As I’m working on the mindset chapter for my upcoming book, it has been bouncing around my brain how I can incorporate growth mindset and innovator’s mindset and use them to support divergent teaching and learning. I’ve always known that mindset seems to play a part in so much of what we do. It can make us feel better (or worse) about ourselves, our situations, or the people around us. It can make us believe we can do the impossible or convince us that whatever we try won’t work. The way we set our minds can either be one of our most powerful tools or cause destruction depending all on how we choose to think about something.
Case in point lately…when I took my Director of Innovation & Tech job two years ago, I began a commute that takes two hours a day. Over the course of a work week, I’m in the car for ten hours. With four kids, my day job, two books in the making, and presenting and traveling and such, it had become nearly impossible for me to workout. I gained a substantial amount of weight and have fought to take it off to no avail. I lived and died every morning by the scale just praying the salad I had the day before or the lunch protein shake I drank would help me take some weight off. I was so focused on losing weight I couldn’t see anything else. However, recently I began to think about how crappy I felt and began researching ways to make myself feel better. I started a new “diet” with the hopes that I would have more energy and frankly, be able to go to bed later than 9pm. I started thinking about how it was going to work long-term and changed my mindset about why I would eat healthier. It wasn’t about losing weight, it was about getting healthy. And when I could focus on feeling better and how the healthier food made me not sick, the weight began falling off. Now, I have a long way to go, and I’m not saying that if you change your mindset you’ll lose weight, but I am saying that the change in mindset allowed me to look at the reason I was eating food differently, and that has made all the difference.
Recently, I witnessed a conversation questioning the benefit of teaching a growth mindset to kids as it may not have a significant effect on student achievement. The conversation made me so glad that I believe that I teach all facets of being a person, not only student achievement. According to Carol Dweck’s website, these are definitions of growth and false mindsets:
Growth Mindset: “People believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities.”
Fixed Mindset: “In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong.”
According to George Couros‘s Innovator’s Mindset, the definition is:
Innovator’s Mindset: The belief that abilities, intelligence, and talents are developed leading to the creation of new and better ideas.
As I think about the students I had and the teachers I now work with, I want two things for them:
1) The knowledge and awareness to go with mindset so they know how to change it and
2) the belief that they can develop into more than they ever thought they could.
I don’t need a study in student achievement to know how important it is for a person to believe in themselves. They need an awareness of their own thinking and strategies for changing their mindset should they fall closer to fixed on the mindset continuum. I need them to believe that changing the way they think about something, like a diet, can alter their entire outlook on a concept. I feel like the very foundation of what I do as a teacher is to help kids (and as an administrator…teachers) believe in themselves. To have the mindset that they can develop and grow and that they can have new ideas that can lead to better things is one of the most important ways I can support the kids and adults I work with.
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