As a means to promote positive learning behaviors, resilience, and awareness of self and others throughout the year, I plan to focus on mindfulness and growth mindset throughout all curriculum and throughout each and every day.
Mindfulness
Main Street utilizes the Mindful Schools & MindUp Curriculum to teach mindfulness. I integrate mindfulness lessons throughout our curriculum regularly. Additionally, as part of our routines and structure, our class will be practicing mindfulness on a daily basis: right after recesses or in the afternoon and impromptu/as needed. This practice will help students set themselves up for successful learning, increased awareness of their feelings, and provide them with coping skills to respond to those feelings in an academic and socially supportive environment. Mindful Schools link
Growth Mindset
Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford University, has studied motivation and its relationship to success. Put very simply, she discovered that success comes from having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. When students (or anyone in any field) believe in themselves, try hard, make mistakes, bounce back from those mistakes, and keep going without giving up, they have the skills necessary to succeed in anything they want. Jo Boaler, also a professor at Stanford University, uses Dweck's findings by applying a growth mindset to mathematics. As parenthetically mentioned, a growth mindset can be applied to anything in life: sports, music, public speaking, acting, academics, fine arts, social skills. A growth mindset is not about talent and things coming easily; it is about developing skill in areas that might seem challenging at first and persevering through hardship and failure by putting in effort, developing stamina, and having the desire to succeed in something that might feel "impossible" at first. I highly value having a growth mindset in life, and my ultimate goal is to instill a growth mindset in my students that carries with them for the rest of their lives.