Annie Brock - The Growth Mindset Classroom-Ready Resource Book: A Teachers Toolkit for For Encouraging Grit and Resilience in All Students

Text copyright 2020 Annie Brock and Heather Hundley. Design and concept copyright 2020 Ulysses Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. Any unauthorized duplication in whole or in part or dissemination of this edition by any means (including but not limited to photocopying, electronic devices, digital versions, and the internet) will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

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Ulysses Press

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ISBN13: 978-1-64604-044-5

ISBN13: 978-1-64604-105-3 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931866

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Interior art: My Wife and My Mother-in-Law by William Ely Hill/Wikimedia Commons; Duck-Rabbit (no attribution)/Wikimedia Commons; Faces by Edgar Rubin

IMPORTANT NOTE TO READERS: This book is independently authored and published and no sponsorship or endorsement of this book by, and no affiliation with, any trademarked brands or other products mentioned within is claimed or suggested. All trademarks that appear in this book belong to their respective owners and are used here for informational purposes only. The authors and publisher encourage readers to patronize the quality brands and products mentioned in this book.

In The Growth Mindset Coach, we produced a chapter-a-month guidebook for cultivating growth mindsets in your classroom. In The Growth Mindset Playbook, we dug deeper into how classrooms and schools can empower students and increase achievement through building growth mindsets. In this new addition to our Growth Mindset series, we are expanding these ideas by offering turnkey lessons (ranging from 15 minutes to an hour) to use in your classroom. Well revisit the same subject matter from our previous books and offer 45 valuable, ready-to-teach lessons and over 50 reproducible resources that will help you put the power of growth mindset to work for you and your students.

Each of our lessons will have a simple structure:

A pre-lesson summary of the purpose of the lesson.

What the students should know or do by the end of the lesson.

The resources and materials necessary to conduct the lesson.

Step-by-step instructions for lesson implementation.

Ideas to check for understanding during and after the lesson.

We have also included a section after each lesson that offers simple ideas to supplement the objective. These supplements might include ideas for student displays, read-aloud books, or other materials that will supplement the lesson in some meaningful way. You can choose to use these or not; the supplements are not essential to the lesson itself.

Additionally, in the methodology of the lesson plan, we advise instructors to say certain things or ask certain questions. You should view these as suggestions, not mandates. If the natural progression of the conversation is moving to more in-depth questioning or conversation, by all means go with it. If you notice or hear something that you would like to elaborate on in the course of the lesson, take time to do that. Dont forsake powerful a-ha moments in service of the lesson plan. The lesson plan should be in service of those moments. Allow the lesson to go where it naturally progresses, skip sections where appropriate, add examples where necessary, and make it your own. You know your classroom and your students best, and we trust you to take the foundations of the lesson plans weve provided and build something truly powerful that will serve your students.

In the early 1970s, psychologist Carol Dweck was studying how children responded to failure. Dweck and her research team devised an experiment involving difficult math problems that would allow them to gather data on how the children responded to failing a challenge. Dweck discovered that some students had a complete inability to cope with their failure. Other students approached the difficult task with the distinct attitude of wanting to learn from it and to challenge and grow their intellect. Dweck wondered what might cause these different reactions in children faced with challenges. This experiment was the beginning of Dwecks research into the mindsets.

Dweck coined the phrases fixed mindset and growth mindset to describe the way some students avoided challenges and others approached them head on. The fixed mindset is simply a belief that ones skills, abilities, and talents cannot be meaningfully developed. We sometimes refer to this as the God-given talent theorythe belief that you are born with only so much skill or ability in certain areas and there isnt much you can do to change that. According to this mindset, some people just have talent for things that others do not. Growth mindset, on the other hand, is the belief that with hard work, effort, and perseverance, one can develop their skills, talents, and abilities over time. Over decades of research, Dweck and her team amassed data that definitively showed that people who possessed a growth mindset had better outcomes in academics, careers, relationships, and other facets of life.

In The Growth Mindset Coach and The Growth Mindset Playbook, we outlined a series of steps teachers can take to create a growth-oriented classroom. A growth-oriented classroom focuses on growth over grades, progress over performance, and yet over right now. In this type of classroom environment, we reasoned, students growth mindsets would have the best chance of flourishing.

In her TED Talk, The Power of Believing You Can Improve, Dweck asks, How are we raising our kids? Are we raising them for now instead of yet? Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting As? Are we raising kids who dont know how to dream big dreams? Their biggest goal is getting the next A or the next test score? And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives?

If we want to raise kids as Dweck describedfor yet instead of right now, we must offer them spaces where they see the positive association between effort and growth. In a classroom, this begins with you, the teacher. No matter how much you teach and encourage growth mindset as a classroom teacher, you may be sabotaging it with your own fixed mindset. It is imperative that you approach each day, each interaction, with a growth mindset, always viewing your students and their potential through the lens of growth and modeling growth mindset daily.

Dweck writes in her book Mindset, A persons true potential is unknown (and unknowable) its impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training. Stop viewing your students through the lens of your preconceived notions, instead approach each day with the belief that with hard work and perseverance your studentseven the ones who struggle mosthave the potential to achieve great things.

This belief will propel both you and your students to embark on the growth mindset journey. If students understand that you believe in their unlimited potential, it sets the stage for them to believe deeply in their own abilities. The goal of the growth mindset classroom is to develop in each student the love of learning. This is not an easy challenge. Students come to us with a range of obstacles. They may have learning disabilities, lagging skills in behavioral development, difficult home situations, trauma, chronic absenteeism, a lack of family support, or a variety of other challenges that may impact their availability for learning and academic performance at school. As teachers, we are responsible for seeing each student for who they are, to build relationships with them, and to set them up for success by helping them understand the connection between effort and improvement, regardless of circumstance.