My classroom completely changed when I started implementing Growth Mindset into my classroom on a daily basis! Before, I would talk about growth mindset here and there. I probably brought it up more when I was seeing a lack of a growth mindset in my classroom. Everything changed when I started to intentionally include it EVERY day into my classroom. My students started to think of growth mindset as part of their learning and the more we talked about it, the more natural it was.
Check out some of my favorite ways to include a growth mindset a classroom every day:
- Include It in Your Morning Meeting and Afternoon Meeting: This may sound simple, but what I found was that if I did not intentional plan it into the start of our day, it was easy to forget about as the day went on. So, I started to make it part of our morning meeting and our afternoon meeting. In the mornings, I would often give my students a journal question or a question during morning meeting that related. For example, “What is a goal you have for yourself today or this week?” was a common morning question that I would ask. By setting goals, we were able to have conversations around how they could have a growth mindset with that gosl. Then, I would call on students to share out their goal and how they had a growth mindset through it. In the afternoon, I would pose a question like, “What was the hardest part of your day and how did you work through it?” I would call on a handful of students to share their experiences that day. We would then celebrate the student who used a growth mindset for their hardest part of the day. Real student experiences and students sharing out made such a difference in my classroom.
- Using “YET”: Instead of letting students feel completely discouraged when something was difficult, we started to use the word “Yet” in my classroom instead. “I do not know how to find equivalent fractions YET” or “I can not figure this out on my own YET”. What I found was that by modeling using the word “Yet”, I started to hear other students in my classroom use that word and encourage their classmates by saying “yet”. A couple of my favorite morning meeting read alouds to go along with the word “yet” are “Your Elastic Fantastic Brain”, and “The Magical Yet”.
- Growth Mindset Bulletin Board: One of favorite ways to encourage my students to have a growth mindset is to help them advocate for when they need help. Over the years, I found that some students felt shy to raise their hand in class and I had many parent/teacher conferences where parents told me that they don’t know why their student does not ask for help. So, I created a bulletin board to help with just that! This bulletin board, allows my students to place their number on it when they need help or have a question. I found that many students preferred this way to ask for help and even my shy students started asking for help using their bulletin board. Look at the picture below to see and example of this bulletin board and click the picture to read an Instagram post that explains it more.
I hope one of these ideas is something you can take and use in your classroom immediately! If you are interested in my Growth Mindset Bulletin Board, click on the button below to check it out.
