Creating a Growth Mindset Plan

Growth mindset is a process. It's a lengthy and slow process that takes a lot of patience to maintain. It's a process that should be mentioned to not only the teachers on our campus, but also to the students. Students need to see understand that growth and learning will help them find meaningful opportunities to become better learners. After revisiting my Growth Mindset Plan, I hope to recreate a separate lesson for teachers and students. My plan for teachers is to help them develop a growth mindset about student abilities, but I also see the benefits to our learners to also learn more about growth mindset and how it can benefit their learning. My innovation plan will incorporate a new growth mindset plan for students before they start their tutorial program.

I plan on sharing my process with developing a growth mindset. As I didn't really reflect on it until recently when I felt a fixed mindset seeping within my thoughts. After discovering that my actions were of a fixed mindset, I was motivated to find a way to develop a better plan. In order to do that I had to ask, what can I do be better? How can I grow from this? My reflection led through reviewing over my beliefs in learning.

Looking into my Learning Philosophy, I had to remind myself of Piaget's thought on learning as "not being a fixed trait." This also related to Dweck's idea that ability is not a fixed trait which further supports that a growth mindset is beneficial to learning. If growth mindset is about constantly evolving then my belief that learning is in a constant state of evolving allows me to see that my abilities and my students' abilities now is not predicative to the future. I had to see that my abilities and that of my students wasn't in a fixed state, we are evolving and to evolve requires effort and grit. If students are provided a challenge that allows them to think and question what they know, they can transform their understanding of content they struggle with in their classes. Through the evolving process of learning, students should be allowed to develop questions and seek the answers to those questions. This idea inspired me to rethink my Innovation Plan and reformat it in a way that allows tutorial students to develop questions about their learning. To be allowed to question what they learn, and develop research to seeking those answers provide students a significant learning environment.

In my post, "Creating a New Culture of Learning", I used the example of pastry chef, Christina Tosi and her ability to create inquiry through her environment. Christina Tosi's journey to becoming a renowned pastry chef started with the end in mind by developing questions that allowed her to create desserts that were unique and special to her. Her methods were inspiring because she was using real world application from her learning. She created a significant learning environment through the kitchens she worked at, a bodega ,and her culinary classes. I wanted to create significant learning environment that allowed my students to develop questions and answers to help them become better learners. I went back to my innovation plan , and developed added steps that I needed to allow me to create a significant learning environment for my learners.

My innovation plan was to create a blended learning environment, but I didn't really explain how that blended learning environment was going to be valuable to learners. As I was creating my Learning Environment/Situational Factor Outline + 3 Column Table, I had to think about the real world value and the appeal to the learner. The learning standard was more meaningful to the teacher, but to a learner, it needed to be relatable. In developing the skills in a more meaningful way, I was able to reflect on my learning philosophy and how I learn. My learning comes from the books I read, fiction has a way of teaching someone to make better choices or even to reflect on how to handle a situation. I've wanted our learners to understand the power of knowledge that books hold, and how it makes us become better human beings which became my learning goal for our students. Our learners needed to understand how characters responses and motivation influences their conflict and what happens to them in the story. Such a powerful idea! The 3 Column Table will allow our learners to understand how to connect a power idea not only to themselves but to other characters and to the world.

In ELA, we always want to connect literature back to self, world, and characters to fully influence our learning. So when creating my Understanding by Design or UbD , I was allowed to use my 3 column table to further develop a lesson unit for my innovation plan. My design was able to develop into a unit that provide engagement pieces that were challenging as well as allow our students to ask questions about their characters and their own choices to situations. Through my UbD, I hope that our students can connect that characterization isn't about just the literary story, but how a readers can draw conclusions about themselves and develop an understanding on how they can improve their world. My goal is to be able to create a environment that challenges students to become successful in their learning, but also to understand such complex ideas. With redesigning my growth mindset, I want to be able to share that although the task is challenging; the reward of understanding complex ideas is worth it.