Is it possible to have a #growthmindset only sometimes?

 

I’ve been rather caught up in growth mindset theory, having written on Mind Lab assignment on it and being in the final stages of finishing a second.

One of my colleagues was kind enough to look over my Teaching as Inquiry plan. He posed a variety of questions that I might want to consider in order to enhance the robustness of my inquiry, but one really stood out:

“Is it possible to have a growth mindset in some subjects but not in others?”

I’d be lying if I said that this question didn’t make me think. Over the course of my literature review, I didn’t come across anything that suggested that student may only believe they can get better at some things but not at others.

Admittedly, I need to get my assignment done, so I will not be discussing this any further today. But I am curious to see what others think (and this post serves as a great reminder to actually go back and look into it further).

“Neurons” by Zoe is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

#MindLabED Week 18 – Facing My Lit Review

I’ve never written anything like a literature review before. I’m not even sure I’d seen a full literature review up until now. As you can imagine, I’m finding it all a bit daunting. Even the act of choosing a topic has been a nightmare.

My shortlist had six topics on it, but I settled on researching the idea of the growth mindset, mostly because I think it will be the most useful to my school of all of my shortlist topics. In particular, I want to look at the effects that it has and how it can be fostered. My next step is to sort out my questions, hopefully within the next few days.

#MindLabEd Week 13 – #TaI / #inquirylearning

Is there a right way to inquire?

This question struck a chord with me; as a school, we have one inquiry learning model that all students in all classrooms are expected to follow.

Our inquiry process, like many others, is a linear process that compartmentalises research into set processes that need to be carried on in a particular order in order to be deemed to be successful. Students are expected to follow a ‘snake’ and mark off which part of the snake they are up to. So many highlight stages I know they have no evidence for and no intention of carrying out, and will go back to stages they have already completed to add more detail.

Learning almost anything is a process of inquiry, but yet it is rare that process of learning looks the same.

It raises an interesting question – do we actually need a set process of inquiry?

 

 

#Goals

New Year’s Resolutions are the worst. For me, they don’t last long, mostly because they are things that I could change at any time of the year. For that reason, I don’t really do them. Hence here we are, on the 30th of January – I can totally say that these aren’t New Year’s Resolutions.

For accountability’s sake, I present to you my #goals for this year

1. Share at least two great ideas I have had in my classroom each month, be it via this blog, twitter, etc
2. Try at least one completely new thing per term (Mystery Skype, here we come!)
3. Document more of what is happening in my classroom and share it with parents, the wider community etc

Fingers crossed three will be manageable enough!

#MindLabEd Week 10 – The ‘Real World’ and ‘Money’ Edition

This week’s session was one I wasn’t overly sure about, looking at the readings (or, rather, ‘watchings’). While I thought entrepreneurialism was important for secondary school students, I didn’t think it’d present too many ideas for my students. Boy, was I wrong.

We started with a game of Market Share.

Playing Market Share at @NZMindlab #fun! @HannahLearns @CamiBrotherton pic.twitter.com/bJxGRYcL3O

— Christine Wells ADE (@WellsChristine) January 29, 2016

All about building your business to fit your potential customers, it was incredibly engaging and lacked the frustration factor that games like Monopoly have. While it was designed for college and university students, I’ll be very keen to have Nick visit and play the game with my Year Eights, as I think they’ll get a lot out of it. The best part would have to be that you can play it in multiple sittings, so it could quite easily slot in as part of a Maths rotation.

 

A Different Definition of ‘Real World’

It turns out my definition of ‘real world problem solving’ is either outdated or completely wrong. Previously, I have treated ‘real world’ as could potentially happen in the real world but this example is fake. This, it turns out, doesn’t constitute real world.

The internet has changed the level and quality of work students can achieve and for the better. Resources available today make it possible for more students to solve actual problems, rather than the made up ones we give them. This got me to thinking about how I could change what I do in my classroom in order to support my students to address real issues.

We have a health unit, normally taught in Term 3, which we refer to as Service Learning. I think when it was started it was meant to encourage students into the community and teach the value of doing good, but I’m not sure that’s what it is quite achieving today. Looking at the resources students have immediately available through the internet, as well as the resources within reach, I think that the unit has the potential to be something better. I’m not quite sure exactly how just yet, but at least I have two terms to figure that out.

One thing I’ll definitely be showing my students is one of the Young Ocean Explores YouTube videos – if she can achieve what she achieved at age twelve, my students are certainly capable of similar.

