Day 2: Perseverance and a Growth Mindset

Third Period Class Watching a Clip from Facing the Giants

Some of the target areas from yesterday were much improved today.  I did notice that I am going to have to make a very deliberate plan for how to tackle the time issue in my afternoon classes.  When I feel rushed through things, I do not explore the activities as deeply and I also find myself a bit less patient.  My co-teacher and I are going to work on a targeted plan to improve some student habits in there which means doing some triage with the class activities that I use in the morning.

Here is how the morning classes went...

I believe very strongly that classroom management stems from a positive relationship with students and from teaching the procedures to allow your classroom to run smoothly.  So, we continued to work on class procedures a bit.  We reviewed what we covered yesterday about opening routines, hands signals, class materials, preparedness, and homework.  Today, we added on work submission, makeup work, writing utensil supplies, and locker routines.

Growth Mindset:  Then we moved into today's discussions and activities.  The students began by taking a Growth Mindset quiz.  I collected the data to review it a bit, but the overall impression was that the vast majority of my students showed evidence of strong growth mindsets...which was really refreshing to see.  I did make a mental note of a couple of students in one class who expressed a lot of fixed mindset attitudes and I am hoping to make some progress there.

After the quiz, we talked a bit about neural pathways and how we can strengthen our minds just like we strengthen our muscles.  We moved into the value of mistakes where I asked the class to recite the phrase on our classroom wall...  "In this classroom, mistakes are expected, respected, and inspected." ...and we talked a bit about how valuable mistakes could be.

The Value of Failure:  We also talked about how fear of failure can keep us from taking the risks necessary to grow.  I shared with them the quote:

"There is no comfort in the growth zone, and there is no growth in the comfort zone."

And we shared a bit about what that means.  Then we watched this Michael Jordan commercial clip:

We talked about the word PERSEVERE.  While a few of them were familiar with the word, it was new vocabulary for many of them.  I made a note to include that word in our cross-curricular vocabulary for the month.

Good Mathematicians Persevere:  We opened up the foldable in our interactive notebook and recorded the first habit of all good mathematicians:

"Good mathematicians make sense of problems and persevere in solving them."

I explained to them that there are mathematicians that will work on the same problem for years and even decades of their lives.  They may take breaks to regroup, they may attack the problem a different way, they may spend time exploring the mistakes and mis-tries...but they persevere.

Class was drawing to a close but I made sure to make time to conclude with this powerful clip from Facing the Giants:

It was a good set of conversations but I carried much of the weight of instruction in a traditional "teacher is telling us this stuff" type of way.  I am looking to tomorrow and finding out a bit more about what THEY think about some mathematics.  Dot Talks and Which One Doesn't Belong just ahead...