The Educator and Growth Mindset

I became a teacher because I love to learn and I believed that I could make a true difference in the lives of young people (because of this enthusiasm).  I remember writing my first Philosophy of Education; the thesis of that philosophy was basically justifying why I felt like I was a “life-long learner”.  After two years of teaching grade 3 (which I loved), my principal asked me to move to an assignment that had me teaching junior kindergarten in the morning and grade 6 in the afternoon.  She asked me how I felt about that, and I remember saying (I recall because she pointed it out to me) to her that I could teach anything, however I just needed a bit of time to get “good”.  That year, I spent a ton of time reading about both grade levels; buying resources, learning new curriculum, figuring out management strategies, learning how to teach little ones how to read…the list goes on. It wasn’t easy to learn to teach both groups of learners that year, however I think that I enjoyed the challenge – when things didn’t go well, it just made me work harder.  When I reflect back on this, I now have a name for my attitudes, beliefs and behaviour – it was a growth mindset in action.  That was 17 years ago.  I know that I am still that learner today as are many of the amazing educators with whom I have the opportunity to work daily.

Today, I know that I continue to believe that I can learn anything – that I can grow my intelligence and brain.  What I need to work on however, is the notion of co-learning with others.  A key factor of growth mindset educators is that they do not see themselves as what we call “the keepers of the knowledge” – but instead as co-learners and co-investigators along side their students.  We take risks with our students and we make mistakes; thus modelling that growth mindset. This is tough for many of us who might be a bit “old school” – from a time when teachers were in fact the experts!  But awareness is the first step!

In this growth mindset learning journey I have also revisited the Standards of Practice for the Teaching Profession through a new lens.  I see growth mindset in these standards within the notion of continuous growth and improvement. The standards require us to engage in “refining (our) professional practice through ongoing inquiry, dialogue and reflection”, and to “recognize that a commitment to ongoing professional learning is integral to effective practice and to student learning”.  Our “Professional practice and self-directed learning are informed by experience, research, collaboration and knowledge”(Standards of Practice for the Teaching Profession, online). There is no doubt that every educator must be learning, both in a job embedded and self-directed way. All those books on my night table, the articles on twitter, the reflections in my problem of practice journal, the endless supply of videos, monographs, emails…this ongoing learning and reflection is what defines me as a professional.  It is why we are called a “professional organization”…and to truly enact the standards, we must each have a growth mindset.

If process praise is a key to fostering a growth mindset, then it is critical that leaders positively praise the independent learning that educators engage in. I think about the senior administration team, and the impact on my motivation when they issue positive praise on my work ethic – the result?  Makes me want to work even harder.  However, I wonder if, because of the nature of “release time” in our practice, we have inadvertently given the message that most learning happens between 8:30 am and 3:00 pm in professional learning communities?  That the “independent learning” piece has been compromised?  Don’t get me wrong…there are many of us who are learning on our own after hours…but there some who have the impression that they need to be taught or that they need training.  It makes me wonder if we are fostering a “dependent” mindset – I will learn something new if you teach me kinda thing? I don’t have time to learn this…or If I just ignore this new initiative, the pendulum will swing and I will be fine… Are these examples of a fixed mindset?

I know that I have work to do on my growth mindset, however I believe that awareness is the first step to growth!

…challenge some of my thinking!  Until next week…

I have been asked lately about how to teach a growth mindset to learners who understand the act of learning to be limited to memorization.  How do those learners see intelligence as malleable  when they are defining learning as rote memorization?

Again, I will return to the definition of learning that Katz and Dack use “Any relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a direct result of experience.” (Intentional Interruptions, 2012, p. 14)  I don’t know about you, but much of what I memorized all through school (and believe me there was a lot…most of which I can now simply Google), I have long forgotten – thus, I don’t believe that I actually learned it.  However, when I try to align the definition of growth mindset (from Mary Cay Ricci, 2013, “a belief system that suggests that one’s intelligence can be grown or developed with persistence, effort, and a focus on learning” pg 3) with the notion that in some cases we are asking students to memorize (in Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy Remembering is the lowest level of thinking), I wonder if growth mindset can actually exist within the notion of remembering…  my question is, if persisting, effort and a focus on learning contribute to a growth mindset, can students grow their brains by memorizing?

Memorization requires students to persist and to put forth effort (to exercise grit), however if there is actually no application of that content, then I suggest that there is no real learning happening, and thus, if learning is absent, then students are simply in compliance mode.  Their understanding of learning is reduced to the notion that they can “learn” if they can memorize.  Time and effort is spent on this piece.  Don’t misunderstand, there is a place for memorization in learning as students need to have some content ideas to move to the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, but when learning is measured by memorization and tests only, I would argue that there is no opportunity for a growth mindset to develop.

Are you inspired to engage in growth mindset work?  Here are some resources to consider:

larryferlazzo.edublogs.org  has an extensive collection of mindset resources. Have a look!

