After my I-search, I found that lots of scholarly articles focus on the approach to develop the growth mindset. Then I concluded a question — How to develop the growth mindset. This is an interesting question that I can explore more in-depth information about the growth mindset even it will be help for me to develop the growth mindset. As is known to all, the growth mindset is important to students’ achievement. The concept of the growth mindset first appeared in Carol Dweck’s book: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. A growth mindset is when students understand that their abilities can be developed. (Carol Dweck) It can help students to change their attitude into a positive one and make students keep enthusiastic on study. Therefore, more and more people attach importance to the growth mindset on the development of students and try to find the correct way to help students establish the growth mindset. Totally, students develop the growth mindset in two ways: one is by themselves, and another one is by the help of their teachers.
“Instead, as you begin to understand the fixed and growth mindsets, you will see exactly how one thing leads to another — how a belief that your qualities are carved in stone leads to a host of thoughts and actions, and how a belief that your qualities can be cultivated leads to a host of different thoughts and actions, taking you down an entirely different road.” — Carol Dweck
The article “How do you actually develop a growth mindset?” was written in a personal blog. I searched on Google and found it which is especially for students themselves. In this article, the rhetor — “InnerDrive” is a mental skills training company. It covers the traditional areas of sports psychology and mindset training. The rhetor gave five key words about developing the growth mindset: learning, asking for feedback, persistence, choosing difficult tasks and setting high standard. At the same time, these words constituted a gradual process of creating the growth mindset.
Learning is important to students. The attitude towards learning will be basic of their school achievement. Some students focused more on comparison and they tended to have an ego-orientation. And some students who focused on learning are task-orientated. This difference leads to their different consequences on study and this situation had a scientific proof. Task orientation has been associated with better motivation, enough confidence, self-regulation, academic performance and reduced anxiety. These factors would make students to understand the fun and meaning of learning. In the course of learning, teachers’ feedbacks will have a vital impact on students’ learning. However, plenty of students tend to ignore feedbacks and will not find their shortages and improve them according to the feedbacks. People with a growth mindset seek out and value feedback more than those with a fixed mindset (InnerDrive). These persons see feedbacks as an opportunity to learn new things, challenging and improving themselves and they make asking for feedback as a habit, which is a positive response to either success or failure. The ability to persist and overcome setbacks is seen by many as a key life skill (InnerDrive). Persistence is the ability to stick with something for a persistent time. Research indicates that the persons with a growth mindset will persist for longer. Someone has a growth mindset, but they can not insist on it in the future, so they still can not succeed. The same applies to learning. Choosing difficult tasks and setting high standards may have similar influence to students. Students with fixed mindset tend to equate making mistakes with having low levels of ability. This can lead to them being afraid of challenges or difficulties and they think they can not behave well. Over time, their negative choices can lead to worse performance and lose confidence on study even in daily life. By encouraging students to choose difficult taskas and setting high standards, it will help them develop their mindset and improve themselves to break through their current level of competence. This also can help students develop a sense of courage and curiosity. At the same time, they can keep passionate about their learnign and life. Many students may be confused about the way of establishing the growth mindset and try their best to keep this mindset on study.This article gave several suggestions in order to help students find their personal shortcomings and develop the growth mindset in the right ways. Accroding to these detailed tips, students will feel a sudden realization and follow these tips to change their ways.
This source “Growth Mindset of Gifted Seventh Grade Students in Science” is really different from the first one that it is more professional and academic. I found this article from the library databases. There are three rhetors — Julie Esparza, Lee Shumow and Jennifer A. Schmidt. Julie is a program coordinator in west Aurora(IL)School district 129. And the other two persons are Ph.D from Northern Illinois University. They are all devoted to the study of mindset. This scholarly article did not just talked about the gifted students. It also mentioned that some students with fixed mindset uses some correct ways to change their original mindset into the growth mindset such as beliefs about the malleability of intelligence, desiring to learn , pursuing learning opportunities and so on. Meanwhile, the article contained a complete survey which happen in the shool. The rhetors sorted out the data and summarized the methods mentioned above. Therefore, these conclusion can be more credible and the students must be persuaded better. Students tend to believe in authority figures in a particular field. The ways that the rhetors concluded were not difficult and students may feel more confident to develop the growth mindset.
