NCEO | Publication. Growth Mindset: Clearing up Some Common Confusions | MindShift | KQED News. By Eduardo Briceño A growth mindset is the understanding that personal qualities and abilities can change. It leads people to take on challenges, persevere in the face of setbacks, and become more effective learners. As more and more people learn about the growth mindset, which was first discovered by Stanford Professor Carol Dweck, we sometimes observe some confusions about it. Recently some critiques have emerged. Of course we invite critical analysis and feedback, as it helps all of us learn and improve, but some of the recent commentary seems to point to misunderstandings of growth mindset research and practice. This article summarizes some common confusions and offers some reflections.
Confusion #1: What a growth mindset is When we ask people to tell us what the growth mindset is, we often get lots of different answers, such as working hard, having high expectations, being resilient, or more general ideas like being open or flexible. Deepening our understanding over time. Let The River Run: Float On Down Stream. A classroom is ever changing like a river, displaying the progress, continuity and outpouring of knowledge. Rapids, falls, meandering, channels, banks, and eventually estuaries and deltas where they expand and release their flow into the sea of learning. Each bend of the lesson causing a course change, each student adding a plethora of personalities and mobility of mind. The flow of a classroom is roaring when these personalities merge from individual tributaries into a channel ever changing the landscape.
Every teachers goal is to have the engagement level of their classroom high. Where the ebb and drift of the activity is guiding students to a place of self-awareness and motivation. When a situation is "flowing" participants are generally happy and content, and working at their peak performance. An oxbow lake is a pool of stagnate water which forms beside a winding river due to erosion and deposition. Being in the water lends itself to fun, hands-on activities.
4 Ways to Reduce Classroom Risk and Reach the Whole Child. Intention is everything, especially when educating and nurturing children. Words matter, and specificity with vocabulary determines whether or not adult interactions with kids have the desired impact. One misguided message many teachers instill in their students is that risk-taking is good. On the surface, this may seem like a worthwhile component of social-emotional learning.
Yet I reiterate to my students that generally and within reason what one thinks of as risk is not truly risky at all. Especially where school is concerned, the vast majority of “risks” that tend to paralyze children and prevent them from making any academic attempt whatsoever contain no actual danger, undue burden, or extraordinary sacrifice. Granted, even in the best of situations a student’s active participation and investment in school sometimes contain a dash of discomfort, an element of uncertainty, and an enormous amount of effort and attention. Therefore, teachers should not completely dismiss risk. A Mindset Shift to Continue Supporting the Most Frustrating Kids | MindShift | KQED News.
Why Language Learning Apps Haven’t Helped Struggling ELL Students. Educational Leadership:Expecting Excellence:Seven Reasons for Standards-Based Grading. DOK in the Content Areas. #empower17. Larry Ferlazzo - Helping Students Motivate Themselves. The Teenage Brain Is Wired to Learn—So Make Sure Your Students Know It. Adolescence is an exciting time as teenagers become increasingly independent, begin to look forward to their lives beyond high school, and undergo many physical, emotional, and cognitive changes. In that last category, teenagers can learn to take charge of their developing brains and steer their thinking in positive and productive directions toward future college and career success. The brain’s prefrontal cortex, which functions as the control center for executive functions such as planning, goal setting, decision making, and problem solving, undergoes significant changes during the teenage years.
In an NPR interview, Laurence Steinberg, author of Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence, notes that ages 12 to 25 are a period of extraordinary neuroplasticity. They have the capacity to become functionally smarter. Tools for Self-Directed Learning Don’t just read—learn. Consider the source.
Create, then edit. Make a schedule—and stick to it. Resources on Learning and the Brain. Rich Talk = Rich Learning | Engage Students In Conversation. Schools Often Fail to Educate, Support English-Language Learners - Learning the Language. Schools across the United States often provide substandard instruction and social-emotional support to the nation's English-language learners—and fail to properly train the educators who teach them, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finds.
