A person’s beliefs about their own abilities and skills can contribute to the person’s overall behavior pattern along with forecasting their success later in life. So it is important for a person to have a growth mindset to better themselves throughout their schooling and life. To understand how to help a child develop growth mindset, I need to discuss what a fixed mindset is so we can avoid encouraging that stagnant mindset. A fixed mindset is where the person believes that their intelligence is static. If a teacher continuously told a student that they were bad at reading then the child will continuous think that they are bad at reading, which will turn to loathe towards reading.
Having taken up the fixed performance narrative, we tend to live into it, becoming the character with the fatal flaw (Johnston, 2012, p.15). These children who believe that learning is fixed will believe that they will not grow as a learner no matter how hard they try. Unfortunately, this is how many children in feel in the classroom due to the teacher’s choice of feedback. A lot of times when teachers walk around the room to check on their student’s progress, they often say, “good girl” “good job” or “perfect” which implies that the student’s efforts were good enough. This gives the students a fixed mindset that they are good at they particular skills.
Often this would translate to the student not trying harder anymore. Not only do children who adopt a fixed mindset become helpless when they encounter failure, then when they face problems that they had previously solved, they believe they might not be able to solve them a second time and, indeed, they don’t do as well as they did previously (Johnston, 2012, p.15). This fixed mindset can lead to probl. .rten class I am working with now has been creating pages in their Jazzy Journal since the beginning of the school year.
Each student has their own journal with writing and drawing assignments. This way the student can see their progress. The teacher and student can also see how far they’ve come in their writing by looking over the pages in their Jazzy Journal. This would show the student that their learning process, and knowledge is always evolving.We as teachers are role models for our students so when it comes to teaching we need to be aware that our choices impact our students’ mindset. Therefore, we need to we need to make sure to help our students mind’s and hearts flourish to the best of our abilities.
We need to make sure that children don’t get suck in a fixed mindset and instead we need to find ways to foster a growth mindset to help our students succeed.