“Teachers should be the best minds in the country.” — Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
I searched on Google and found an article “ The Impact of a Growth Mindset on Student Achievement and Success” on the website called Athlos Academies. The rhetor is Tabitha Bower who is the social media specialist for Athlos Academies. In this article, she focused more on the teacher’s role in the development of the students’ growth mindset. She stated that the teachers were able to make their students grow and become deeper learners when they started teaching and learning with a growth mindset. Teachers having a growth mindset is the most basic step to helping students develop the growth mindset. Because these teachers believe in the potential of each students. They help each student grow as a learner by understanding that with effort and perseverance, all of them can be successful on study. She gave an example of a teacher called Isbell. The teachers said the power of growth mindset in teaching from how many educators approach math teaching. “In math, we traditionally provide students a strategy to solve a problem with no awareness or recognition of their own intuitive strategies for solving the problem,” Isbell said. “When we do this, we unknowingly tell the student, ‘your ideas do not really matter, just do it the way the teacher is telling you how to do it.” Approaching math teaching with a growth mindset, Isbell instead encouraged her students to find their own strategies to solve problems. She gave an open-ended problem in classes and students could have more opportunites to take risks, face challenges or failure and overcoming by realizing failure can give new chances and meaningful learning. This example included some important actions that the teachers should do before teaching or helping the students develop the growth mindset. This article is more essential for teachers to read. The teachers can consider whether they have growth mindset or not and some ways of education that can be improved in the future.
From some academic websites, some articles gave some tips to teachers on helping students develop the growth mindset. As the topic written “ 6 Tips to Help Students Develop a Growth Mindset in the Classroom, this article gave 6 useful tips for teachers to understand. The rhetor is Lexia Blog which is a resource hub for education news, insights, teaching tips, policy analysis, and more — all written by Lexia’s experts in reading instruction, literacy assessment, and educational technology. In this article , there are 6 tips:
- Model growth mindset as an educator
- Praising effort
- Different strategies. Read books with characters who face challenges and develop strategies to overcome them
- Conduct activities that give students the chance to practice phrases that promote the growth mindset.
- Display visible reminders of growth-mindset vocabulary using inspirational posters and bulletin boards
- Have students turn in growth-mindset exit tickets.
- When giving feedback to students, use prompts that facilitate a growth mindset
These tips were not hard for teachers to understand. It directed the teachers in some preparations or the process of helping student develop the growth mindset. Teachers can refer to these suggestions and combine them with actual teaching. They can do more effective education according to their students.
In this video, the makers states more details about what the teachers should do while helping students develop growth mindset. She gave some sentences as examples to tell teachers what they can say or what they can not say to their students. These positive words can convey a right signal to students’ minds and they can be encouraged even they meet serious challenges.
To have a better understanding of my topic, I search on Google and library databases and found lots of beneficial blog articles, scholarly articles and interesting videos. These sources state the way of developing growth mindset from different angles, like students’ effort or teachers’ actions, personal opinions or academic research. After searching plenty of information about my topic, I think that I solved the question and know the correct ways of developing the growth mindset. However, I found another question while doing this story. We know that people can change the fixed mindset into the growth mindset with their effort or help from teachers. Is it possible that someone may change their growth mindset into fixed mindset because of some negative reasons? I think this also can be interesting to explore. In the process of making this blog, I learned how to choose the best source which matches my topic instead of putting everything in my articles. Also I realized if we want to make the blog more complete and interesting, plenty of materials is necessary for us.
Work Cited
Dweck, Carol S. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine, 2016.
InnerDrive. How do you actually develop a growth mindset https://blog.innerdrive.co.uk/how-do-you-actually-develop-growth-mindset
Esparza, Julie. Shumow, Lee. Schumidt, Jennifer A. “Growth Mindset of Gifted Seventh Grade Students in Science.” National Science Foundation, No:HRD-1136143
Bower, Tabitha. Growth Mindset on Student Achievement and Success, October. 2017. https://athlosacademies.org/growth-mindset/
Lexia. 6 Tips to Help Students Develop a Growth Mindset in the Classroom, September. 2017.https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/6-tips-help-students-develop-growth-mindset-classroom
Dr.Julie Schell. “Helping Students Learn: Growth Mindset.” Youtube, uploaded by Craft Educational Videos, 19 Nov 2013. https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/6-tips-help-students-develop-growth-mindset-classroom