Growth Mindset
When students and teachers have a growth mindset they understand that intelligence can be developed. Students focus on improvements instead of worrying about how smart they are. They work hard to learn more and get smarter. Years of research has shown that children with a growth mindset have greater motivation in school, do better academically and are happier.
This is a key concept which we are working with this year to facilitate all children to have a ‘can do’ attitude towards learning. We are teaching them a really important word –YET. Just because a student can’t do something now doesn’t mean they won’t be able to do it in the future - they just can’t do it YET.
In order to ensure that we are encouraging effort and persistence we are thinking very carefully about our praise, feedback and marking. Rather than simply praising success we are working on praising effort and persistence.
We believe the best thing to do is to teach children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. We know that we will have been successful when our children recognise that effort, persistence and good learning habits are what will help them to improve. If children have fixed mindsets they find it hard to cope with failure: we teach our children to see mistakes and failure as positive.
Click here for more information about this.
A good video for a summary - only 6 minutes long - click here.
