Stories of Our Own Mindset: As you read the first part of the book you may have found yourself reflecting on situations where you have adopted a fixed mindset and times when you’ve adopted a growth mindset. Talk a bit about those times. As your friends share their stories, listen for commonalities that might be occurring. Discuss those common threads that are appearing.
Who Walks With You? Like an athlete that enlists the support of a coach, who is on your growth mindset team that is helping you to grow? How are they doing this?
How Would You Like to Grow? Musicians have always fascinated me. Their ability to play at a high level, while entertaining, is not what impresses me the most, it is knowing how much work has gone into their craft. Think about your craft. In what ways would you like to grow? How is your mindset impacting this?
FAILURE
“Even in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from” – Dweck
It’s not something we like to talk about, but failure, set backs, obstacles, whatever you decide to call them, impact our mindset. Discuss a time when you did not initially succeed at something. As you reflect on that time try to think about your mindset and how it impacted your next steps.
SUCCESS
If we are to imagine a continuum you may place the failure from above on the far left. Now, what about success? Talk about a time when you may have had your doubts but in the end you were a success.
THE POWER OF YET
How can the three letter, Y, E, T, have a profound impact on your mindset?
STUDENTS THAT STOP TRYING
“It’s no wonder that many adolescents mobilize their resources, not for learning, but to protect their egos. And one of the main ways they do this…is by not trying” – Dweck
As you reflect on the quote above, what is your role as an educator in this process? We may not be able to shift a student’s mindset in the moment (we’ll talk more in conversation #2 about working with students), but we can control ours. How does our fixed or growth mindset affect how we work with students that opt to, “not try”?
THIS INSTEAD OF THAT
You’ve had a chance to dig into part or all of the book and it is very likely that you are already identifying times when you’ve approached things with a fixed mindset and when you’ve adopted a growth mindset. As we prepare for conversation #2 try to identify when you are in a fixed or growth mindset. We will chat about this next week.