Growth Mindset

At St Anne’s Infants’ School, we want all of our children and staff to ‘shine’ and we recognise and encourage this through our school star values where we celebrate people being, self-believers, team players, adventurous, resilient and successful.

Intertwined within the star values, we are focused on developing ourselves as life long learners, motivated by challenge, responsive to feedback, inspired by other people and willing to learn from mistakes. Learners with a ‘growth mindset’.

Our inspiration has come from the research of an American Psychologist, Professor Carole Dweck from Stanford University. Her studies have shown that how we view ourselves as learners has a huge impact on what we are able to achieve. She suggests that people broadly fall into one of two categories: those with a fixed mindset and those with a growth mindset.

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 can learn from the mistakes I make
I learn from my mistakes

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

Those of us with a fixed mindset believe that we have a predetermined amount of intelligence, skills or talents which cannot be changed, whereas those of us with growth mindset believe that we can develop our abilities, intelligence or talents with persistence, effort and a focus on learning.

Instilling all of our children and staff with growth mindsets has become a key priority within St. Anne’s Infants’ as studies show that it is people with a growth mindset (as opposed to a fixed mindset) who achieve in life, are successful in all they do and are happy.

Our feedback in school, recognises the effort, resilience and persistence that children (and staff) show in their learning. We are developing our language to encourage us all to ignite the desire to succeed and continually improve, to find different ways to solve problems and overcome adversity.

Staff are equipped with sentence stems to encourage, give guidance to and challenge the children at St. Anne’s Infants’. Here are just a few:

I am so proud of your resilience – you didn’t give up, when it was hard.

What a creative way to solve that problem.

I am impressed with your resilience / adventurousness/ team playing/ ……because

You should be proud of your work because….

Your positive attitude helped because…..

Tell me what you have learnt from that marvellous mistake.

Parents can encourage children to develop at growth mindset at home by:

Avoiding labels and giving growth-mindset praise

Try not to label yourself in ways that models a fixed mindset ( I’m a terrible cook….I was never good at maths)
Praise and value effort, practice, self-correction, and persistence that led to the outcome.
Don’t over protect your child from making mistakes. Ask “What can you learn from this experience? What could you try differently the next time?”

Get curious about your child’s work through questioning

How did you work that out?
Is there another way you could have done that?
How many times did you try before it turned out that way?
What did you find challenging and how did you work it out?
What do you plan to do next time?

The last word from Carol Dweck:

“..when students had more of a growth mindset, they held the view that talents and abilities could be developed and that challenges were the way to do it. Learning something new, something hard, sticking to things—that’s how you get smarter. Setbacks and feedback weren’t about your abilities, they were information you could use to help yourself learn. With a growth mindset, kids don’t necessarily think that there’s no such thing as talent or that everyone is the same, but they believe everyone can develop their abilities through hard work, strategies, and lots of help and mentoring from others.”

Famous people with Growth Mindsets

Albert Einstein failed his first college entrance exam, and had to retake it before entering the prestigious Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland?