In both classes we are talking about Mindset. Afters years of research, Dr. Carol Dweck, wrote a book:
I read this book several years ago and was immediately taken with her ideas and tried to apply them in my own life and as a teacher and parent. Essentially, people who have a fixed mind set believe that intelligence or talent are innate and we can’t do anything to affect them. People with a growth mindset believe that intelligence or talent can be changed, continually improved upon. This graphic explains it in more detail:
We will be watching and discussing several videos on mindset over the next few days. We started with these:
One aspect that really struck me is the part about praise, I’ve read about the negative impact of the wrong type praise before but this really solidified the idea in my mind.
I wrote a blog post about praise on Urbanmoms a few years back and the Globe & Mail interviewed me about it several weeks ago (still waiting for the article to be published).
I think it’s fairly obvious why I am sharing this information with the class. Their own mindsets will affect their future success. By success I do not mean financial success or job success. I include happiness and life satisfaction (much more important than large amounts of money) in the definition of success. The good news is we can change our mindset (not with brain surgery as one student asked – it’s easier than that). The first step to changing our mindset is understanding what it is and then to believe that we are in charge of our own success, once a human being realizes that, the possibilities are endless!
The book Mindset inspired me to find out more and I have compiled a list of books that I read before and after that support the idea that all humans can reach great potential, our futures are not predetermined by genetics at all. If you are interested in this topic check them out (I have all of them if you want to borrow one).