helping each other. As you can see from the pics, we also got the big chess set out where there was also a lot of discussion and helping. It's all about the tatics.
Kia ora Karen, I recall participating in collaborative games at the Middle Leaders PD at Kokako Lodge earlier this year, when we did the Towers of Hanoi. Our team was fantastic at negotiating, and talking together etc, and yet, pretty hopeless at completing the task. The funny thing was, that we actually felt good about ourselves, even though we weren't able to finish, and the other team won :)
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