Carol Dweck: A Summary of The Two Mindsets There are two main mindsets we can navigate life with: growth and fixed. Having a growth mindset is essential for success. In this post, we explore how to develop the right mindset for improving your intelligence. Carol Dweck studies human motivation. She spends her days diving into why people succeed (or don’t) and what’s within our control to foster success. Her theory of the two mindsets and the difference they make in outcomes is incredibly powerful. As she describes it: “My work bridges developmental psychology, social psychology, and personality psychology, and examines the self-conceptions (or mindsets) people use to structure the self and guide their behavior. Her inquiry into our beliefs is synthesized in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Dweck’s work shows the power of our most basic beliefs. In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck writes: The Two Mindsets Your view of yourself can determine everything. In Mindset, Dweck writes: The mindset affects creativity too.
What is Mindset Every so often a truly groundbreaking idea comes along. This is one. Mindset explains: Why brains and talent don’t bring success How they can stand in the way of it Why praising brains and talent doesn’t foster self-esteem and accomplishment, but jeopardizes them How teaching a simple idea about the brain raises grades and productivity What all great CEOs, parents, teachers, athletes know Mindset is a simple idea discovered by world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck in decades of research on achievement and success—a simple idea that makes all the difference. In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. Teaching a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in the worlds of business, education, and sports.
Lesson Goals: A Quick Way to Boost Student Achievement Great lessons start with a clear focus and lesson goals provide that focus. Do you want to help more of students to succeed? Would you like to push each child to new levels of personal excellence? Then try setting lesson goals every day. Research1 shows that teachers who are clear about what they want their students to learn as a result of each lesson have a higher impact on their students’ results. Focusing students’ attention and activity is a core part of evidence based teaching. Lesson Goals & Learning Intentions John Hattie is one of the main go-to-gurus on evidence based teaching. Learning intentions describe what it is we want students to learn in terms of the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values within any particular unit or lesson.John Hattie Some people refer to learning intentions as lesson goals. The key difference is that learning intentions can relate a broader array of tasks, including assignments, units of work and even yearly overviews. Why You Should Set Lesson Goals
What Having a “Growth Mindset” Actually Means Scholars are deeply gratified when their ideas catch on. And they are even more gratified when their ideas make a difference — improving motivation, innovation, or productivity, for example. But popularity has a price: People sometimes distort ideas and therefore fail to reap their benefits. This has started to happen with my research on “growth” versus “fixed” mindsets among individuals and within organizations. To briefly sum up the findings: Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. “Growth mindset” has become a buzzword in many major companies, even working its way into their mission statements. I already have, and have always had, a growth mindset. Even if we correct these misconceptions, it’s still not easy to attain a growth mindset. To remain in a growth zone, we must identify and work with these triggers.
The Complete Guide to 20% Time (and Genius Hour) in the Classroom It’s been almost a full three years since I told my students they would have 20% of their class time to work on whatever project they were inspired to create. Since then I’ve learned so much from my students and our amazing community of 20% time and Genius Hour teachers. I have tried to share this journey, the ups and downs, through blog posts, video interviews, a 20% time MOOC, and most recently my book, Inquiry and Innovation in the Classroom. The Course: The Complete Guide to 20% Time (and Genius Hour) in the Classroom When you sign up for this free email course you’ll receive the following: 4 learning modulesVideo interviews and examplesResearch and resources to support this workParent letters, rubrics, and timelines to help the process Sign-Up For the Free Course Here You’ll receive the entire course over the period of 7 days. Module 1: Why 20% Time? Module 2: How to Get Started Module 3: Navigating the Project’s Ups and Downs Module 4: Final Presentations, Grading, and Reflections Enjoy!
Pedagogic theory – Information Literacy Website Learning theory framework Cognitive theorists view learning as involving the acquisition or reorganization of the cognitive structures through which humans process and store information (Good and Brophy, 1990). Metacognitive learning theory addresses strategies students need to help themselves monitor and direct their own learning. These strategies include predicting outcomes, planning research steps, time management, decision-making, and alternate strategies when a search fails (Donovan et al., 1999). Corresponding teaching approaches Key theorists Albert Bandura, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, David Ausubel. References Donovan, M. Good, T. Kobelski, P. and Reichel, M. 1981.
