Educators sometimes fail to realize that our own personal mindset can dictate the outcome of achievement within our classroom. Before reading Carol Dweck’s book, “Growth Mindset”, I had not thought about how my own beliefs could affect my students. It’s important to understand that we all have characteristics of both a fixed and growth mindset. The fixed mindset means we think our intelligence is only what we are blessed with at birth, that it can not be changed or altered, or at least not significantly. Having a fixed mindset means we avoid challenges, give up easily, and ignore useful feedback. Often people with a fixed mindset feel threatened by the success of others. They see failures as a wasted effort and as an excuse to quit trying. If we do not try, we won’t fail and then we can not be disappointed. Does this sound familiar? We have all had students who react this way in our classroom. On the flip side, having a growth mindset means we embrace a challenge, see failure as an opportunity to learn, have persistence, learn from criticism, and see inspiration in the success of others. We feel determined to increase our intelligence by learning as much as we can. We also know this student as the one who loves a challenge and often begs us for more work.
A growth mindset is about believing that people can develop their own abilities (Dweck, 2016, p.214). I wish I had read Carol Dweck’s book years ago when I was earning my bachelor’s degree. I can recall many times when I felt like quitting because the workload was too difficult. Now that I’m in a master’s program, I admit it is harder than I thought it would be, but learning about the growth mindset has challenged me to change my way of thinking. I am now reminding myself to embrace the challenge of learning and that with effort, I will succeed.
I am also learning to listen to my own fixed mindset voice in my classroom. My school is piloting a new math program this year. In the beginning, I felt as if I couldn’t master it. I had been teaching math a certain way for almost 20 years, so changing now felt like an impossibility. To make matters worse, the students have to learn math in a completely different way than they did last year. It did not take long to see their confidence in math wane. I was hearing things like, “I used to like math,” and “I’m not that good at math.” One student even wrote me a note that said, “Sorry, I just don’t do math.” I had to step back and evaluate how my fixed mindset could affect my students. I realized that if I wanted to change their mindset, I had to first change my own. Now, I remind them we are all learning together and that even though it is a challenge, we will learn how to do it.
Now that I have a better understanding of a fixed and growth mindset, my goal is to focus more on what I’ve learned rather than what I’ve achieved. I know that I have triggers that will put me back on the fixed mindset track. Negative comments from administrators, parent complaints, students failing an assessment when I thought I had taught the content well, or even something as simple as my family not liking a meal I’ve spent hours preparing can all trigger my fixed mindset thoughts that say to me I am “not good” at something. I can now use my growth mindset voice to determine what I can learn from my experiences or how I can make changes to achieve success, rather than to give up or feel like I have failed.
I plan to use the Growth Mindset in my classroom to help empower my students to focus on their learning rather than their grades. This year, with our new math program I feel it is the perfect time to implement a growth mindset in my classroom. Now, when my students tell me they are not good at math, I can counter that with “not yet”. With those words I hope to give them a clear path to future learning. (Stanford Alumni, 2014)
Blended Elementary 