Growth Mindset Reflection

How does Carol Dweck’s [She did a TEDtalk] concept of “growth mindset” help you to frame your thinking about learning and motivation? 

In Carol Dweck’s TEDtalk, she talks about the differences between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. You might ask, what are growth mindset and fixed mindset? Well, they are both a way of thinking. A fixed mindset is the pattern of thinking in which you are stuck in thinking you suck because you keep failing. You get in a routine of thinking this, and then eventually you won’t want to learn more or attempt more challenging problems. Growth mindset, then, is the opposite. It is a pattern of thinking where you turn failures and mistakes into opportunities instead of giving up on the material or situation. This thinking allows for more growth to happen in wanting to learn even more and wanting to pursue more difficult problems. Why is this important to me and my teaching? This is important because in life when do we ever stop learning? We never do, we always learn something new every day. This means that we also make a lot of mistakes every day; if I were to get defeated after every mistake I make in a day I’d be constantly scrambling around with my head yelling at myself to get a grip (which doesn’t help quite frankly). How do I know this? Because sometimes there are days like that where anxiety gets a grip on everything I do and makes the day seem to be so tedious and miserable. Though that may have seemed off-topic, it was not. That shows how a fixed mindset can impact a person’s day or life if it becomes a habit for long enough. Now, on particularly good days, I can take a step back and say “Okay, how can I learn from this and move on?” whenever I make mistakes. This helps me to gauge where I’m at in learning about myself or about the kids I’m with. This growth mindset will more specifically help while teaching as well because there are some activities that will flop. I will learn from what activities work and don’t work based on how they fail to work or how they fail to convey the concepts I will be teaching. Now this may be a bit of a tangent, but this is why I love to work with computers and kids. You keep trying different things, and you may fail, but that failure isn’t bad it’s just a stepping stone to making a really great program or to having a handle on how to deal with kids. In my experience, those were the two opportunities I really felt comfortable failing in. This is why it’s not a surprise to me now that I always look for harder challenges in coding (even ones that may seem far beyond my reach), and why I have such a desire to learn and gain more experience with kids. I want to be the best I can be to teach them not only computer science, but also thinking skills that will carry over into their lives after being with me.

How can you use this idea to help you be a successful learning both in the college environment and beyond?

I can use these skills and ways of thinking to help me in college and beyond by putting it into practice until it becomes a habit so engrained I don’t have to think about it. A couple ways I can go about doing this is when I’m having a particularly hard and rough day is to one recognize that I’m going into anxiety and panic, and two once I realize that I’m going into those states to pause and focus on breathing for a minute. That will help ground me, and then third I’ll think about what’s going wrong and if it’s a mistake or situation I can fix and also what I can learn from what is taking place. Adding yet to sentences to where I say I can’t do this. All of these steps to gain a greater growth mindset will help me increase my self-confidence and will allow me to be a better teacher and role model for those around me.

How might you help the students you are working with to understand and embrace this principle?

There are multiple scenarios that could be made with this question. The student could be frustrated and crumpling up their paper refusing to work, or the student could be having a panic attack about not being able to understand the concepts. In both situations, they’re both feeling a sense of self-doubt just in very different ways. “What if I’m just bad at this and can’t ever learn this” This is an example of fixed mindset. To have the student gain a better understanding of growth mindset, I would approach each student differently. With the student crumpling their paper, I’d let them be for a while until I’ve seen they calmed down so long as they aren’t disrupting the class or in danger. Then I’d come over to them, get on their level, and ask “What’s the matter? What’s going on right now?”. If they talk, I’d listen to them and hear them out and slowly bring them back into doing their work. While doing their work, I’d stay with them and praise the process that they used to arrive at an answer. With the student having panic attacks, I’d get on their level and have them take long slow breaths to get to a calmer state of mind. If the breathing doesn’t work at first, I’d ask some engaging questions to get their mind off of the subject causing the panic and then do breaths. This diverts the attention from the problem enough to calm down. It also lets them know I’m there to care for them and that they can trust me. After they calm down enough that they can listen to me, I’d try asking them “What’s going on; how can I help?”. If they show me what the problem is, I’d help them work through it and again praise the process to get to the answer. By these two examples, I would help my students gain an understanding of growth mindset by being there to help them with problems and to praise the process they use.