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1.6 Cultivate a Growth Mindset in Yourself First (Required to earn certificate)
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Posted by CUNY Mindset Initiative on March 11, 2024 at 11:01 am💬 Reflection/Discussion:
- How can you authentically model a growth mindset through your attitude, behaviors, and teaching practices? How can you support and inspire other faculty and staff to cultivate a growth mindset and related behaviors in their academic department and college?
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That sounds very true. Modeling a good response to ignorance let’s our students see a good way to react to not knowing as opposed to, say, making something up or being ashamed that they don’t know. Students need to see questions as a way to learn and grow, not the price they pay for getting information that they will need for an exam.
I have worked very hard to have a growth mindset. We educators may have confidence academically, but the way I really wanted to grow was emotionally. During a depression in my thirties, I read that people who meditate have the same brain chemistry as people who had stable or happy childhoods. I started the next day, and within a couple of months, I was a different person. I became about twenty percent happier, which is a big deal. After this, I began to work on myself year after year. Recently, I began doing a meditation that helps me release anger. I have seen for myself that people are often capable of much more growth than they might have believed. I constantly tell my classes stories about students who first struggled, then took over. One of my favorites is the student who had about a B- average. He decided to stop playing video games and to read instead. His final essay was an A-, in just a couple of months his use of language became more agile, and his vocabulary grew. He never would have done that without a growth mindset.
I’m glad you mentioned the way you speak to colleagues. I can certainly think about this more, and suggest the modules to coworkers. We have to see our students as full of potential– and our colleagues as well! When people say, “I’m not good at…” I think: well, do you want to be good at that thing? You may never be great at it, but odds are you can be better.
When I was teaching for the very first time many years ago, I recall that I was afraid of making a mistake in front of my students. But it was tiresome to be nervous and so vigilant all the time, and I learned that one could use mistakes productively. Something as seemingly trivial as a typo on a Powerpoint slide can be recognized and corrected in real time, a micro-lesson in proofing and editing one’s own work. If a student asks a question to which I do not know the answer, I try to make it something that we all research and come back to later (if it’s relevant). Sometimes I wondered how students really saw me in these moments. Then last year I was working with a group of students in an art gallery and we had a task to do that I had never done before. I knew what the outcome was supposed to be, we had the tools, but we were on totally equal footing in being new to the task, and I made it clear we were going to learn together. A couple of students told me that this really helped them approach the task with confidence and not feel bad that they didn’t come in knowing everything already. Nice moment.
Sharing your failures and lessons learned afterwards with students are ways to model growth mindset. It is also one of the ways to connect with students.
I try to model growth mindset by embracing challenges, engaging in continuous learning, and by celebrating effort over results. I also try to encourage persistence by normalizing mistakes and welcoming feedback. When we work with students or faculty, our goal is to provide tasks that are challenging but achievable. We emphasize the learning process over immediate success and use growth-oriented language to inspire resilience. To support and inspire colleagues, we offer professional development opportunities on growth mindset and foster a culture of collaboration and reflection. Recognizing and celebrating effort, sharing strategies, and encouraging open discussions helps us create a department-wide focus on continuous improvement and growth.
I can model a growth mindset by showing vulnerability and difficulties in the learning process, and how to embrace challenges, and to reflect on setbacks as opportunities for growth. Sometimes, I share with my students my own messy writing drafts to let them know the difficulties in my writing process and how I deal with the challenges.
I can support and inspire others by having conversations about the growth mindset, brainstorming together with colleagues how to deal with the challenges we have in class, practicing reflection on our teaching approaches, etc.
I definitely share the same sentiment, Cynthia. When I was teaching Microbiology lab for the first time four years ago, I was flooded with fear of making a mistake and seeming incompetent to my students. I could feel anxiety amplify every time I am about to teach. I learned all of these fears and insecurities stem from ego. While reading “Ego is the Enemy” by Ryan Holiday (highly recommend this book!), I learned that ego only seeks control and validation while silencing the path to the best version of ourselves. At the start of each semester, I reset my mindset by remembering the following:
- I am here to guide not control or command.
- Each time I teach I go through a process of metamorphosis, this allows me to enjoy the process of teaching no matter the setbacks.
- At the end of each teaching sessions, I self-reflect and ask myself what I could have done better to enhance the teaching experience. This is based on students’ performance and feedback.
- I view the interaction with my students as a fluid enriching conversation where water flows from me to them and vice versa.
- I reframe the words failures and successes. I call failures “growth opportunities”, and successes as “honing opportunities”. This allows me to relinquish control over outcomes while immersing myself in the process.
To help support faculty in cultivating a growth mindset, I second what Tim Leonard and Casandra have mentioned about having a designated time in departmental meetings. In addition, I believe course coordinators should meet with teaching faculty to discuss growth mindset, and how to modify class structure and assignments accordingly. To help ease the process a survey could be conducted to address faculties main concerns, this will prioritize which area needs remodeling to foster a growth mindset.
All of my classes are inquiry-based. That is, every class opens with questions students may have or things they would like to discuss as a group. I emphasize that I do not have all of the answers, but that we, as a class, will explore possible responses to questions and where the questions and the responses we generate as a class will lead us.
There is a certain amount of scaffolding, developing skills and applying them to a task or context, circling back and repeating the application of skills that we have developed together but now compounded with other skills.
In certain classes, I have students read a text, then read several others that the first alludes to or draws on, then return to read the first text again. This makes much more sense of the first text, provides a much fuller view, but also demonstrates what reading is–an ongoing process of familiarity and reference, with everything we read expanding our ability to read other things.
Cynthia,
Not only have I made an ass of myself while teaching (e.g. writing gibberish on the board while trying to talk and write at the same time), but I now cultivate it. I teach students to do peer review by showing them an early draft of something I wrote with one of my long-time reader’s comments. I walk them through the very thorough evisceration and explain why he was right, what I changed to make the piece better, and why they should cultivate those who will give them real feedback. Last Fall, when I did this in class, a student said “I need a Brian” [the reader’s name is Brian]–I was extraneous, which is the perfect model of giving students control of their learning.
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