Challenge and Mindset

It is that magical time of year, when educators and students are starting a brand new school year.  It has been 14 years since I prepared a classroom for the first day of school and this is the 5th year that I have not been leading in a school as we prepare for the first day.  The last 4 years I have not been able to drive by a school during the first week of school without wiping tears from my eyes and wondering how I ventured so far from the classroom- teaching children- which was my unwavering dream from the age of 8.  This year will be different- no tears or feeling sorry for myself.  I now have a strong vision for why I am in this space and how it fits into my dream.  More importantly, thanks to  friends and mentors who reminded me that I should not be standing in front of educators talking about instructional practices that I have not personally tried, failed, refined and found success with a variety of students in a variety of settings, I WILL be in classrooms with students this year.  (Also thanks to friends who will let me in their classrooms and will share their students with me.)

My focus when I am in classrooms will be inspired and informed by two opportunities that are currently contributing to a significant change in my professional path.  The first is an extraordinary opportunity that I have been blessed with to see Carol Dweck and James Nottingham on their Mindset Conference tour in September.  The second is the influence, guidance, friendship, and mentoring I have received as a result of my association with Challenging Learning (Challenging Learning USA).  I have been a believer and fan of Challenging Learning for a long time, but I now have an even better understanding of the intentionality and authenticity that makes their work and their company so effective.

I am going to be intentional about two things- Challenge and Mindset, and I am going to be authentic by practicing both with students and engaging in dialogue with teachers about how they incorporate them into their classroom culture.  At a time when educators are feeling overwhelmed by so many initiatives, improvement plans, and change programs, I invite my educator friends to join me in focusing on just two words-challenge and mindset.  We can do this by filtering all of our instructional and assessment plans through two questions :  Am I challenging ALL students?  and Am I modeling and encouraging a growth mindset?

Am I challenging ALL students?  As you plan your units, activities, and daily lessons, focus less on content coverage and more on the idea of challenging the students.  Once you have a true culture of challenge, covering the content is easy.  Hold all students to high standards and expect all students to engage in challenging activities.  Obviously students all need different levels of support along the way, but they can all engage in the challenge and achieve at high levels.  Regularly introduce concepts that encourage cognitive conflict and avoid swooping in to save them at the first sign of struggle.  Instead, encourage and support their struggle without offering the solution.  You will be amazed at how much content they will learn on their own once they achieve that EUREKA moment.  When questioning students, think carefully about whether your response to their questioning is ending the learning process or whether it is challenging them to continue their thinking.  Challenge yourself to respond to their responses with more questions rather than accepting the answer and moving on.  Plan your lessons so that you are talking less and are, instead, engaging the students in dialogue.  True dialogue will help them build their efficacy through their collaborative efforts to construct understanding and form their own judgments and inferences.  (References to The Learning Challenge, Challenging Learning through Dialogue and a book coming out soon- Challenging Learning Through Questioning)

Am I modeling and encouraging a growth mindset?  There has been a lot of focus on growth mindset, especially in recent years.  Unfortunately, although there have been great intentions, much of the work around growth mindset had been slightly misguided.  Growth mindset cannot be an additional "subject" that is taught in class and it cannot be achieved by simply changing the phrases that we use to praise student work.  Shifting mindsets is more about creating a different culture by evaluating how we instruct, thinking about the messages we send about expectations for success, and modeling growth mindset behaviors every day.  If you are focused on challenging all students, you are already on your way to modeling and encouraging a growth mindset.  In her book, Mindset:  Changing the way you think to fulfill your potential, Carol Dweck discusses how people with a growth mindset seek and thrive on challenge.  She shares stories of people like Mia Hamm and Patricia Miranda who took on physical challenges in order to succeed athletically and Christopher Reeve who challenged himself in recovery from a severed spinal cord to do things the doctors told him he would never do.  On the other hand, she shares that people with a fixed mindset thrive on the "sure thing" and shut down when challenged.  If we can challenge all students in a non-threatening environment, we can  help all students to thrive on challenge rather than the "sure thing".  Dweck does acknowledge the difficulty in shifting mindsets and talks about the journey to a true mindset and how it takes time and effort to achieve it.  In their book, Challenging Mindset, James Nottingham and Bosse Larsson build on Carol Dweck's famous phrase, "The Power of Yet" from her Ted Talk in 2014 by introducing YETIs that can be used to help students on their journey to a growth mindset.  The Y in YETI is for you, and it encourages students to focus inward on whether they are open to learning, determined to improve, and willing to have a go at improving.  The E stands for evaluate and prompts students to evaluate their progress towards the learning goal.  The T is for setting targets that will help with improvement and deeper learning.  The I stands for improve and involves selecting a strategy that will effectively support movement towards the target.  There are YETIs for older and younger students for a variety of concepts in which students may need support in reaching their goal. With the use of strategies like the YETI and a focus on mistakes as not only learning opportunities, but the only way to really enhance learning, we can help students (and ourselves) to make the shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, or for those who already have a growth mindset, we can continue to feed it!

