My Expedition of Becoming a Master
The purpose of the paper I will be writing is, my classmates and I have been exploring some specific habits and mindsets that make students successful. We have overviewed grit, perseverance, fixed mindsets, growth mindsets, deliberate practice and strategies of experienced writers that was mentioned by Nancy Sommers in her research. I have analyzed and explored my past as a student to try an learn how to become a better student in college. In this research I discovered many things that could help me like growth mindsets.
Personally for myself learning how to have a growth mindset has really helped me out a lot. It is a good habit for me to have in college because in high school I faced many obstacles, but having that helped me leap over those obstacles and accomplish big things. Having a growth mindset helps you become more confident and being more confident allows you to accomplish bigger and bigger things. I discovered this technique of believing in myself from Dr. Dweck’s article called “Decades of Scientific Research that Started a Growth Mindset Revolution.” I pulled a quoted from her writing that really stuck with me and it states “When students believe they can get smarter, they understand that effort makes them stronger. Therefore they put in extra time and effort, and that leads to higher achievement.’’
An example from the past that I used this method on was my Senior in Algebra II I was failing multiple quizzes and started to lose hope in myself. But I talked to my wrestling coach who is a phycologist and he told me to approach my math with a growth mindset and study my math as much as possible with a positive outlook and attitude. So I did and through perseverance I was able to get a B in the class and learn how to have a growth mindset. In my personal opinion I feel this habit worked for me because I didn’t allow myself to go into a state of negativity I just kept a positive outlook on math and over time and repetition that growth mindset grew into a reality and it really payed off for me in the end result. This semester I want to use this habit in math because I am currently taking two math classes and it can be overwhelming at times but I know having a growth mindset and staying tough through it will give me the ability to complete the courses with a passing grade.
For me focusing on tasks beyond my current level of competence or control is the best component of deliberate practice I have found and that works for me. This works best for me because Those mentors remind me how much potential I have and how I can improve to for fill that potential. In Ericsson’s writing she talks about components of deliberate practice such as “focusing on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort.” In the article The “Making of an Expert” Ericsson states “Moving outside your traditional comfort zone of achievement requires substantial motivation and sacrifice, but it’s a necessary discipline.”
An example of mine is when I was a sophomore year in wrestling I set goals for myself at the beginning of the season that were farfetched and going to be very difficult to accomplish but I knew that I could learn and get better. I did this because the only way I could have a chance of completing these goals is going out of my comfort zone and constantly doing things that I don’t like. So throughout the season I would get up every morning at 5 AM and going lift weights and wrestle. I did this because it gave me a sense of hope and help me truly believe I could do it, also an opportunity to get extra repetitions in and get used to working out consistently in the morning which I absolutely hated because I was not a morning person. But as an end result I was able to achieve what I wanted and ended up accomplishing all those difficult goals of mine. This habit worked for me because I had a growth mindset when approaching tasks beyond my ability. Every morning I woke up I did the best I could to focus on the positive end of things and give myself the best opportunity to learn. A class that I am taking this semester that this habit will help most with is my English class. This is because I will have to put hours of work in when it is uncomfortable for me in order to be able to get good grades on essays and bigger writing assignments. This will work because I will get myself into a habit of doing work at times I don’t usually do them like earlier in the day when I feel like relaxing I begin my English homework instead to get a good head start and enough time to put quality work in.
The final strategy for student success I learned about was to think about my writing as experienced writers do. The experienced writer strategy that I personally liked best was when they describe how they approach there arguments in a way of using structural expressions such as “finding a framework,” “a pattern,” or “a design” for their argument. I would touch up more on that in the next couple sentences. In the learning of experienced writers I came across an article written by Nancy Sommers. Nancy Sommers is professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and studies the writing development off college students.
Her study was about tracking the college writing experiences of 400 students from the Harvard Class of 2001 to try and better understand the hard to grasp roles writing has in undergraduate education. What I learned from reading her article is many mistakes I had made before as a writer and what I could do to change and improve those skills. A specific student mistake that I have made that Sommer’s describes in her article is taking the revision process as a rewording activity. An example of this is my junior year of high school in World History I had to write a essay and I used an essay offline as a tool to help me write my essay and instead of coming up with my own ideas I tried to just revise the essay offline by rewording it and as the end result I almost got tagged with plagiarism and ended up getting a bad great.
Back to my sub-point earlier in the writing the successful experienced writer strategy that Sommers mentioned that I could have used instead was the experienced writers describe how they approach there arguments in a way of using structural expressions such as “finding a framework,” “a pattern,” or “a design” for their argument. Using this strategy would have led to a more successful paper for me because I wouldn’t of been so focused on paraphrasing words and finding synonyms. Instead I would have been focus on sentence structure and the overall paper itself.
In conclusion what I specifically got out of thinking about how successful habits can help me in college was always setting the bar high for myself and doing things outside of my comfort zone to help myself become a master at being successful. To me that was the most important thing I got from researching and learning how to become a master at something and successful.
