It's Not Just About Ideas

What can I do to help

Asking learners and students to develop a growth mindset is a hard task to do. We are all taught how to learn a certain way and once we are done with our schooling, we decide that we don’t want to continue to learn new things and we just go through our daily motions. We can help them by making sure we have a growth mindset ourselves so we can help them understand how it works. There are many factors that we need to consider to have an impact on the growth mindset. One of the main ones is to create significant learning environments for them to be able to grow in. Creating significant learning opportunities will have great benefits on the students and learners by enabling them to see challenges and how they can overcome them to reach a certain goal. While learning, students will run into obstacles and we need to prepare our students to be able to know how to overcome them and continue on with their learning. Hopefully they will learn how to overcome, criticize and provide feedback whenever necessary.

The Power of Yet

The power of yet is one that we all share. It is pointing out that even though we are struggling with our learning, we are not yet done. For example, if one of my students did not understand the material and was struggling, some would say that they are not smart. The way I see it is that they haven’t mastered the material “Yet”. Every student learns at a different pace and that doesn’t make them not smart, it just means they need some more time and help to understand the material. With my Innovation Plan, I want to model the yet mindset to my students by providing them with many means of learning the material. I will have videos, courses, forums and so much more for students to explore on the online platform. It will allow them to be able to learn at their own pace with no deadlines.

Adopting the Growth Mindset

When I first started out in the ADL program, I did not have a growth mindset. After I was thrown into the work, I realized that I need to adopt the growth mindset. I created a blog post about it here. I realize now after looking back at that post, I need to continue with a growth mindset and now I am realizing that I need to pass it to my students and the next generation for it to have an impact. The growth mindset is so powerful. When students learn to adopt this, they might take a step back from considering to cheat and accept that they still have much to learn and that they do not need to learn as fast as others do. It will help them accept feedback well by enabling them to come to the terms with not everyone is perfect and we all are different in our own ways when it comes to learning. It could also help our students perception of grades. A lot of students when they see their grades, they think that it is over and they cannot improve their grade but that is so far from the truth. When they adopt the growth mindset, they will be able to see their grade as a challenge and they will keep working to hopefully eventually turn it around to be better for them instead of just accepting that they will never be smart. I feel like grades do not reflect a students’ ability to learn, because some students like myself are just not good test takers.

So how can we prevent the students from considering the growth mindset as a fad or trend? We need to educate our students that it is so much more than a temporary thing in our lives. We don’t just use it in school, we use it everywhere we go. We use it at work, the gym, practicing for sports, improving our lives and so much more. If students continue to have the growth mindset as they grow up, they will be able to use it in their everyday lives and we need to teach students that it is always blooming in their minds and that it is not limited to school or a certain amount of time like a fad. Adopting the growth mindset is definitely a start but in reality it is not enough to make a giant impact. We as educators need to teach as many people as possible what the growth mindset is all about. By teaching it to our students, we are enabling them to share what they learned with friends, family and coworkers so in reality, they are spreading it as far as they can. Just teaching it to our students is not enough in this world. We need to start teaching it to our friends and family in order for it to become so big that it makes and impact.

There are so many ways we can move our learners to the growth mindset. We can show them examples of what having a growth mindset means and we can also teach them how it has made an impact in our personal lives as well. It will take some time but together we can make it work and succeed.