Town Hall Meeting: Developing a Growth Mindset

We had a Town Hall Meeting this afternoon at Coleytown.  Our Town Hall Meetings are community building activities where we explore different topics.  This year our focus for the Town Hall Meetings is growth mindset.

A mindset is a set of personal beliefs that influences your behavior and attitude towards yourself and others.  Carol Dweck, researcher from Stanford University, has described two types of mindsets: fixed and growth.  A fixed mindset is a belief that one’s intelligence (personality, etc) is static.  It can’t change even with hard work and effort.  A growth mindset is the belief that one’s intelligence (and other qualities) can be developed.  We can grow our brains and learn new things!  Click on this link to view a great TED Talk by Carol Dweck for more insight into her work.

At Coleytown, we have learned that one way to support the development of a growth mindset in children is to teach them about the brain.  At our Town Hall Meeting today, we learned that your brain is a type of muscle, and it can grow and get stronger with exercise!  The children watched a video of a cartoon character named MoJo who was frustrated when he couldn’t do his math problems at school. (This video series is a collaboration between Class DoJo and Stanford University’s Project for Education Research That Scales).  He immediately decided that he “wasn’t smart” and gave up on his work. He cried, “You are either born smart or you are not!”  MoJo’s friend Katie corrected him and said, “Anybody can be smart but you just have to work at it!”  She describes how your brain is like a muscle.  When you try challenging things, you give your brain exercise to help it grow.  She likens it to a baby learning to talk. Babies aren’t born with the capacity to talk, but with practice (and exercise) they eventually do learn this important skill.  We also learned that mistakes are part of the learning process.  As we make mistakes, our brain is growing. (Here is the link to the video Your Brain is Like a Muscle).

The Student Leadership Council then guided the students through some brain exercises as a CES community.  Ask your child to show you some of the fun brain boosts that we tried today.  Follow up discussions in the classrooms this week will give students opportunities to share on the following prompts:

• What does the phrase “mistakes can make you smarter” mean to you?
• Think of a mistake you made recently.  What was it and what did you learn from it?
• If you were working on something and kept making mistakes, what would you do?

We will continue to explore the concept of developing a growth mindset at CES in our Town Hall Meetings this year.  In addition, we will be reading some wonderful stories in our classrooms that support this work.  I have compiled a small list of wonderful read alouds for families interested in this topic.  

Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty

Your Fantastic, Elastic Brain: Stretch It, Shape It by JoAnn Deak

The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds

The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires

What Would You Do With a Problem? By Kobi Yamada

Have a great evening!