How Educators Can Assist Learners in Developing a Growth Mindset

I have written, described, and presented about the growth mindset in education settings, see

• The Educator and the Growth Mindset
• The Educator with a Growth Mindset: A Staff Workshop
• Growth Mindset: Personal Accountability and Reflection

This post delves a little deeper, and hopefully provides some additional ideas for how educators can assist their learners in developing a growth mindset.

Part of facilitating a growth mindset within learners involves changing some preconceptions of the role of teacher.  One such change is in viewing one of the roles as being that of a coach.  As Kirsten Olson discusses in Teacher As Coach: Transforming Teaching With the A Coaching Mindset:

Coaches operate with an underlying assumption that giving advice to others undermines the confidence and self-worth of others.  Others don’t need to be fixed.  In teaching we need to move to exactly this stance in order to foster creativity in our students–to allow our students the choice, control, novelty and challenge that builds their creativity.  Without the assumption that our students are already competent, imaginative, and ready to burst forth with regular exhibitions of novel and valuable ideas and products, we are limiting their creative capacities before they’ve even had a chance to discover them.

The educator, as a growth mindset facilitator and coach, has a different, often unique, set of beliefs about students learning and growth. The following infographic shows (1) the common beliefs of an educator who promotes a growth mindset, and (2) some reflection questions about instructional practices that reinforce the growth mindset: