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Capacity to Care,
Growth Mindset and Collaborative Problem-Solving
In this lesson, we will be primarily focused on Capacity to Care,
Growth Mindset and Collaborative Problem-Solving.
Capacity to Care
What do you need for a caring classroom?
The article "The Secret to Raising Smart Kids" by the Growth Mindset proponent Carol Dweck, highlighted that focusing on the “process”- not on intelligence or talent- is key to success in school and in life as shown by Dweck’s more than three decades of research. Such process consists of personal effort and effective strategies, and it specifically refers “to building empathy into the classroom setting and how developing emotional intelligence is key to success inside and outside of the classroom”. (Mindful Staff, 2015, para 2)
The model of Goleman and Senge (2014 as cited in Mindful Staff, 2015) on empathy shows what learners need for success in school and life. Based on the model by Goleman and Senge, there are three kinds of empathy that learners need for success in school and life: Empathic Concern (i.e. caring classroom), Emotional Empathy (i.e. chemistry in connections), and Cognitive Empathy (i.e. how understanding how people see and think about the world).
Goleman and Senge further elaborated that learning takes place best - in a warm, supportive atmosphere, in which there exists a feeling of safety, of being supported and cared about, of closeness and connection. In such a space children’s brains more readily reach the state of optimal cognitive efficiency—and of caring about others.
Evidence also showed that such an atmosphere has particular importance for those children at most risk of going off track in their lives because of early experiences of deprivation, abuse, or neglect. Studies of such high-risk kids who have ended up thriving in their lives—who are resilient—find that usually, the one person who turned their life around was a caring adult (cited in Mindful Staff, 2015 para 9).
Click the arrow on the side to scroll through the images about empathy and literacy below.
Growth Mindset
Click the arrow on the side to scroll through the images.
The left image shows a growth mindset; the right image shows a fixed mindset. Generally, all students have mindset. Whether or not students are aware of their mindset, a broad body of research has shown that what they believe about their own intelligence can affect their effort, engagement, motivation, and achievement as measured by test scores, school grades, passing rate in post-secondary education, and other metrics (Transforming Education, 2014).
Click the arrow on the side to scroll through the images below.
Essentially, Growth Mindset matters because it may contribute to better outcomes in school and beyond particularly in the literacy instruction. Carol Dweck, the proponent of the Growth Mindset, states that- In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment,” writes Dweck. Students who embrace growth mindsets—the belief that they can learn more or become smarter if they work hard and persevere—may learn more, learn it more quickly, and view challenges and failures as opportunities to improve their learning and skills. (Education Reform, 2014, para 4).
In Growth Mindset, Dweck (2010) emphasizes that learners lead to a desire to learn, and therefore a tendency to: Embrace challenges, Persist in the face of setbacks, See efforts as the path to mastery, Learn from criticism, and Find lessons and inspirations in the success of others. As a result, learners reach ever-higher levels of achievement. Along with these lines, growth mindset contributes to effective literacy instruction.
Collaborative Problem-solving
Collaborative problem-solving is another indicator measured by PISA that is defined as “as the capacity of an individual to effectively engage in a process whereby two or more agents attempt to solve a problem by sharing the understanding and effort required to come to a solution and pooling their knowledge, skills, and efforts to reach that solution” (PISA, 2015 in OECD, 2017, p 47).
There are three factors in PISA’s definition that can help us understand the concept of collaborative problem-solving and relate it to literacy instruction:
Ability of the learner to work well with others,
Two or more learners working together, and
Solving a problem.
In schools during reading or speaking activities, we tend to group our learners to work together to solve a problem, complete a task, create a product, or discuss a single problem with a partner. They are almost always involved in a collaborative problem-solving activity.
Read the following excerpts from the PISA 2015.
You can also find the full article included in your Book of Readings.
TEACHING AND ASSESSING COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING SKILLS
Some education systems across the world are beginning to adapt their curricula and instruction to equip their students with collaboration skills (Griffin and Care, 2015; Hesse et al., 2015). One concrete example of such a pedagogical programme is Project Work, introduced for grade 11 students in Singapore in 2000 to “provide students with the opportunity to synthesise knowledge from various areas of learning, and critically and creatively apply it to real-life situations” (MOE, 2017).2 Four learning outcomes were identified: knowledge application, communication, independent learning and collaboration.
For the latter learning outcome, students “acquire collaborative skills through working in a team to achieve common goals”. However, in most countries and economies, collaboration is not a skill that is explicitly taught in schools but is rather acquired through the teaching of other subjects. For example, students are often asked to perform group work in traditional academic subjects (such as the three core PISA domains), and are also given chances to interact with one another in a variety of other contexts in other activities and classes, such as physical education class, music class, or extracurricular sports teams. There have been few attempts to assess how well students collaborate with one another. This may be partly due to the lack of an obvious measure for how well one has collaborated. For example, in Singapore’s Project Work, students are assessed in the learning outcomes of knowledge application (generating, developing and evaluating ideas and information in order to execute project tasks) and communication (presenting ideas clearly and coherently in both written and oral form). Collaboration and independent learning, which are skills developed and used on the way to completing their project tasks, are not assessed (MOE, 2017).
Hence, PISA 2015 decided to assess 15-year-old students’ ability to collaborate in order to solve problems. By doing so, PISA aims to address the lack of internationally comparable data in this field, allowing countries and economies to see, for the first time, where their students stand in relation to students in other education systems in these skills. Within-country analyses will give policy makers the information they need to enable them to develop programmes to improve their students’ collaboration and interpersonal skills. PISA thus seeks to address the lack of knowledge about which factors, policies and practices are related to the development of collaboration skills.
THE PISA 2015 FRAMEWORK FOR ASSESSING COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING COMPETENCE
The PISA 2015 framework for assessing collaborative problem-solving competence guided the development of the assessment and sets the parameters for reporting results. The framework identifies two major components to collaborative problem solving: the cognitive and general problem-solving aspects common to individual problem solving (as examined in PISA 2012) and the collaborative aspects unique to collaborative problem solving.
As in PISA 2012, four processes in individual problem solving were identified:
exploring and understanding: exploring the problem situation by observing it, interacting with it, searching for information and finding limitations or obstacles; and demonstrating understanding of the information given and the information discovered while interacting with the problem situation
representing and formulating: using tables, graphs, symbols or words to represent aspects of the problem situation; and formulating hypotheses about the relevant factors in a problem and the relationships between them to build a coherent mental representation of the problem situation
planning and executing: devising a plan or strategy to solve the problem; executing the strategy; and perhaps clarifying the overall goal and setting subgoals
monitoring and reflecting: monitoring progress; reacting to feedback; and reflecting on the solution, the information provided with the problem or the strategy adopted.
Unique to PISA 2015 are three collaborative problem-solving competencies:
establishing and maintaining shared understanding: identifying the knowledge and perspectives that other group members hold and establishing a shared vision of the problem states3 and activities
taking appropriate action to solve the problem: identifying the type of collaborative problem solving-related activities that are needed to solve the problem and carrying out these activities to achieve the solution
establishing and maintaining team organisation: understanding one’s own role and the roles of other agents, following the rules of engagement for one’s role, monitoring group organisation, and facilitating the changes required to optimise performance or to handle a breakdown in communication or other obstacles to solving the problem.
Let us look at again the connections of practicing distributed leadership, preparing a shared vision for a learning organization, and creating conditions of school life transform schools into a learning organization. Capacity to care, well-being, growth mindset and collaborative-solving as well as school climate, social, emotional learning (SEL), and Gender Equity and Social Inclusion (GESI) are conditions that contribute to effective literacy instruction.
What actions can school heads and supervisors do to ensure these conditions are fostered for effective literacy instruction in a flexible learning modality?
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