As we think about challenging all students and modeling and encouraging growth mindset, it helps to have a vision for what our classroom would look if we say yes to the two questions I have posed above.  For me, that vision can be formed by thinking about how students would respond to the following questions on a survey:

• Does your teacher believe that you can solve challenging problems on your own?
• What does your teacher value?

My vision includes students who say yes to the first question and  who answer the second question with words and phrases like:  students, learning, risk taking, growth, resiliency, student voice, learning from mistakes, student choice, self-efficacy.... 

Change one thing

As all of our educators head back to school for a new year, I am a little envious of the teachers who will be standing in front of a new group of learners over the next couple of weeks.  I miss teaching students every day and I especially miss the excitement that comes with a brand new year.  Students will walk into new classrooms, with a new teacher, a new set of classmates, ready to unpack new school supplies.  What will not be new to many of them is the anxiety that resides just below the surface and is fed by questions like:  Will my teacher understand me?  Will I have any friends?  Will I get the help/challenge that I need?  Will there be adults who care about me and accept me for who I am?  Something else that will not be new is the knowledge that things WILL be different this year than last.  The curriculum content will change, the teacher's expectations will be different, and classroom procedures will vary from past years.  Amazingly, young learners do not typically struggle with this part.  They are amazingly resilient and adaptable to change.  Especially if they are well supported and cared for.

I am completely immersed in my passion and efforts to support change in our schools that will benefit our learners.  I will not re-hash what I have already shared in my blogs about the documented need and urgency for change, but suffice it to say, our children need us, as educators, to shift our practices.  I have been disheartened in the last few weeks to witness multiple occasions where high quality and well informed efforts to support and inform change have been thwarted or adjusted because they do not align with the "American market".  I find this to be frustrating, embarrassing, and discouraging.  I have great faith in our educators and I am certain that our schools are brimming with talented, motivated teachers who are very capable of making the same changes that are being made in other parts of the world.  Rather than making changes to high quality change efforts to fit the "American market", I will continue to challenge our educators to create a new culture where we are as resilient and adaptable to change as the students who enter our classrooms.  Like the students, though, it must be done with support and care from the system.

I challenge our schools and districts to embrace ONE substantial change this year that is focused on learning rather than just a cursory response to student achievement data.  Maybe it is a focus on process over content, it could be a shift to competency based practices, it could be a commitment to challenge students to lead their own learning, or perhaps it is the integration of academic subject areas.  Work collaboratively and set aside your other initiatives long enough to really figure out what supports, steps, resources, etc... are needed to truly make this ONE change.  I am not talking surface level, check-the-box-and-move-on kind of change.  I mean real change that looks and feels different, infiltrates the entire system and has a measurable impact on student learning that is not only visible, but also long-lasting.

We must move beyond doing what we have always done and we must stop limiting our vision for change by the current structures and paradigms that we hold so dear.  We are preparing students for a future that we cannot even fathom.  It is difficult to justify educating them in a setting that has changed little in the last 100 years.