After watching Angela Lee Duckworth's video for the thousandth time (this particular video seems to come up a lot not just in this program, but a lot of professional development workshops I have attended), I wanted to explore more. What has she been up to the past ten years? Is she still engaged in education and teaching students about these other traits that develop their character? She is!
I wrote about it in another blog post, My Name is Ashley, and I am a Recovering Procrastinator (believe it or not, it's true), and a new perspective I am starting to see is how growth mindset and learner's mindset can apply to procrastination. Growth mindset and learner's mindset is not something that you can implement in a day; it requires continuous, small but substantial incremental steps that add up. Growth mindset really impacts those learners who struggle in the traditional academic setting but not so much for high achievers. They see growth mindset is just another thing they can be smart about, which follows a fixed mindset perspective. Often times, my high achieving students stop trying when problems or questions become challenging, because then their intelligence cannot be questioned. You can't say someone is wrong if they never made an attempt in the first place, right? That's their viewpoint. They will believe they have a growth mindset, but it requires intentional reflection and metacognition to realize that no, you actually don't. Lately I have been privileged to witness some beautiful student character. I teach level and honors Algebra 2, and in level Algebra 2 I have a wide range of students. Students who have had to repeat every math subject in summer school or credit recovery up to this point, students who have major discipline and attendance issues with constant disruption to their engagement in the classroom, and students who at one point were in honors classes but decided for a number of valid reasons they needed to "level down". When students finish assignments early, I introduce them to the honors content for that day, which typically extends the knowledge just applied or enriches their knowledge with additional topics. Usually, students just smile and nod, going about working on tasks for other classes. A few of my students though have been more engaged, pushing themselves to complete the required level work so they have more time to explore and try the honors material. In fact, I have shared with them the honors OneNote and OneDrive folder so they can independently review the material and track their progress and understanding through my posted keys. What stinks is they cannot "level up" at this point; our campus and district policies do not allow that during the school year, so they technically will not receive any additional credit or grade points for learning honors material. What is incredible though is witnessing the growth mindsets they have to choose to learn because learning and challenging oneself to go further is what really matters. This same experience happens for those students who historically have not been successful in a math class, except with the level content. For them, that is the chance to explore and try, push themselves to deepen their mathematical understanding, and finally feel success through hard work and effort. My activities are at different levels within a class and I assign them the one that meets their needs. If they finish, they know they can move to the next level activity to keep growing. At first, there is moaning and groaning because "I finished already!" but soon they realize that learning is never over, and they can build their confidence further and improve even more than before because they have established a background and foundation to build on. These experiences make me consider the lead versus lag measures too, which I have written about in my Big Picture Goals. Our culture is a now culture - instant gratification and we want to see results instantaneously. A growth mindset requires lag measures, reflecting back on where we started and the journey to where we are today, as well as being inspired to keep moving forward towards more transformational growth. Our students deserve the time investment to show and model what growth mindset looks like, sounds like, acts like, and feels like so they can carry it into their futures. I am realizing that I need a growth mindset on what growth mindset looks like for different people and different students. Meeting people where they are at and modeling for them how they can respond to grow is another way to positively impact lives.
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As educators, we need to model what being comfortable with being uncomfortable looks like and acts like. The way it feels is different for everyone, but as we show them how we respond when things get messy, they can see a way out. It reminds me what a classmate of my masters' program, Danny Hernandez, said in a discussion: "If we ask for rain we must also prepare for the mud." The picture on the left is the runoff creek connecting to Clear Creek, pictured on the right, when the raining finally stopped after Hurricane Harvey. Sometimes, the rain is overwhelming. Not only is there mud though with the rain, there can be lightning, flooding, tornados, the works. We have to remember though, THE STORM ALWAYS HAS AN END. The clouds will clear, the sun will come out, and a rainbow might even be the cherry on top. Having faith in the storm that fighting through it will lead to the end can keep us going. It also doesn't guarantee that there won't be another storm, but we can learn how to handle these storms and mud for the future. Students will follow a teacher's lead in how they respond to a situation. Earlier this year, my projector's bulb went out and when the technology support came to fix it, a piece broke off inside the projector so it wouldn't register a lid closed and therefore never turn back on. This required dismounting my projector from the ceiling, ordering a new one, and installing it. That day, I was supposed to cover graphing. Now imagine, trying to graph on a whiteboard... not ideal. Did I panic? No. Did I throw my hands up and say oh well, since that lesson is for our calendar today, we just have to wait? No. We just did lessons "out of order" and guess what, we still learned! Students didn't panic or ask if we would have a free day, they just reacted to my calm reaction: "this is a first-world problem... if this is the worst thing that happens today, then today is a good day". Now, there are other times when it is much more serious than a projector bulb going out. A few years ago, our school went into an actual lockdown because a student reported her older ex-boyfriend threatening to hurt her, that he had access to a gun, and he was seen on campus. Having a retired police officer and retired ER nurse for parents, I learned to stay calm in these types of situations and assess my surroundings. Here's me dressed up like my mom for "career day" at school, my mom at Christmas, and my dad acting like a bossy firm teacher at my desk the first year I started teaching high school. We went through the lockdown protocol and sat in silence. Initially, I thought it was just a drill, but five minutes turned into ten, ten into twenty. When the shadows of police officers with bulletproof vests and AR-15s could be seen outside my classroom windows, I knew this was serious. Students started to quietly ask, "is this a drill or is this for real?" and it turned into a teachable moment. Yes, it is for real but let's consider what we see and hear and how we could act. We see officer presence, we don't hear any screaming or weapon fire, we will remain calm and quiet unless we need to defend ourselves by throwing chairs, laptops, desks at anyone who tries to enter. Were we uncomfortable? ABSOLUTELY, this was only something we saw on the news happen to other people. Did we learn how to be a tad more comfortable in that moment? Unfortunately yes. We cannot plan for everything that happens but hypothetical situations do arise for us to consider how we might respond. Being comfortable with being uncomfortable means understanding the world around us from our previous experiences, recognizing that a new situation is in front of us that we may not have experienced yet, considering and analyzing how we can use our past to adapt to the present, and move forward. This is why I strongly identify with a cognitivism learning theory. This also means relying on the past experiences of others can really enhance our response. If I did not have parents with the service professions where they saw disorder, lawlessness, and trauma almost daily, they would probably not have had the experience to teach me how to consider responding to these situations, and then I would not have responded the way I did in the classroom. When we look at our classrooms and students as part of a community that can support and enrich each others' lives, then we all benefit. Being comfortable with being uncomfortable makes life that much sweeter when we get the rainbow after the storm. References Magee, J. (2020, December 14). Friendswood applies for $78 million grant for local drainage project. Community Impact. https://communityimpact.com/houston/
pearland-friendswood/government/2020/12/14/friendswood-applies-for-78-million-grant-for-local-drainage-project/ |
My husband lovingly teases me when I reflect on my day with him and say "I learned something new today!" because he would be surprised if I didn't learn something new.
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