Noting that limited English proficiency remains a substantial barrier to academic success for millions of children in K-12 schools, the study explores how under-resourced schools and under-prepared educators can hinder efforts to help those students learn and master English. The committee behind the report—consisting of a who's who of experts on language acquisition and educators—also explored the struggles of specific populations of English-learners such as those with disabilities, who are less likely than their native English-speaking peers to be referred to early intervention and special education programs.
Here's a link to the full report. For Further Reading on This Topic: A27. Comprehensible Input: What Teachers Can Do - Empowering ELLs. Did you get to read about Ayaka’s story in the previous article? It illustrates how Entering ELs can engage in critical thinking activities even though they are completely new to English. In Ayaka’s case, we focused on what we could do to help her learn and ignored all the rest until later. As I worked with Ayaka, I only had two priorities – first develop comprehensible input, then foster engagement. This is teacher speak for: Students can participate if they understand the content and the instructions. My first priority was to help Ayaka comprehend the instructions so that she can engage with the content.
As her content knowledge grew, my role switched from translator to conductor – helping her communicate and apply her understanding. The Diagram The diagram below, divided into two sections, is the visual embodiment of these two priorities. Comprehensible Input: What Teachers Can Do Direct Instruction Joint Construction The main tool used in this phase is prompting. Mr. Mr. Mr. Dexter: Mr. Three Things Top Performing Students Know That Their Peers Miss | MindShift | KQED News.
Every class has students who excel and those who don’t. The reasons behind academic performance are myriad, but when Douglas Barton and his team at Elevate Education set out to study and benchmark the most effective practices used by top students in Australia, the U.K., South Africa and the U.S. they found three common practices. The company has used its findings to coach students on the most effective study strategies.
Barton says 50 – 90 percent of students say IQ has the biggest impact on their ability to get good grades. Barton says his team found 13 other variables more important than IQ to predict academic achievement including things like self-discipline and self-motivation. So his first piece of advice to students is to stop worrying about IQ. The other reason students often give for not succeeding at the level they want is that they aren’t working hard enough. One of biggest differences between top students and everyone else was that when they study, they take practice tests. Response: Understanding the Benefits of a Student's Home Language.
(This is the second post in a three-part series. You can see Part One here.) The new "question-of-the-week" is: What is the role, if any, of an ELL student's home language in the classroom? In Part One of this series, Melissa Eddington, Wendi Pillars, Tracey Flores, Sandy Ruvalcaba Carrillo, and Mary Ann Zehr offered their thoughts. You can listen to a 10-minute conversation I had with Melissa, Wendi and Tracey on my BAM!
Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here. Today, Rosa Isiah, Tan Huynh, Karen Nemeth, Sarah Thomas contribute their responses to the question. Response From Rosa Isiah Rosa Isiah, Ed. "It is hard to argue that we are teaching the whole child when school policy dictates that students leave their language and culture at the schoolhouse door" (Cummins, 2005). The number of English Learners has dramatically increased over the last two decades. Home Language and Academic Identity Culture and Home Language: English learner Assets. Focus 2 Achieve - Infographic: Deeper Learning. How to Put Metacognition in Process for Teachers | Shyamsunder Panchavati.
EFL Listening lesson: what one class learned (and taught me) about learner autonomy – DYNAMITE ELT. This is a story about listening. About about how, in an effort to encourage learner autonomy, I helped some students start to overcome their fears of tackling authentic listening texts. But it’s also about what I discovered from listening to my own students about the strategies they used for tackling authentic texts. And finally, it’s about listening to feedback ― the best kind of feedback a teacher can get. The story starts in 2015, when I taught four different groups, back to back, at a single company. Lessons were a combination of articles they found, topics that came up in class, grammar that reflected challenges I picked up on in conversation and writing.
Sounds like trouble The thing that absolutely terrified them, however, was listening. They soldiered on, but when I asked them to watch some PechaKucha presentations online to get a feel for the format (before doing it ourselves), this group practically went into crisis. Listening for signs of hope Making strategies explicit. If You Teach At-Risk Kids, You Need This Book (Hint: It's not Ruby Payne) Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta Hammond, 192 pages, Corwin, November 2014Buy Now [The links in this article are Amazon Affiliate links.
