Our Latest Edutopia Post: Incorporating a Growth Mindset

Having a growth mindset is not only essential for students. It also can help teachers increase their impact in the classroom. That's the premise of our latest Edutopia blog post, which explains how the growth mindset as described by Carol Dweck, has implications for learning and improving education.

The growth mindset is a belief that individuals can improve, change, and grow through application and experience, no matter what their initial performance, interests, talents and skills may be. Donna and I wrote the post to focus on the importance of empowering educators with opportunities to develop a growth mindset, which will help build skills and strategies to increase the impact of their instruction in the classroom.

Specifically, we talk about capitalizing on teachers' "sea of strengths." While tapping into a growth mindset, coupled with an understanding of the science of neuroplasticity, can help individual teachers in isolation, there is even greater potential for sustained growth via formal and informal collaboration among teachers. We expound upon this concept in our book, Smarter Teacher Leadership: Neuroscience and the Power of Purposeful Collaboration.

The Edutopia post identifies several steps for promoting a group mindset among teachers, which fall into the categories of:

• Planning: Establishing clear intent, developing an action plan, and setting goals
• Engaging in Teaching: Taking action
• Group Evaluation and Staying the Course: Charting course corrections and committing to continued progress.

Read the entire blog post at Edutopia.