#MindLabEd Week 5 – Building Things and Growth Mindset

I’ve been slack with my reflections the past few weeks – the combo of reports and assignments hasn’t been a nice one. It’s time to get back into the habit.

This week was split into two sections. It was my first time attending in the evening and it was certainly different, although I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to maintain focus.

Code + Makey Makey = FUN

Our first task was to create a musical instrument with Scratch and Makey Makey. I must admit, I was familiar with both tools already (I use Scratch in my classroom and my students have played with Makey Makey), so the experience was a great opportunity to reflect on how I could use both in my classroom. Scratch is very easy to integrate – it fits with pretty much everything – but the Makey Makey took a little more thinking. I could see it being very useful with explaining electricity and circuits, but it was interesting to see what other groups did with it. These included, but were not limited to storytelling, changing the functions or inanimate objects, and recording voice.

I’ll definitely be trying to get a few Makey Makey for my class for next year.

Constructivism, Constructionism, Collaborative – (so many ‘c’s!)

These didn’t really need summing up for me – one of the perks of still being fairly fresh out of Teacher’s College, although it must be noted that teachers college only taught me about the first one.

Constructivism – connecting prior knowledge and current experiences/observations to form new knowledge

Constructionism – #MakerEd

Collaborative – students working together in an organic manner to achieve a shared goal

Growth Mindset

This was the part of the session I was most excited for. We’ve been doing Visible Learning at my school for a year now and this is the one thing that I haven’t really managed to get to click with my students yet. I’ve spent a bit of time working with them on metacognition and understanding how your brain works, but I think this will be a far bigger part of the conversation at the start of next year than it was at the start of this year.

Key resources/ideas that I really enjoyed (disclaimer: I can’t remember what came from in session and what came from googling afterwards…)

• the backwards bicycle – with practice, you can unlearn and relearn
• praise the process, not the outcome
• celebrate failure and the learning that comes with it
• mistakes are good, but not all are equal

Carol Dweck’s book is on my summer reading list, and I’m looking forward to looking at ways I can actively promote the growth mindset in my classroom.

Testing Theories To Work Out The Unknown

I love my ICT duties. I love them because they give me a whole lunchtime where I can stay inside my classroom while students utilise the computer in my class. But, most of all, I love them because they are often the easiest time to have uninterrupted conversations with my students without having to worry about being off topic or having a million things on my ‘to do’ list. Every now and again they cause some magical interactions.

Somehow, on Friday, we ended up talking about magic tricks. A couple of my students shared card tricks they had learned, one of whom had no idea why the trick she performed worked (I still haven’t worked that one out…). Then one of my students shared this.

The game is simple. Pick a two-digit number, add the two digits together, and then subtract the sum from the original number, look up the symbol for the number you chose on the list of symbols, and then watch the gopher work out what your number was. I wish I could say that working it out was so simple – we (about six students and myself) were baffled by it.

What happened next was real magic; we spent the next 20 minutes trying to work out how it worked, using the following methods:

• going through the steps as many times as possible to see if the gopher slipped up, therefore making it something to do with probability – no mistakes
• covering the webcam with a hat to see if it had something to do with being able to see us – still no mistakes (and I knew this one wasn’t it as the game didn’t have permission to use the webcam)
• not saying the number we chose out loud – again, no mistakes (and no permission to use the microphone)

It got pretty intense; by this point we had distracted a number of the other students in the room for ICT, who were offering their suggestions for possible solutions. Several students were on it at once. The rest of us watched, offering as many theories as we could come up with.

What blew me away was the questions my students were asking. I heard more “what if we try…?” and “maybe it’s…” in those 20 minutes than I would normally hear over the course of the month. We got there in the end – two students and I (yes, in some respects I ruined it, but I was just as engrossed as they were) employed some algebraic thinking and noticed a pattern in the symbols. But the process was fascinating and it got me to thinking about how I can cause my students to employ that sort of thinking again.

Reflections on ‘The Third Teacher’

I’ll be completely honest and say that I’ve never thought too hard about how the layout/design of my classroom and how it impacts on my students’ learning. My school isn’t overly fussed with modern learning environments at the moment, so my focus is on ensuring that the space my students work in is fit for purpose. It was very interesting borrow ‘The Third Teacher‘ from the library and have a read.

