Growth Mindset

 What is a growth mindset?

According to Carol Dweck, a growth mindset is one that embraces challenges, persists in the face of setbacks, sees effort as a path to mastery, learns from criticism, and finds lessons and inspiration in the success of others and all of theses attributes lead to ever-higher levels of achievement. With a growth mindset student's intelligence can be developed. 

On the opposite end of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is one that avoids challenges, gives up easily, sees effort as fruitless or worse, ignores useful negative feedback, and feels threatened by others success. With a fixed mindset students may plateau early and achieve less than their full potential. 

As teachers we need to accept the fact that we are going to make mistakes, the most important thing is that we learn from them and then we teach our children that it's okay to mess as long as we keep trying. If no one ever made any mistakes then the world would be a very boring place with no new discoveries! 

In my classroom I want to introduce growth mindset by giving the students chances to discover and create. In the short video about cultivating growth mindset, the teachers at the school have a makers area in their classrooms. The students are able to experiment and use their imagination and creativity to explore and create and mess up. They get to learn from each other, from their teacher, and most importantly, themselves. This is the type of environment I would like to create in my own classroom. Nobody is perfect and that's okay.