Mindlab Week 5

Week 5   

Developing a Growth Mindset - Leadership

Mindset – a mental attitude that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations

Media: The Idea of Building Learning Power - Guy Claxton  (video)

Main points

·       Young people can become more ‘intelligent’

·       Strengthening capacities leads to powerful, confident, real life learners

Eg persistence, resourcefulness, thoughtfulness, being a team player, being imaginative yet able to think with clarity

·       Teachers can do this by focusing on the learning process eg talking about learning, displaying all stages of the learning process

·       These capacities can be transferred to other experiences in a child’s life

Ideas linked to our inquiry How do we ensure that play-based and problem solving inquiry leads to higher levels of student engagement and accelerated progress for all students? 

We need to have high expectations of all students. Students need to have opportunities to strengthen their learning power in a range of learning areas/contexts. Student and teacher talk needs to be focused on the process of learning. Both students and teachers need to understand and be able to talk about themselves as learners. Students and teachers need to be able to articulate how they use their learning power in contexts other than school.

Media: The Power of Believing That You Can Improve – Carol Dweck (video)

Main points:

·       The power of yet is huge!

·       Abilities can be developed by engaging deeply in a challenging process, making errors and learning from them. This is a growth mindset

Eg Praise wisely. Praise effort, strategies, improvement, perseverance

·       Mindsets can be changed. People who understand this, make progress

Effort and difficulty leads to neurons making new connection and people get smarter

·       Understanding growth mindsets and using what you know can lead to much more equatible outcomes for students

·       “Now we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with YET!”

Ideas linked to our inquiry How do we ensure that play-based and problem solving inquiry leads to higher levels of student engagement and accelerated progress for all students? 

We need to have high expectations of all students based on an understanding that growth mindsets can be changed developed and that intelligence can be changed and developed. We need to provide challenging problems as a basis for learning in a range of contexts. We need to ensure that capabilities are noticed and acknowledged by the learners themselves, their peers and us. We need to position ourselves as learners developing our own growth mindsets

We need to ensure that we all understand that when we are challenged and we persevere, we become smarter.

Media: Growth Mindset in Context Content and Culture Matter Too

By David Dockterman Ed.D., and Lisa Blackwell Ph.D. (journal article)

Main points:

·       We have a mix of fixed and growth mindsets eg “I can’t do maths”

·       We can have a fixed mindset because of repeated success eg easy success can leave us without strategies to overcome difficulty

·       Mindset is learned from experience and instruction

·       When we understand how the brain learns and grows smarter we know how to get smarter

·       Our brains are like a muscle that grows stronger with exercise and we need to know how to do that

·       Mindset is continually influenced by peers, teachers, parents and society

·       Praising intelligence makes us fragile

·       Peer culture and identity are important factors in students’ sense of self-efficacy

·       A sense of belonging is very important in developing a growth mindset. We need classroom, school and community culture that reflects that language and expectations around growth mindset

·       Some students with a long history of failure, may need additional evidence that their effort will be worth it. – Making the level of challenge appropriate.

Students with a growth mindset are primed to seek and learn the strategies and background knowledge that will facilitate their success.

·       It’s O.K to let students fail but we need to ensure they know how to learn from that failure

Instruction should reflect the language, strategies, and expectations of effortful learning, risk-taking and productive failure.

Ideas linked to our inquiry How do we ensure that play-based and problem solving inquiry leads to higher levels of student engagement and accelerated progress for all students?

Share with students who may have a fixed mindset due to easy success, how they can develop their mindset.

Make the sharing of information and ideas about how the brain learns, explicit.

Everyone noticing and responding to examples of a growth mindset.

Being thoughtful and reflective about the experiences and level of challenge appropriate for students with a long history of failure.

Ensure that students see themselves as belonging to a community of learners who value effortful learning. That they feel supported to take risks. That they have status in a group of their peers that is linked to effortful learning.

That peers, teachers and whanau understand that developing a growth mindset involves expectations of effortful learning, risk-taking and failure. That this will lead to higher levels of student engagement and accelerated progress.

Computational Thinking- Digital   

The poetry of programming – Linda Liukas (video)

Code is the next language

Kids need to be creators rather than consumers of technology. To express themselves.

Kids learn computer skills through play

The internet of things – anything can be a computer

“ The more approachable, inclusive and the more diverse we make the world of technology, the more colourful the world will be.”

“ Disruption doesn’t start with technology, it starts with people who have a vision.”