Learning Agility
Has the tide turned on Growth Mindsets?
Most school-based Growth Mindset interventions don’t work! As schools struggle to find Growth Mindset interventions that work, a growing tide of criticism has forced psychologist Carol Dweck to defend her theories. A recent article in TES (“Carol Dweck: where growth mindset went wrong”) gives her response. I’ve been warning that the tide will turn on Growth […]
Authentic V’s Learned Mindsets
How you get your Mindset makes all the difference! Recently, I was re-reading the first chapter of Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and something extraordinary struck me. In just the first chapter, she lists more than 20 examples of people with either a Fixed or Growth Mindset. Dweck describes Lee […]
Have you ever been the victim of a personality test?
You know the type of test I’m talking about. You’re asked a bunch of questions. Then you get a nice coloured chart that describes your character strengths. While these tests certainly have their place in schools, if they are not used appropriately, they can send Fixed Mindset messages to students. You see, the problem is […]
What’s your approach to Growth Mindset?
Teachers and Schools are adopting many different approaches to Growth Mindset. Some of these approaches are more effective than others. In this blog, I walk you through the three most common approaches I have seen, from least effective, to the most effective. I then outline how to raise the bar on your work with Growth Mindset by creating a Style […]
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should!
One of the most important lessons I learnt as an aspiring school leader was “just because you can doesn’t mean you should!” Like a lot of teachers, I found my first few years of teaching very challenging. The “bar” seemed to be set incredibly high, and I had to work hard to learn my craft. […]
Three reasons why Growth Mindset interventions are failing
We’ve got a lot of research now that shows that schools – well-intentioned schools – are trying to change students’ Mindsets, but they’re not having the impact on student learning outcomes that we’re after. There are three reasons for that – find out more in my video below. I invite you to come along to my new workshop, Mindset […]
Turia Pitt: A Growth Mindset in Action
Turia Pitt knows how to take on challenges and overcome adversity. Completing a double Bachelors degree in Engineering (Mining) and Science at the University of New South Wales in 2010, Turia went on to successfully apply her learning as a mining engineer at a prestigious diamond mining company in Western Australia. Not content with only […]
Teaching students to create and use feedback
Over the past few weeks, we have been exploring the Five Elements of Effort. We began by noting that although we are interested in student “effort”, we often lack a coherent definition of what we mean by “effort”. “Effort” is often associated simply with the amount of time and energy a student expends on a […]
Why students need to get better at making mistakes
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about how real growth only happens when we stretch ourselves beyond our current best. We grow when we seek to raise the bar by working in our Learning Zone. This stretch requires us to develop our Habits of Mind to become better learners. The challenge with working […]
Learning to do better with Habits of Mind
Last week, I wrote about the two fundamental types of learning: learning to do more and learning to do better. Learning to do more involves “below-the-bar” thinking. It occurs in your Comfort Zone and simply entails applying your current learning behaviours to the task at hand. It’s doing something you can already do or doing […]
