Learning Mindsets & Skills

Learning Mindsets & Skills 

MOOC Week 2 - Camille Farrington (Oct 1, 2015)

We once again hear from Dr. Camille Farrington as she discusses how to specifically assess and measure learning mindsets.

Read more at http://hightechhigh.libsyn.com/#DapKccLHbgrlhPg1.99

The idea of self efficacy and growth mindset ...has a lot to do with grading and instructional practices. If what we do as a teacher is say to kids, “What we're trying to learn is a really hard thing to do. It's going to take a lot of work and practice to get there and I know you're not there now, so we're going to bring in models of what a good example of this done well would look like.  You're going to practice and practice and I'm going to give you feedback on what you're doing. I'm not going to grade until you can do it well, once you've gotten to the point where you've demonstrated you can really do this -- whether it’s writing an essay, a particular kind of math problem or whether it's creating some final presentation. You're just going to keep working on it until it is a high quality product. Then give kids time to work, be wrong, then try again -- really working on some kind of meaningful product is how you build self efficacy, which is how you build growth mindset.

I'll contrast that with, I'm going to teach you unit 1, page 1 through 10 today: we're going to read through it, you're going to do the questions at the end.  Then may or may not review it, but we’re going to move on to the next thing and then 10 days from now we're going to test on all of it. Then we have to move on to something else because we have this content coverage stuff that we have to move through. So kids don't feel like ‘I can succeed at this’ because if they don't get it right away, there really isn’t another opportunity to get it. Also it sends the message to kids that either it’s [the content] not that important that you get it, because I know you failed at this or you got a C on the test, but that doesn’t matter b/c what’s more important is that we move on to the next thing. So that sends the message that 1) we know that it’s not that important that you learn this or 2) we don't really mind if you can learn it any better than that anyway. It really undermines that notion that kids “I can succeed. My hard work is going to pay off.”