When the adults change, everything changes

As a result of our project, we feel that the children managed to change their mindset.  They now have a can do attitude and will try tasks that may be out of their comfort zone.  Children began to understand how their brain developed and that gave them more confidence.  Instead of seeing mistakes as failures, they understood that their brain was growing with these mistakes.

We were unable to stay within the timelines outlined in the project plan.  On reflection, we should have started the project earlier.  In the fourth term, we have lots of assessments which are very time consuming, and which must be marked and analysed.  This term also has transition days for the new classes, and extra support in these transitions for children with additional support needs.  All this meant that commencing the project in the last term was challenging. 

Some changes had to be made to the project to overcome the resistance faced from other colleagues.  Efforts were made to demonstrate the benefits of a growth mindset for the children.  This shared goal of helping students did ease the challenge of culture change.  The main obstacles faced were:

• we had to overcome some resistance from other teachers and administrators who were invested in current methods of instruction and classroom culture
• some colleagues who are routinely asked to make changes or adopt new teaching methods were sceptical about the benefits of growth mindset
• time constraints also made it difficult for colleagues to learn new methods and implement new practices
• some colleagues themselves displayed fixed mindsets and this made them discount the theory’s validity

Understanding the nature of our intelligence can act as a real leveller in educational attainment.  When young people realise that they can experience personal and academic success in their lives, this improves their life chances.  Embracing challenge and being willing to learn from failure, also positively impacts our self-esteem.  Such beliefs can help develop resilience and bounce back from failure. 

Our plan was to embed growth mindset in the classroom and place it at the heart of educational recovery.  We used peer feedback, peer learning, mindset challenges that tapped into the children’s interests and assessments to ensure that all learners received sufficient challenge.  We used praise to encourage the children to think of the classroom as a safe space to get a question wrong, focusing on the students’ efforts, strategies, and choices.  We encouraged the children to set realistic and suitably challenging goals and ensured any feedback they received was specific, kind, and helpful.  This all aimed to develop learner’s resilience and understanding that criticism and perseverance are needed for success and to bounce back from failure.

Overall, we have seen improvements in the growth mindset and resilience of the class.  The behaviour of one student, in particular, has improved.  This pupil was prone to negative outbursts, which have decreased, and they have learned strategies to remain calmer.  There is still scope for improvement with this pupil, and this will take more time.  Everything we have learned during this growth mindset project will be embedded into all aspects of teaching going forward.

We have received mixed feedback from colleagues during the project.  Other colleagues who were also on the Mindset course have been an excellent source of support.  However, many support staff were very pessimistic and it was difficult to get them to use the same careful language with the children that we were adopting through the project.  They perhaps undid some of the good work achieved by the project, with a fixed mindset about some of the children, commenting 'they will never change they will always be like that!'  This has flagged the need to change the mindsets of the adults involved before we can fully hope to develop a growth mindset within the children. 

We will certainly use growth mindset with the children from the start of the new term, embedding it into daily teaching.  This will be supported by:

• giving students clear and concise steps to take to achieve a goal. Smaller goals attained over time are easier to manage.  By bravely attempting smaller steps that lead to a larger goal, in the end, students will gain a feeling of success and achievement.  This will also likely result in increased effort on more complex tasks as their confidence grows
• making sure that our students face good challenges going forward and praise where it is helpful and merited
• role modelling a growth mindset (e.g., using growth mindset language when speaking aloud to solve a problem) and seek out resources to support this, such as books like ‘Flight school’ by Lita Judge       
• teaching children how to accept constructive criticism and seeing it as a stepping-stone for growth.  This requires kind feedback which sets out the next steps a child should take to meet the prospective goal
• valuing failure as learning and making sure this comes across in all the teachers say and do.  We need to make sure children understand why they have failed at a task, and review the actions needed to be successful next time
• celebrating successes and minimizing failures.  We will seek to reward children for their positive outlook and catch them in the act of showing a growth mindset.  We should be ensuring they know how to learn from any mistakes and give them opportunities to demonstrate improved performance
• providing opportunities to celebrate the success of others.  It is important to encourage children to share in the joy of another student’s achievement and use it to flag why that student has been successful, so that others can learn from it