The Process

            Now that you have learned all about the benefits of the growth mindset you’re probably thinking something along the lines of well that’s great and all, but what do I do with this information? (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out our previous post called "The Research") If this is you, then you have two options. You can either apply it to yourself or bring it into your community (we chose the latter). For our project, we decided to set up bulletin boards around our school educating people on the growth mindset and how to adopt one for themselves.

First, we sent surveys to all the teachers. The survey consisted of a brief quiz on what mindset they have, followed by questions asking if they’d be interested in having bulletin boards placed in their respective subject wings and if they would be willing to integrate the growth mindset into their teaching. Once the survey results were in, we emailed the heads of each department, describing our project and what we intended to do. For each subject, a different board about the growth mindset was to be designed (for example, the art board displays the struggles faced by well known artists, while the guidance board describes the power of the word “yet”). Rough drafts were then created and sent out for feedback. One of the most helpful pieces of advice we received was from the head of our social studies department. He brought the lack of diversity on the bulletin board to our attention, and suggested we modify the examples in order to more closely reflect the diversity of the school. We soon realized that almost all of our boards had some work to be done… Once these changes were made and everything was approved, we enlisted the help of one of the art teachers to start printing the designs. Over the course of a few days, the boards were made and put up around the school. Now you can’t walk more than a few meters without seeing some sort of board reinforcing the growth mindset. J

The History Board with the tribulations of prominent figures like FDR and Malala Yousafzai.

The Science Board highlighting the struggles of scientists like Einstein and Meitner.

This aspect of our project may be done, but our work is far from complete. Over the summer, we’d like to design lesson plans for teachers with suggestions on how to encourage the growth mindset in their classroom. Some of the most important goals of these lessons are 1) to teach the faculty members how to design projects that help their students adopt new strategies when original methods don’t work and 2) to show teachers how to change their praise from rewarding intelligence to acknowledging hard work and effort. Research shows that small changes are enough to make a huge difference in a student’s success, and that sort of magic really needs to be shared with the world.