Growth Mindset

With Christmas break right around the corner I thought this was the perfect month to talk about some changes we could all be making in our classrooms. 

So today, I'm going to talk about Growth Mindset.  A growth mindset is all about thinking positively, not giving up, and practicing to gain new skills that you didn't have before.  We've all had a growth mindset before... you likely couldn't ride a bike the first time you sat on one... but you likely can now.  Same with writing, or reading, or adding, or pretty much a lot of what happens at school.

A growth mindset is an excellent thing to have but you know what kind of sucks?  Sometimes we have fixed mindsets... we can't do something straight away (or maybe even after trying for a while we still can't do it) so we give up on it.

But I think what we should be teaching our students is to have growth mindsets where they want to continue learning more.  And I've found the perfect resource to help with this... It's called The Big Life Journal and as I write this they have it available for kids and are working on one for tweens and teens (hopefully it's already been released).  Not only is this resource great because it talks about having a growth mindset but it also has reading material to go along with it and writing sections (So, psst... you can definitely use this in your ELA grades).

I don't currently have a classroom of my very own but if I did I think I would be ordering at the very least the PDF version of it (mostly because it's a little cheaper) to go over myself. 

If you've already used this in your classroom drop a comment below to let us all know how it has worked and if you've noticed any improvement with your students mindsets.