I believe wholeheartedly that all of my students are capable of achieving at an extremely high level. It is contingent on me to provide them with the opportunities to challenge their minds and develop their thinking. The impact of a growth mindset in my classroom will produce a classroom environment where students accept a challenge and would keep working or coding until they eventually accomplish it. This is an environment that is desired and wanted by myself to better serve my students.
As I taught during this past year, I began realizing that the way that I have been teaching in my classroom and the manner that it is structured wasn't helping a lot of my students. Even though I have attempted many different strategies to change a lot of things, in the end, i still ended up with a majority teacher-lead classroom. This aided in the fixed mindset that my students had already had upon entering my class. How can I change the mindset of my classroom? How can I change the mindset of my students, any other students and the parents of my students? A growth mindset was something that I had set out to accomplish at the beginning of the school year. I looked at my evaluation from last year, like I do every year, and I decided to do certain things to attempt to change things to make myself a better teacher. A growth mindset is the belief that the talents, intelligence and abilities are fluid and can be developed or strengthened with practice. In my classroom during the year, I consistently repeat "mistakes are opportunities to learn." And, my students fought that idea vigorously. I pressed on and I kept on trying thinking in my mind that I am going to reach them and change their minds. This, of course, was a little easier in a three of the seven courses that I taught. In those classes, the students were eager to learn, eager for information and eager to be taught. Those classes were a dream to teach. Yes, there challenges with them. Sometimes, they didn't have the prerequisite skills for the content being taught. Sometimes, they totally didn't remember what was taught to them previously. But in every case, I saw that as an opportunity to get their mindset changed from the fixed to the growth. I began every new lesson with prerequisite skill or reminding them of a previous lesson. I then told them that this concept is what were are going to do but we are not there yet. They understood that and they began the journey of the lesson with me. The problem with that was that it was primarily teacher-led. What I wanted was for them to look at something before entering class. If they had any questions about the were supposed to preview, that was how I was going to start class after a warm up activity. After all of the questions were answered, begin extending the lesson to include more problems or situations that promoted thought. That was the extent of my knowledge of the growth mindset. I felt that that was taking some very small steps with a group of students who were eager in every aspect but stuck in a fixed mindset. With a little more thought and ingenuity on my part, the class could have easily been transformed in to growth mindset. My statement of "mistakes are opportunities to learn" could have been changed to "okay let's learn from this mistake." Also, encouraging the students to consistently and eagerly attempt at solving problems and to not give up, had to become the norm. Also with that, I must give each of them a choice in what they produce for each lesson. For some lessons, the choices may be easy to demonstrate mastery of a particular concept. But, for others, those choices must present a challenge for them. The idea is to challenge them but don't break them. Encourage them but don't embarrass them. Each time, each day and each year, do these things and the culture of the classroom would not only change, but the mindset would change also.
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May 2020
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