Carol Dweck Revisits the 'Growth Mindset' Opinion By Carol Dweck For many years, I secretly worked on my research. However, my colleagues and I learned things we thought people needed to know. So a few years back, I published my book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success to share these discoveries with educators. —Jori Bolton for Education Week This is wonderful, and the good word continues to spread. A growth mindset isn’t just about effort. We also need to remember that effort is a means to an end to the goal of learning and improving. “The growth mindset was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them.” Recently, someone asked what keeps me up at night. I also fear that the mindset work is sometimes used to justify why some students aren’t learning: “Oh, he has a fixed mindset.” Must it always come back to finding a reason why some children just can’t learn, as opposed to finding a way to help them learn? In many quarters, a growth mindset had become the right thing to have, the right way to think.
How can I set clear expectations in active learning classes, so students see the value of engaging? If you teach using active learning strategies, you may find that students don’t automatically engage. Students may just sit back and listen, waiting for their peers to term. Luckily, open resistance is rare. You have the power to impact how students engage with the curriculum and the content. In this lengthy Expert Recommendation, you will find a summary of the research on student engagement, recommendations for helping students to engage productively in active learning, and concrete examples of how to incorporate these ideas in your classroom. Interested in more ideas on student engagement? About student engagement What is engagement? Engagement has three primary aspects (Engle and Conant 2002; Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris 2004; Chapman 2003; DeMonbrun et al. 2017; Nguyen et al. 2021): Behavioral engagement: Do students participate in the activity? We want our students to have all three: behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement. Do students typically resist active learning? 1. 2.
8 Things to Stop Passive-Aggressive Behavior in Workplace One of the most irritating things you’ll ever have to deal with in your workplace is a passive-aggressive coworker. We’ve all seen this behavior before--and perhaps been guilty of it at some point: Think of the coworker who doesn’t say hello when he sees you in the hallway. When you write him an email to ask for important deliverables, he doesn’t respond. He even actively undermines you but acts like nothing’s wrong when you confront him. Sound familiar? Sadly, this type of behavior is more common than you think. As a below-the-radar technique for expressing discontent, it’s one of the preferred methods for venting anger in the workplace--just short of crossing a red line and risk getting fired. Imagine confronting this infuriating behavior by calling your coworker a “passive-aggressive” or, worse still, a “jerk”? Whitson defines passive-aggressive behavior as a “deliberate and masked way of expressing covert feelings of anger.” Devious Hypocritical Resentful Negative Disingenuous Powerless
How to Gamify Professional Development in Your School Sometimes we act like professional development is hard. It doesn’t have to be. Sometimes we treat professional development like a chore. It should be fun, engaging, and wanted. As a K-12 staff developer I’ve spent the past two years giving professional development and receiving a lot of professional development. Because if you reach more teachers, you reach more students. We were kicking around ideas to “flip” our PD this entire year, but the lightbulb moment came during an actual professional development session that we took from Philip Vinogradov at our local IU. Phil gave a session on Gamification, and let me tell you…this guy is a Google Certified master gamer! If you’ve read my blog before, you know that I don’t spend too much time “thinking” about making a change, I try to jump in and “do it”. In the three weeks since Phil presented on Gamification, Dianne and I have been able to gamify and flip professional development sessions in our district…and are preparing to launch next week.
What Every Teacher Should Know About the Science of Learning The human brain has a remarkable and often unexpected way of making, storing, and retrieving memories. Did you ever wonder why it’s easy to learn some things and hard to learn other things? Why can you read a book and feel you learned a lot, only to find that you’ve forgotten most of it a year later? Why can you remember your first day of teaching, but not your tenth day? What is the science of learning? Cognitive scientists have conducted research on what’s called the “science of learning”—how we learn stories, names, facts, important events, unimportant events, and more. Teaching fads feel like they’ve persisted for 100 years, too. There are two main reasons why educators keep reinventing the wheel with teaching strategies based on the “fad of the semester,” when scientifically based strategies are already out there: The science of learning sits dormant in academic journals, rather than easily accessible in pre-service textbooks and professional development materials. Start Here