Obviously, a lot of this book relates to whole school design, and I am only thinking about ways that I can change my classroom, but I still found a number of aspects very interesting. Below are some of my takeaways:

9. Let the sunshine in.

This one should be blatantly obvious, but I find one of the challenges of teaching with screens is that the sunlight often makes it hard to see screens. I’ll open the curtains in the morning, only to find that half of them have been shut 30 minutes later. I need to do some negotiating with my students.

20. Make peace with fidgeting.

I have students who will practice their sasa during class (I am not being culturally insensitive here – they are actually doing a sasa), which I find can be quite distracting. Thinking about it now though, I’m probably the only one they distract, so is there any harm in trying to ignore it so that these students can have the stimulus? The same goes for my boys swinging on chairs; the only thing they are at risk of is learning the hard way why chairs have four legs.

46. Let students lead.

My classroom is set out the way that it is set out because that is the way I have set it. I may give students an opportunity to give feedback, but I make the ultimate decision. This is something I really should change. I have seen articles on hacking your classroom come through Edutopia a couple of times, so I am thinking now that I might be having a look at some of these. A redesign of the learning space could serve as the perfect mid-term treat for my college-bound Y8s.

54. Think hands on.

This term’s science unit is a really exciting one for me because it links really well with hands-on learning experiences; looking at forces lends itself well to playing/fiddling/tinkering. I find my boy-heavy class love all things hands-on, so I need to be looking at ways to make other areas of the curriculum more kinesthetic. My challenge for next year – hands-on literacy?

73. Expand virtually.

Connecting via a variety of different forms of media is something that I am working on with my students – we are not as social media savvy as I would like us to be. I want to see my students having more connections with the outside world.

Lastly, I have seen many John Dewey quotes before, but this is definitely my favourite.

“I believe that the school is primarily a social institution… I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” Quote from John Dewey, p.108

My Changing Practice #CENZ15

Last term kicked my butt – the combination of coming off the tail end of production to then have an ERO visit, and the fact that Term 3 is the rainy, kids-end-up-couped-up-inside term meant that I have unashamedly spent the first week of the holidays focusing on face-to-face connections. As a result I am playing catch up with the #edblogNZ, so I’m just going to pretend it’s still Week 1…

With things slowing down in the second half of the term, I had a bit of time to reflect on my practice and my educational philosophy in general. I actually pulled out the document I wrote in Teacher’s College and was suitably horrified to see how much it had changed. But, when I think back to how far I’ve come, it shouldn’t be that surprising.

My journey from Teacher’s College to my first teaching position was a rocky one; many would say that it took me a year to find my own class, but I would argue that I spent a year preparing for my first teaching job (even if it wasn’t deliberate). Many will remember articles like this one. As a result, I spent a year as a Teacher Aide/reliever in a school that recognised how keen to learn I was . In many respects I was lucky – at uni, I had little to no awareness of the impact of digital technologies on the education sector. The school I ended up working at was at the forefront, and they were well enough resourced that I could utilise some of the technology while Teacher Aiding. It was here I learnt about using apps to support/enhance the learning of students operating in the earlier years of the curriculum and got the basics of google docs. One absolute highlight was working with an autistic student who was a reluctant writer. He was fascinated with airports, so we wrote to every airport in the country asking for information and then made a google site for each. He would get so excited when we received letters.

Fast forward a year, to when I interviewed for my current job, I knew a bit about e-Learning, but still not very much. I can remember the interview panel being impressed by my knowing about Hapara Teacher Dashboard; I’m not sure that my knowledge went much further than that. Very few of the things I believed back then still sit in my philosophy as they were then. They are:

1. that learning should be authentic and connected to the real world context in which it will be used, and
2. that students need to share their learning so that they understand that there will always be an audience.

Fast forward to today and I quietly detest the word e-Learning. For me, learning with digital techonolgies is the same as just plain old learning, and I would struggle to go back to the old way of doing things. My job is so much more that google docs (although, sometime, even I need a reminder of that) – we connect with other classes, we have connected with experts via skype, we experiment with other ways of sharing our learning (next year’s challenge is to do way more of that…), we are good digital citizens etc.

My favourite part of my job is that things are constantly changing, and I am really excited for future changes in my practice – I have a list, which feels five miles long, full of things I want to try with my class. As the ‘digital’ aspect becomes less and less apparent, learning becomes more and more connected. The walls of my classroom long ago ceased to define the boundaries of learning. I think the thing for me is what next?

Hence I am very excited for ULearn this week!