Norwood Primary School has been learning all about Growth Mindset and how it can help us with our learning.

Growth Mindset as a focus for all our community has highlighted it is okay to be stuck and in fact, some of their best learning is done when they find things the hardest. Rather than simply praising success we praise effort and persistence.

 We believe the best thing to do is to teach children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. For children who find work easy we make sure they encounter more difficult tasks. Our children recognise that effort, persistence and good teaching are what help them improve.

Every class has been looking at and learning about the two types of mindsets that children and adults can have, a ‘fixed’ mindset and a ‘growth’ mindset. Below is an overview of the traits of each: 

Fixed Mindset 

• I like my work to be easy 
• I don’t like to try a challenge 
• I want people to praise me for how clever I am 
• I believe I cannot change how clever I am 
• I don’t like to try new things because I won’t be very good at it 
• I give up easily

Growth Mindset 

• I never give up 
• I like my work to be difficult – it means I am learning 
• I love challenges 
• I want people to praise me for the effort I put into my work 
• I believe I can get more intelligent by working hard 
• I feel clever when I’m learning something new 
• I learn from my mistakes 

It has been proven that having a Growth Mindset can improve children’s progress and attainment. As a result, we are teaching our children that by having a Growth Mindset they can grow their brains and intelligence and achieve anything they want! 

A quote from Carol Dweck:

"In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it."

This is important because (1) individuals with a "growth" theory are more likely to continue working hard despite setbacks and (2) individuals' theories of intelligence can be affected by subtle environmental cues. For example, children given praise such as "good job, you're very smart" are much more likely to develop a fixed mindset, whereas if given compliments like "good job, you worked very hard" they are likely to develop a growth mindset. In other words, it is possible to encourage students, for example, to persist despite failure by encouraging them to think about learning in a certain way.”

 How you can help at home 

• Praise the amount of effort your child is putting into things rather than how clever they are; 
• Talk to your children about their brain being like a muscle - the more they use it, the stronger it gets; 
• Encourage your children to not give up if they are finding something difficult; 
• Challenge your children to try something new or challenging.