Dave recently passed on the following as well:

usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/the-educator-with-a-growth-mindset-a-staff-workshop

www.scoop.it/t/leading-learning/p/4029403401/2014/10/07/the-best-resources-on-helping-our-students-develop-a-growth-mindset

And..

http://www.slideshare.net/Stephaniasherman/growth-mindset-37658865

http://www.slideshare.net/rfryer75/growth-mindset-explained

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept10/vol68/num01/Even-Geniuses-Work-Hard.aspx

http://www.mindsetworks.com/default.aspx

Mindsets in the Classroom: Building a Culture of Success and Student Achievement in Schools  by Mary Cay Ricci

http://deeplearning.edublogs.org/2014/08/03/top-ten-tips-for-developing-a-growth-mindset-in-your-classroom/#.VE7jFPnF-So

Stay tuned for next week when we will unpack the following graphic….

The Educator and Growth Mindset

Our system wide professional learning day is rapidly approaching; a day which is focused on numeracy.  Our Conditions for Learning are the foundation for achieving success in numeracy; thus we will spend time in the morning on that day analyzing these conditions in relation to our adult learning.  Specifically, we will spotlight Growth Mindset – a condition for learning that has received much attention in the past couple of years.  The next few postings will hopefully inspire all of our leaders to post their thinking.

I included the graphic above as I believe that this is a simple way to get us thinking about how what we say and do (what we model) daily really says a great deal about our mindset. Last year I engaged in a mindset quiz and was shocked (and appalled) at my outcome – I had more of a fixed mindset.  My reaction to the results actually supported the results – as I immediately began to self-reflect in order to prove that the results were wrong.  What an excellent example of a fixed mindset in action…to begin to argue with a computer to justify why it was wrong, instead of thinking about how with effort, motivation and perseverance (grit), I could improve my learning and leading stance.

Since then, I have increased my awareness in one area that I know makes a difference in fostering a growth mindset – that of praise.  In my educational life, I have been immersed in learning about feedback and the difference between praise and feedback.  I recall leading professional learning sessions where we provided a document that distinguished between praise and feedback and the conversation that resulted; educators began to see that precise feedback according to the learning goals and criteria for success (outcome) was critical to move thinking forward, while praise was an essential part of encouraging the process or the action that the students engaged in. For example, telling a student that I noted that they “worked hard on their assignment” is praise that encourages a growth mindset.  David Sousa in How the Gifted Brain Learns (2009) points out that “children who are praised for their intelligence learn to value performance, while children praised for their efforts and hard work value opportunities to learn” (pg. 34).

Do the students in your buildings understand that they can make their brains grow?  How is this work embedded into our school learning plans?  Are we explicitly teaching students to have a growth mindset?  Can you provide some examples? Until next week…

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing…and the main thing is learning.” (Student Centered Leadership,  2011)

 This quote describes our collective vision.  We have all read it before.  I believe that we are on the right track to continuously and collectively grow our district school board.

After thinking and reflecting after participating in the System Implementation and Monitoring Session and Pedagogical Leadership K-3 Session, I have even more confidence that our work is the right work for us.  If we stay the course and do what we say we are going to do.  If we continuously put the evidence of our learner’s thinking on the table, analyze it to deeply understand what they are thinking, and plan our next steps to move their thinking to the next level…and measure our impact.  This is the essence of Responsive Instruction – one of our Conditions for Learning.

With time and commitment, we will embed this way of thinking as a habit of mind.  We will move from theory to practice.  We are “learning to do the work by doing the work, not by telling other people to do the work, not by having done the work at some time in the past, and not by hiring experts who can act as proxies for our knowledge about how to do the work” (City, et al.,2009).  We cannot be told what effective practice/instruction looks like or sounds like; we need to construct this knowledge by engaging in the actual work.  We know that “telling” model of learning does not permit this knowledge development to occur; if we “tell” we share our understanding of theory only.

I am confident that every formal leader in our organization understands this; thus we are at the Awareness Stage of Implementation.  To move us to the Beginning Implementation Stage, (acknowledging that some of our leaders are actually at the Partial Stage of Implementation as they are in classrooms and responding to the learning daily), leaders have been challenged (and are being supported) in “trying to close gaps that exist between what we say we expect to be and with who we actually are.” Toshalis and Nakkula, (2012) refer to this as “behavioural drift” – the misalignment between what we say, do and value.  We are asking ourselves these hard questions because we know that we need to increasingly become aware of this misalignment; as leaders our credibility is founded on the notion that we “practice what we preach” – that we model the practices that we want to see in every classroom.  It is no longer enough to speak with educators about what effective instructional practices are; as school and district leaders, we need to show educators how to engage in these instructional practices.

