A Teaching Minute: Encouraging a Growth Mindset

Friday, 9/20/2024

We're continuing our focus this week on the first principle of the WID-CTL Framework for Inclusive and Equitable Teaching, fostering a sense of belonging. An essential part of that is communicating that every student has the potential to succeed, or encouraging a growth mindset.

What is a growth mindset?

In contrast to a fixed mindset which assumes that success is only based on innate talent, a growth mindset holds that a person can get better at a task or skill over time with effort, practice, and feedback.

If students believe that they don't have what it takes to succeed, early struggles may shut down their engagement. However, when students believe that their abilities can improve over time, they have the best chance of staying engaged and learning more.

What does a growth mindset look like in practice?

Here are a few examples:

• When giving feedback to students, use encouraging language, e.g. "You haven't fully understood this YET, but I know you can get there."
• Share challenges from your own experiences to help your students see that the learning journey includes bumps in the road.
• An exam wrapper is an easy-to-implement tool that helps students reflect on their study habits and identify ways they can improve.
• Organize your grading plan to allow students to recover from setbacks—perhaps giving work that's due later in the semester more weight than earlier work. Or drop the lowest grade in a category of work. If you give students meaningful, supportive feedback and time to adjust their efforts, they'll find it easier to persist. (Book a consult with the CTL on setting up your Brightspace Grade Book or read about dropping lowest grades in categories here.)

We’d love to hear from you about ways you make a growth mindset come alive! If you’d like to read more about the topic, check out this Psychology Today blog post “Nudges for Equity: Growth Mindsets.”