Mindset Works’ Blog

Thank you for all of your entries into the Growth Minded Educator Contest! The Growth Minded Educator of April is: Caresse Nguyen!

Congratulations to our winner, and thank you to all who participated!

Below is the winning entry to the contest question: "What is your favorite growth mindset moment or story from your classroom? We are looking for great quotes from students that show they are learning a growth mindset!":

"Returning to school should have a top spot on the top-ten list of human fears. All adult educators would agree that adult students' anxieties are high. Returning adult students have been out of school for a number of years, and many of them have had negative experiences with learning and school...

"Some schools actually grade students on Growth Mindset and grit. At Lenox, it doesn't make it to report cards, but kids do get evaluated on it, by other kids."

Exciting news for growth mindset schools!  Tovia Smith, NPR news correspondent, visited Lenox Academy, a school in Brooklyn teaching Brainology, and talked with students, teachers and administrator Joe Giamportone.

Lenox Academy has been explicitly teaching a growth mindset for several years and has been featured here on our blog.  Listen now to hear students and teachers talking about their work!

Maine Middle School teacher shares a growth mindset classroom moment.

One of the students in my special education class received the highest score possible on her mainstream health class test and was the only one to get a perfect score. She told me early in the year that she has "a third grade brain" and has "triple brain damage" due to traumatic events early in her life. Frequently, she was too discouraged to try anything she thought was going to be too hard. When she shared her great news about the test score, I asked her how she had accomplished such an impressive result. She let me know that she had studied really hard and that she could feel her dendrites growing. Then she shared a short song she had made up about learning and growing dendrites!

If you have a story to share, enter the Growth Minded Educator Contest this month!

Did you know that you can access Brainology en Español?

Your Bilingual / EL / ESL students, or other students learning Spanish, can learn the basic neuroscience behind how the brain learns along with research-based study skills, a combination that sparks their passion for learning and increases their motivation, efficacy and academic achievement.

There are two ways to use Brainology en Español!  You can view the online program in Spanish, and you can also download the lesson handouts in Spanish.

Visit Brainology Español!

by Gerry Wass, Purdy R-II School, Purdy, Missouri

So this guy walks into a bar, into the hotel bar actually, after the open mic night is over, after emceeing, performing a song of his own and helping to wrap up cords and take down equipment.  And he works his way up to visit with Jim Wooldridge AKA Señor Wooly (www.senorwooly.com) and Dr. Stephen Krashen, the professor whose works he had to read back in college.  He has actually talked to Stephen a couple of times during the conference, and he talked to Jim nearly every day to convince him to perform at the open mic night.  His improv version of "Puedo ir al baño" was a lifetime memory, and that's the glow over everything as Dr. Krashen looks at our guy and says "Get me an article about 'that' in the next week for the International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, a page and half maximum."