Teachers should no longer feel or be labeled as the all-knowing expert of their subject area or in their classrooms. Like our learners, we as educators should cultivate a growth mindset for ourselves, a term coined by psychologist Carol Dweck.

You may be asking, what is a growth mindset?

Sasha Crowley, an instructional designer at Brandman University concisely summarizes the difference between students with a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset:

To encourage and develop a growth mindset in students, we should model and implement the key characteristics of a growth mindset in how we work. 

To successfully facilitate and cultivate a growth mindset in teachers and educators, many factors must work together amongst the schooling community. In the article titled “Developing a Growth Mindset in Teachers and Staff” by Keith Heggart, he shares four ways to encourage a growth mindset in teachers:

Modeling

Modeling is seen as one of the most effective methods in encouraging a culture of a growth mindset. Teachers should see themselves as learners, who are there to learn with the students and see that they too have the ability to improve and learn new things. When students see the passion of learning from their teachers, they too will be encouraged to embrace the learning journey.

Opportunities for new ideas

The willingness to try new things is an essential part of having a growth mindset. To encourage this in teachers, there should be more opportunities and space to do so in the school environment to try new approaches to teaching and learning with an emphasis on what is learned through the process. 

For example, schools can explore offering opportunities to employ action research into the constant improvement of a curriculum. 

Self-reflection

Built-in reflection time is crucial in helping teachers bring awareness to their practices to foster a growth mindset. The reflection should focus on what was learned through the process or journey rather than focus on the success of a new process/program. 

Formative Feedback 

Formative feedback is something we often use with students, but it is equally important in teacher performance management. School management should consider implementing formative feedback opportunities, rather than quarterly “summative” assessments of the teacher. Teachers need to feel that they are in a safe environment to give and receive constant meaningful feedback to improve their daily practices. 

The four areas mentioned above are important and it will take time to implement and establish as part of a schools’ management culture. Here are some ways that you can consider to practice a growth mindset.

Establish a community of practice with your colleagues

Involve your colleagues in your quest to foster a growth mindset. Establish seek colleagues to come together as a community of practice (Wenger-Trayner and Lave, 1991). By regularly meeting and engaging with a group of like-minded colleagues who share your concerns and passions will help you to constantly reflect and get feedback on your practice. What is also great is that through sharing, you may feel inspired to try new approaches!

Involve your students

The first step to modeling is to actually share your goals with your students. Tell them that you are constantly learning with them and you are learning to adopt a growth mindset. Additionally, welcome student feedback, actively ask students how they think you can improve, and become a better guide for them. You will be surprised by how enlightening their answers may be!

Change is the constant in our lives, and teachers have been thrown in the deep end the past year with the current pandemic shifting our usual practices but hopefully, this year, with a little change in perspective we will be ready to face any challenge ahead and innovate with a growth mindset.

– You can read more about Carol Dweck’s work here.

If you have ever spent any time teaching in a school, you will observe that throughout the day children will find or invent new ways to play with just about anything whether it’s tossing paper airplanes down the hall or engaging in sports games during recess.

This seems only natural because children are inclined to be curious, imaginative, and engage in playful discovery. 

Traditional education systems seem to stifle playfulness and instead encourage obedience and order, the opposite of play. I can recall many moments in my own childhood where I was asked to turn over the trinkets and toys that I usually brought to school in my pocket and played with during lessons.

Jane McGonigal, a game designer and researcher in the field of game-based learning says in her TED Talk that “when we’re playing a game, that we’re actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out.”

It turns out that playing games and engaging in other forms of play are deeply stimulating and intuitive activities that require cognitive thinking and problem solving, the very things that education strives to achieve. 

Toy manufacturer LEGO has known about the power of play for many years and has even conducted research to thoroughly understand the nature of play. When they published a framework for educators called the Pedagogy of Play, their research indicated that when children are engaged in play, they are building cognitive, emotional, social, physical, and creative skills.

