Growth Mindset

Helping Teach the Future!

Since I took the Mythology and Folklore course last semester I had already watched the videos over Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset. I enjoyed learning about her “not yet” mantra of telling students instead of they failed a lesson that instead staying they have not learned the lesson “not yet”. I picked two different videos about Growth Mindset to write about. The first video was called The Sleeper by Michael Wesch. The video explained how a teacher would get very upset when a student would fall asleep in his class and no matter what he tried he could not get this student to pay attention. Since this student did not pay attention it brought up many different feelings in the teacher, that he was boring, meaningless, but it also caused him to be angry. When the teacher decided to confront the student, he took him to lunch and actually learned about what was going on in his life. He learned that this student was obsessed with gaming and was actually designing his own game. Because the teacher took the time to learn about this student he was able to help him develop his game idea and help the student develop his strengths. This is important because each student is unique and has different strengths. Depending on the strengths of a student certain lesson might not be the best for them to learn and grow. The second video I chose to watch was Carol Dweck - A Study on Praise and Mindset by Trevor Ragant. In the video, they did a simple study where one group was praised for their intelligence and one group was praised for their effort. They found that the students that were praised for their effort wanted to attempt to take a test that was harder the next time around. Carol Dweck explains that this is because the student that were praised for their effort feeling that if “they do not take on hard things and stick to them, I am not going to grow.” Praising students for effort makes the student want to try harder because they do not feel like they are going to be looked down at for getting answers wrong but will be praised for just trying on the problem. This is important in helping students continue to develop by praising the process they use and the effort they put out.

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Image: "Effort ignites ability." Source: Created Image at Cheezburger