Growth Mindset

Happy Wednesday!

Looking for new ways to cultivate a classroom culture that embraces a growth mindset? This week’s coach tip includes several resources for you to add to your toolbox related to growth mindset in the classroom. Maybe you will try something new in the last few days of school, or use the resources to plan for next year!

Growth Mindset: a belief that suggests that one’s intelligence can be grown or developed with persistence, effort, and a focus on learning.

According to Mary Cay Ricci in her book, Mindsets in the Classroom, “An educator with a growth mindset believes that with effort and hard work from the learner, ALL students can demonstrate significant growth and therefore all students deserve opportunities for challenge. Add to this belief an effective teacher armed with instructional tools that differentiate, respond to learner’s needs, and nurture critical thinking processes, and you have a recipe for optimum student learning.”

   

Looking for a little summer reading? This book, Mindsets in the Classroom, is full of helpful ideas in an easy to read format. There is also a compatible resource book making new ideas easy to implement.

Additionally, this video “Praising the Process”, demonstrates how process praise helps students to develop growth mindsets. The video is specifically focused in the area of writing, and is well worth the 6 minutes to watch! In the video, Ms. Stewart shares tips for how teachers can begin to use process praise in their classrooms.

Finally, if you haven’t already checked out the Class Dojo videos related to growth mindset, you’re missing out! They are a perfect way to help elementary students to see themselves as learners, cultivate a growth mindset, and start classroom discussions.

Class Dojo Growth Mindset Videos

Super-Easy Strategy to Help You Save Time for a Lesson Closure

Why should teachers build in time for lesson closures?

Lesson closure can enhance “a learner’s ability to organize, evaluate, and store information presented in class” (Reese). We focus on learning targets, but to maximize learning, we should also make sure that students have adequate time to process their progress toward the learning target and to set goals at the end of the lesson.   

The problem is this:  How does a teacher keep track of the time and not end up accidentally teaching all the way to the bell? 

Watch this SUPER-EASY strategy used in the classroom of THS Math teacher Malinda Shirley.  All she did was to recruit a student to call a five-minute warning at the end of the period each day, so that she always has time for a closure. Brilliant!

To learn more about closures: “Road Tested / Lesson Closure: Stick the Landing” by Tyler Reese.
 (http://www.ascd.org/publications/newsletters/education-update/jun14/vol56/num06/Road-Tested-~-Lesson-Closure@-Stick-the-Landing.aspx)
 

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Student Self-Assessment & Goal Setting

According to Susan Brookhart, the coordinator of assessment and evaluation for the school of education at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, student self-assessment is driven by three basic questions that students must be taught to ask themselves

• Where am I going?
• Where am I now
• Where to next?

To learn more about equipping students with the tools to accurately answer those questions check out this article: “Students 'Self-Assess' Their Way to Learning”

Three W's Closure Strategy

This is a simple strategy that provides students a chance to reflect on their learning and teachers an opportunity to gain important information to inform future instruction (6.3).

Students write or discuss:

What?	So What?	Now What?
What did we learn today?	What is the relevancy, importance, or usefulness?	How does it fit into what we are learning?   Does it affect our thinking?  Can we predict where we are going?

More Lesson Closure Ideas

Ask questions:

• What is one thing you learned today?
• How does today's lesson impact your understanding of _______________?  
• How would you summarize today's learning for someone who wasn't here? 
• What was the most significant learning from today?
• What "a-ha" did you have today?
• What was the most difficult concept in today’s lesson?  Why?
• What should I review further in our next lesson?
• 
  

If you are running short on time:

• On a scale of 1-5—using your fingers—rate today's lesson. To eliminate peer pressure, have everyone close their eyes.  
• Whip around:  Have each student share one word or concept they learned.

Get-Out-of-Class Ticket

• Ask students to write down one potential TEST QUESTION from today's lesson. Collect them as your students leave the room, a ticket out of class, if you will. Hang on to them. You might want to use one or two on an upcoming unit exam. This also provides a chance to personally connect. Saying goodbye is an opportunity to build up individual relationships with your students which, in turn, helps build up a positive classroom culture.

This article was also used for this post.

Ending Your Lesson Using Best Practices

 Coaches and administrators throughout the district have been going into classrooms for the yearly spring Data Collection, observing and recording best practices throughout the lesson.  If the observer is in the classroom at the end of the period, he/she looks for best practices in the lesson closure. The benefits of a strong lesson closure are well-documented and can be summarized as follows:  Closure summarizes the current lesson, allows for a check to see “did my kids get it,”and helps inform teacher planning for the next lesson.  Closure provides that critical bridge that brings sense and sequence to a series of lessons within a unit.

What do coaches and administrators look for in a lesson closure?

Coaches and administrators in Tahoma School District look for the following when they are in an end-of-lesson Data Collection:

If you have questions about what these look like in a lesson, please contact your  building coach or administrator.

What do others say about lesson closure?
Dr. Rod Lucero, Associate Professor in the School of Education and the Associate Director for the School of Teacher Education and Principal Preparation (STEPP) at Colorado State University, says that “closure activities also help define both your teaching agenda and the intended learning progression, weaving today's lesson with yesterday's while providing a look ahead at what tomorrow's will bring. As a deliberate part of your planning process, these activities summarize the current lesson, provide it context, and build anticipation for the next. Properly implemented, they will help you establish and maintain course momentum. Reinforcing what students have learned, closure activities also serve as an assessment tool with which to evaluate your students retention level—Did they get it?—as well as your own effectiveness.”   (http://teaching.colostate.edu/tips/tip.cfm?tipid=148).

How do lesson closures relate to TPEP?
Allowing a few minutes for a brief summary and student assessment and/or reflection not only meets Criteria 6.1, “Self-assessment of learning connected to the success criteria,” but also meets 6.3, “Formative Assessment Opportunities”; 6.5, “Student use of assessment data”; and 3.2, “Ownership of Learning.”  All of this for a brief time-out to synthesize the day’s learning!

Next week:  Fun ideas to liven up your closures

Two Don'ts and a Do: Asking questions to get students to analyze, make inferences, and generalize

Dylan Wiliam, author of Embedded Formative Assessment, cites a large research study by Ted Wragg  and colleagues that analyzed 1000 questions asked by teachers (79).  Of those 1000 questions, only 8% required students to analyze, make inferences, or generalize.

As we begin the slow slide towards summer, how can you improve your questioning AND keep your students more actively engaged?

DON’T OVERUSE I-R-E QUESTIONS.

Example

Teacher: “Who can tell me what a simile is? Mike?”

Student: “A simile compares two different things using ‘like’ or ‘as.’”

Teacher: “Good job.”

The sequence above is an I-R-E model, one that teachers should use only minimally. Why? In this model, the teacher is speaking  2/3 of the time, and only one student at a time can speak. The conversation is unnatural, one that seldom occurs in any other setting, and there is usually only one correct answer. Students quickly learn to play the game, to raise a hand to offer up the desired response, and to tune out until their name is called. a

DON’T OVERUSE THESE TYPES OF QUESTIONS:
Management questions (57% of questions in the Wragg study)
 Recall questions (33% in the Wragg study)

DO ASK QUESTIONS DESIGNED TO
Cause your students to think
Provide information for the teacher about what to do next

Would you like some CCS Reading Standard-aligned sentence starters to make your questions deeper and richer, force your kids to think, and prepare them for college and career at the same time?

Grade 6

Grade 7

Grade 8

Grades 9-10

Grades 11-12