Research has repeatedly shown that “play experiences are not merely fun – play also has a critical and crucial role in learning and in preparing children for challenges in childhood and throughout adulthood.” If play helps to develop the exact same skills that education intends, then why do we shun play in school and in classrooms? 

Instead of shunning play in education altogether, perhaps there are ways in which we can leverage play in classrooms as a way to keep children engaged while learning. Depending on your readiness to play and lead play, there are several entry points, such as gamifying behavior management with tools like Class Dojo or if you are ready for a costume change and a magic wand, step into the world of Live Action Role Playing.

We all understand that education can’t be fun and games all of the time, but there certainly is room for improvement. 

Today, there are dozens of educational games, apps, and learning environments that are designed to provide a playful experience for learning to take place. One of the biggest players currently in this space is Minecraft, which operates an education version of their famous game environment. Educator Dan Bloom has used Minecraft to teach biology, where students used Minecraft to recreate models of cells.

This is just one of the many examples of how educators are harnessing the power of play through what is called game-based learning. 

At BSD Education, like LEGO, we know that children are inherently tuned for play, which is why our curriculum is project-focused and is centered around creating and making digital artifacts such as web pages, games, and interactive elements.

By engaging in the process of making something like a webpage or video game, our students are experiencing the same characteristics of play that are described in the Pedagogy of Play: iteration, meaningful contexts, joyful experiences, and social interactions.

Our Education team at BSD Education relies on the unique potential of play to be a catalyst for learning, which is why we start developing our curriculum with play in mind. 

Personalized learning is widely debated among educators. While I am not writing this as an expert in this area, I want to use this opportunity to begin a dialogue with readers about personalized learning – what are your thoughts, experiences, practices, hopes?

In recent years, a great deal of attention and investment has gone into pushing initiatives and software by Silicon Valley in utilizing technology to enable personalized learning. This has been met with varying degrees of criticism (for more on this, you can check out this Education Week article by Benjamin Herold.) In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic propelling the shift to online learning, the suggestion that it’s a “good time” to try-out tech-driven personalized learning is reemerging. Even so, the start of the academic year has been met with varying degrees of success. Schools and communities that have a robust digital learning culture and infrastructure are thriving while underserved communities with the lack of access to devices and connectivity are suffering greatly, thus the learning gap is becoming (scarily) increasingly wider. 

The definition and approach to personalized learning vary from educator to educator and from organization to organization – it really depends on your pedagogical viewpoint.  In practice, we can be talking about the introduction of a platform/software that guides students through different learning journeys built on an algorithm, or to some schools, a loose pedagogical framework in whole-school curriculum redesigns. 

According to Herold, we can summarize this model as follows:

• Personalized learning can be tailored to students’ strengths, weaknesses, and areas of interest
• Pace and instruction are used to design for each individual
• Technology is greatly leveraged to track and measure student learning and develop “learner profiles”
• Educational tech tools are used to develop a student”s “learner profile” to help customize educational content

Too often, nowadays, we try to find a tech solution to all that we do and often begin to lose focus on what is most important. Personalized learning is not about technology. Let us not forget the power and importance of teacher-student relationships and our role as teachers in inspiring and being beacons to our learners. The human element in our learning environments, be it in-person or virtual is more important than ever in these uncertain times. 

Paul Emerich France, author of Reclaiming Personalized Learning: A Pedagogy for Restoring Equity and Humanity in Our Classrooms (2019) debunks five common myths about personalized learning and a great comparison between a “humanized” versus “dehumanized” approach to personalized learning. I find these two resources particularly helpful to refer to when I find myself needing to refocus my pedagogical approach when creating and improving our programs at BSD Education. 

It is easy for us to say just use some software to guide our learners through their learning journey, but France’s resources remind us to dive deeper and consider wider perspectives and circumstances when we plan our curriculum because too often, students just simply need to know that you are there for them and to inspire them – something no algorithm can replace.

What are your strategies when it comes to personalizing education in your classrooms and schools? What are your struggles? How can we better humanize your journey in bringing digital skills learning into your classrooms?

You can reach me at ey@bsd.education at any time to continue the dialogue I want to hear from you!