Developing a growth mindset in the classroom is both powerful and crucial for building more confident and resilient young learners. When the focus shifts to celebrating growth over grades, students start to develop strategies to help them improve their skills over time. As students start to understand the importance of growth and their capabilities of mastering skills, they become more confident and oftentimes are less afraid to fail.
Here are 3 ways through which you can promote a student growth mindset:
Build Community
Fostering a community of students and educators creates opportunities to work together and learn from one another. Community also gives a sense of belonging and a place where you can build connections. When people share within a community, it opens the opportunity for idea sharing and growth as a group. Through community, students are inspired to inquire more, be creative, share with others, and reflect.
How students can build a community using SpacesEDU:
- Solve problems together using Group Spaces - work together as a team in a collaborative Space to create solutions
- Actively engage students using daily posts - create a daily prompt to share in your feed
- Celebrate learning - encourage student-led conferences to celebrate learning within your community
Share
When we’re proud of our work, we look for opportunities to share with the people around us. Sharing doesn’t always come naturally, or feel easy at times, but it contributes to learning and understanding within the classroom. By sharing within the class space, students can build the confidence needed to begin sharing beyond the classroom walls.
How students can share and grow using SpacesEDU:
- Discover new ways of sharing knowledge - students can utilize photos, video, audio, or even upload a document to support their learning
- Showcase their best learning - students can collect the learning they feel the proudest of and share it within an Individual Space
Reflect
Reflection has a great impact on understanding, learning, and most importantly growth. Whether it’s internal or external reflection, it’s an opportunity to evaluate growth over time. Reflection is a great way to remind students of how far they’ve come and their learning process along the way. Often time at the end of the school year, it’s an opportunity to reflect on the growth that’s happened and determine the next steps for the following year. When we make reflection a habit, we can create a process to critically look at student work and inspire innovation and resilience.
How students can build on reflection within SpacesEDU:
- Establish a feedback loop - encourage students to share their work and provide feedback from both teachers and families
- Give students an opportunity to pause and reflect - after providing feedback to students let students pause to reflect on their work
- Let students be agents of their own learning - while students reflect let them celebrate their understandings