If you click these and make a purchase from Amazon, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for your support!] For eight years, I taught at-risk students. Not all of my kids fit that description, but at least half belonged to the groups we talk about when we talk about the achievement gap: Students whose race, culture, home language, or socioeconomic status put them at a disadvantage in school.
I did my best to meet their needs, to challenge them and set them up for success in life, but when I look back with the knowledge I have gained over the last few years, I know I did a crappy job. The discussion often went like this: “What do you think is the problem here?” Dion shrugged. Another shrug. Nothing changed. . Evaluating Websites as Information Sources. Studies suggest that many U.S. students are too trusting of information found on the internet and rarely evaluate the credibility of a website’s information. For example, a survey found that only 4 percent of middle school students reported checking the accuracy of information found on the web at school, and even fewer did so at home (New Literacies Research Team & Internet Reading Research Group, 2006).
At the same time, the web is often used as a source of information in school projects, even in early schooling, and sites with inaccurate information can come up high in search rankings. Shenglan Zhang and I thought that we could help address this situation by laying a foundation for website evaluation in elementary school. In particular, we wanted to: To achieve these aims, we developed the WWWDOT Framework. Who wrote it and what credentials do they have? In teaching WWWDOT, we elaborate on each of these factors. In the study, the WWWDOT Framework was taught in four 30-minute sessions.
Helping-english-learners-break-through-language-plateaus. By Wendi Pillars Moses is a charmer. He wears a perma-smile to match his unflappable sense of humor, is a smooth talker, and a great sport with adults. He speaks English colloquially with absolute savviness, much to the chagrin of many of his teachers, since much of his conversational energy is directed at friends, girls, and racking up cool points as he aims for social capital. However, give him a diagram to label, a writing assignment to complete, a reading passage to summarize, and vocabulary to memorize, and it’s readily apparent that his social language savvy does not equate to sophisticated academic language proficiency.
At 16, he is considered a long-term English-language learner (LTEL), although he has lived in the United States since he was 1 year old. LTELs are students who have been classified as English-language learners (ELLs) for more than six years, are verbally bilingual, are below grade-level in reading and writing, and are at high-risk for dropping out. 1. 2. 3. Web Only. Response: Students Exposed to Trauma are 'Full of Promise' Education Week American Education News Site of Record. Gritty Politti: Grit, Growth Mindset and Neoliberal Language Teaching | Freelance Teacher Self Development.
Over the summer, while everyone else was enjoying themselves I was ruing the day I decided to look at grit (Duckworth, 2007) for my Master’s dissertation. I decided it’s unworkable so you get to read about it here. What is Grit? Grit is so difficult to define that it takes Duckworth (2016) the best part of a book to describe it adequately. Grit is the orientation of short-term goals toward one’s passions and long-term goals. It has also now mutated, taking on Dweck’s (1996) Growth Mindset, Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) Flow, Ericsson and Pool’s (2016) Deliberate Practice and become a behemoth.
Grit is similar to one Conscientiousness facet in particular, achievement striving, which is measured with items such as “I’m something of a ‘workaholic”’ and “I strive for excellence in everything I do” (Costa & McCrae, 1992a). Grit does appear to be lauded, particularly in the USA, for being a commonsense approach to teaching and learning. What negative effects are present? References Denby, D. Carol Dweck Explains The “False” Growth Mindset That Worries Her | MindShift | KQED News.
Carol Dweck has become the closest thing to an education celebrity because of her work on growth mindset. Her research shows that children who have a growth mindset welcome challenges as opportunities to improve, believing that their abilities can change with focused effort. Kids with fixed mindsets, on the other hand, believe they have a finite amount of talent that can't be altered and shy away from challenges that might reveal their inabilities. Dweck believes educators flocked to her work because many were tired of drilling kids for high-stakes tests and recognized that student motivation and love for learning was being lost in the process. But Dweck is worried that as her research became more popular, many people oversimplified its message.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Dweck explained to reporter Christine Gross-Loh all the ways she sees growth mindset being misappropriated.