During my first semester of the BEd program, I got really interested in Growth Mindset and how to teach it. It started during an observation day when I saw a teacher’s Growth Mindset board in her classroom as talked to her about how she was implementing it with her students and the difference she was seeing. Then it was presented to us by professors at the university and my questions became: how do I help my students move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset?

During my first practicum, I mostly taught Math. I met a few students who told me very quickly that they hated Math and were bad at Math. I tried in the 3 weeks I was there to help change this, reminding them when they said they did not understand something that did not understand it…yet, and taking advantage of extra time my Coaching Teacher gave me and the students who needed help to work with them on their Math. As we moved through and did activities, I found something. One student told me she understood what we were doing in that particular Math Unit. She still held that she was bad at Math, but not that particular kind of Math, still a win in the movement towards Growth Mindset! Another student held that she could not do the Math until the last activity and then came up to told me excitedly that she did her calculations with no help, and she felt she understood (she did). Both students still said they hated Math and were bad at it at the end of my time in the room, but I felt like my time with them helped me understand how to use some of the language needed in implementing Growth Mindset and I hope I helped those students in some small way let go some of the fixed mindset.

Image of a spiral made up of squares of multi-coloured stained glass that leads upwards to a circle of stained glass at the top. This image appears to be looking up at a roof from the inside of the building. Image from Pixabay on Pexels.

I felt my journey into encouraging Growth Mindset did not go as strongly during my second practicum. I was in a class where it wasn’t as much about kids saying “I can’t do it” but “I just don’t want to do it.” I was told things like “I can do this, I just don’t want to.” Some students did need words of encouragement about the power of yet and that it’s okay to struggle and to accept help. Mostly, though, my language became a lot more about me needing to be able to see that they could do something. the biggest struggles were Math and ELA. Writing was a chore. I was so glad when I got to a point where I had taught enough that I could use fun writing activities as incentives. Math was more a problem of students finding it boring, not listening when I explained something, then saying they didn’t know what to do. I got pretty frustrated pretty quickly.

My second practicum ended up being more about growing my own growth mindset. I would hit roadblocks and feel like giving up, but I knew I needed to move forward. So Math took a new direction. I started a class one day with asking a student who never really paid attention what he learned in Math the day before. He gave a really good answer. I kept going. We were graphing at this point. So I got students to ask each other questions and tally answers before graphing it. Then we’d regroup and I’d have them tell the class or the person beside them the highest answer, or the lowest answer, or the most surprising answer. Turns out this was enough. Instead of asking for questions or confusions I needed this class to just talk to each other. Then they were engaged. Then they started asking questions to me and to each other. It was simple but the last class I was in was very open about telling me what they needed. This class was younger and didn’t know where a confusion started for them. It was just “Math is hard.”

As I went through my practicum, I heard less and less of “I don’t want to,” and “I can do it but I really don’t want to write it down.” I found instead students would say “look at what I did,” and enjoyed seeing my reaction to their work and talking to me about it. For some students, it was about me needing to see how much they could do and wanting to show me that, for some it was about seeing my reaction to their work and I could tell that they wanted to hear that they had a great writing idea or their graph was really nicely done. Maybe in a way that did help the students’ growth mindset. Either way, I learned about motivation and about how to move myself forward and not get stuck in a fixed mindset when I hit a roadblock in the classroom.