We need to practice what we preach at every level of our organization.  As a system lead, my reflections have told me (hence my problem of practice) that I need to formalize my analysis of the evidence of learning from Inquiries or PLCs that our schools share on our D2L site. This essential work is now booked into my calendar; Monday Morning Monitoring Conversations will begin with two – 30 minute, evidence focused conversations.  We will run a six week cycle; thus every six weeks each school leader and I will share in the evidence, engage in collective analysis, monitor the responsiveness – and then I will use this information to plan my work.  Let’s see how it goes by measuring impact on the precision of the school improvement work.  I am hopeful that this level of monitoring with my colleagues will serve as a model that can be transferred into the schools; I know that I will have to name my actions in order to make them explicit.

If we know that true learning (a permanent change in thinking and behaviour that Katz taught us) comes from practicing, then we need to be working directly with learners.  It is about what leaders actually do, the practices that they implement that will make the change; we need to be aware that this is making sure that our actions and messages are consistent with one another.   “The more leaders focus their relationships, their work, and their learning on the core business of teaching and learning, the greater will be their influence on student outcomes.”  (Robinson, 2011) There are no shortcuts to making change occur.  But I know that if we do what we say we are going to do, growth will continue.

How are you moving theory to practice with your learners?  What are you modelling?

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing…and the main thing is learning.” (Student Centered Leadership,  2011)

 Each of us are in the process of committing our school and board improvement actions to paper; data has been and continues to be analyzed, and needs assessments are emerging, theories of action, learning goals and related criteria for success (diagnostic criteria) are being co-constructed, and structures to allow time to think and learn together are being put into place.

The deep thinking that our educators are engaged in during this process is encouraging.  As the School Effectiveness Lead, I have had the privilege of engaging in reflective conversations that have allowed me insights into the needs of the learners and the passion and commitment of our educators.  The overwhelming message is that our district is filled with educators who are committed to continuous growth both for themselves and for the learners who they influence.  This is the culture of learning being realized.  It is overwhelming.

I knew we could get to this place (okay, some nights I worried…but those nights have become fewer and father between in the past months!).  I have been thinking a great deal about the power of self-efficacy…the belief that we can produce the desired or intended results – that we can reach our goals – and how vital efficacy is to actually realizing our goals.  When we look at our standardized assessment results, it is easy to lose efficacy.  However, when we actually drill down into those results, I see some growth.  I see few students achieving level one, most students participating in the assessment, and MANY students approaching provincial standard.  There is celebration here (and areas of need for sure – that is our work!).  As I monitor and support ongoing focus and growth in learning with you, I am seeing the impact of our work and beginning to feel optimistic. I am realizing that we are exemplifying a growth mindset and learning from our experiences;  as we do, we are collectively making a difference for our students.  I am beginning to understand the relationship between efficacy, success in goal achievement and well-being.

Adult efficacy, of course, leads me to student efficacy – and my wondering if students actually believe that they can reach their goals. Can students articulate their goals, measure their own progress on the journey to achieve those goals, and thus see some growth and success…which may lead them to possess self-efficacy?  Is this not what helps students to actualize a growth mindset?  I challenge you to link student’s feeling of success to their academic well-being; when students are feeling successful, do they, like me, want to keep learning?  Does success inspire and lead to positive well-being (if their basis needs are being met as well)?

I hope that you immediately began thinking about district’s Conditions for Learning – especially the section entitled, Foundational Principles to be Developed in the Learner.  Here is our thinking from that section so far:

• Mindset/positive attitude
• Open to learning Stance
• Learner sees themselves in the process (relevant) Learner Centered – Learner choice/learner voice – learner autonomy
• Seeing a purpose – meaningful, real-world connections
• Feels in control (learner)
• Foster positive beliefs
• Intrinsic motivation of learners
• Learners have to see the relevancy in the work they are doing and have a voice in their learning
• Demonstrating Respect
• Open Communication (to build trust)
• Knowing self as a learner (metacognition)
• Problem Solving abilities (embedding higher order thinking skills)
• A sense of wonder and inquiry

Do you believe that if we explicitly foster a learner centered environment, that we will increase learners’ sense of efficacy?  Can you see the relationship with our theory of action “If we foster learner centered environments and pedagogy, then learners will possess an increased sense of belonging and be motivated to learn.”?

We are beginning to understand that Our Conditions for Learning are in service of  the academic goals that we have identified; thus we are collectively moving towards building our understanding of how to foster these conditions in the entire district (for EVERY learner).  This focus is being championed by the Ministry of Education as well; the recognition that we are educating the whole child.  We are cautious with messaging as we know that some might begin to think that we are moving away from our academic agenda. Please remember that, as educational institutions, our role is to give students the capacities to survive in the world and to be productive and contributing members of society; this means that our academic goals of reading, writing and math must remain at the forefront.  However, we must remember that the environment in which students spend much of their lives must exemplify one that enables them to learn.  Learners must believe that learning is a process that they are capable of engaging in.

 What are your thoughts?  

Until next week!