Professional Development - Ugg... or LOVE!

I know that many teachers have a love / hate relationship with Professional Development. While I have attended my fair share of sub-par PD sessions, I typically enjoy professional development workshops. I welcome the opportunity to reflect on my teaching practice, and to learn new things to help me become a more effective educator.

On Friday, my district had a teacher in-service day. I was pleased when I heard that our PD day would be spent with just our faculty at my site. Our site leadership team prepared a full day of activities for us, and it was time well spent. We spent the morning talking about growth mindset vs. fixed mindset. This was not a new topic to me, but it was great to spend the morning with my colleagues learning about this topic. 

I found the following video clips very insightful, and they caused me to think about my language in the classroom, and how I go about challenging and supporting my students. These clips feature the research of Stanford Education / Psychology professor, Carol Dweck. She has done extensive research on the topic and wrote the book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which I promptly downloaded to my Kindle! Dr. Dweck has revisited some of her teaching about growth mindset, and I found this Education Week article very helpful in understanding how to teach growth mindset, and what is does / does not look like when working with children.  

What is also interesting is that just this week, the popular classroom management app, Class Dojo has gotten on board with the concept of Growth Mindset and has created a series of videos to teach this concept to children. The first video was released last week! They will be releasing a new video each week for the next four week! I can't wait to share these videos with my students!

I think that as a staff we all had a good understanding of how we could work to foster Growth Mindset in our struggling students, but collectively we had questions about how to best serve our high achieving students. How do we develop a growth mindset in them when things see to come so easily. They need opportunities to struggle with new concepts to develop the neural connections they will need later in life.

How are you developing a growth mindset in your classroom?

How are you supporting your high achieving students?