Happy New Year! I hope you are enjoying the holiday break.

Welcome to our new class website. Here you will find information relevant to our classroom, including important dates and news links and posts. Hopefully, you will find your way around very quickly.

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Winter Break LA Assignment

"My New Years Resolution" Essay (see ClassLink) Due Friday, Jan. 5

2nd Payment for St. Augustine Due Friday, Jan. 5

Candle Sales Due Monday, Jan. 8

We will be going to the library on the 2nd Tuesday of every month.

Science Center will be offered on the 2nd Friday of every month during specials time.

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SPELLING BEE NEWZZZZ

Congratulations to Caily and Madelyn for their outstanding performance in today’s middle school Spelling Bee! Caily won first place and Madelyn was the runner up. Both students will represent the Northwest Florida Ballet Academie in the District’s Middle School Spelling Bee to be held in January.

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* We have a couple of students with allergies to all nuts, shell fish, and possibly coconuts.

Link to Mr. Westlake's Website: http://eocstudymaterials.net/index.php

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Spotlight Article for Parents: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids (PDF)

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Below you will find information on a learning program/philosophy shared by the teacher's association.

The Growth Mindset

Learn more about what the National Education Association (NEA) shared recently. It is called the growth mindset.

Here is a youtube video about the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN34FNbOKXc

Research completed by Dr. Carol Dweck states that the way our students think impacts their attitude toward learning and how they perform in our classrooms.

• 90 percent of students who are praised for effort instead of abilities ask for new challenging tasks and persevere in solving them.
• Students who are praised for effort view challenges as a way of learning, and embrace them.
• Students praised for abilities reject the opportunity for a challenge in fear they will not be able to perform as expected. These students are also more likely to lie about their performance when they do not feel they have succeeded on a task.
• Students who are praised for being smart (abilities) are less likely to take risks in their learning and if they do not perform well or things do not come easily. They shut down because they no longer feel smart.
• Students praised for hard work (effort) may find it hard to understand why another student would not want to challenge him- or herself and learn. (Read more about Dr. Dweck’s studies at Brainpickings.org)

These are the differences between the growth mindset and the fixed mindset student. A great introduction to the two mindsets is the Youtube video “The Power of Belief – Mindset and Success” by Eduardo Brinceno.

After you watch the video, feel free to explore other key points of Dr. Carol Dweck’s research on the left toolbar. If you would like to share any comments or feedback about what you see and read, please feel free to email me at Abbey.Stewart@fldoe.org.

Abilities

Ability is defined as “the means or skill to do something”. Where do we get our abilities from? Are they something we are born with or are abilities able to be developed? The answers to those questions depend on the mindset of the person.

Based on studies completed by Dr. Carol Dweck, students who had the fixed mindset blamed other people or things when their abilities were limited. Our fixed mindset students will state things such as “I’m too stupid, so I can’t do this.” Or “If Johnny wasn’t tapping his pencil so loud I would have been able to finish.” These students feel their abilities are dependent on other things, not themselves.

In Dr. Dweck's book Mindset she explores people who had phenomenal abilities. These examples might help put things into perspective for our students. She cites that before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb he worked on a team with thirty assistants and they spent countless hours working on their project. Dr. Dweck mentions how it took Charles Darwin half a lifetime and hundreds of consultations with colleagues before piecing together The Origin of Species.

It would have been very easy for these scientists to give up and just claim they didn’t have the ability to reach their goal, but they kept working and created their skills. They had the growth mindset.

With a growth mindset, we realize that our abilities are based on how much effort we put into the project. If we are not skilled in something yet, we need to keep working and studying so we will achieve our goals.

Effort

A lack of student effort and motivation is one of the top five complaints from teachers. What Dr. Carol Dweck has found is that our students who display a lack of motivation and effort are in the fixed mindset.

Students have been conditioned to believe that when they have to work hard at something, they are not very smart. These students consider themselves to be inadequate if they are in a class that is difficult and requires many hours of studying. They believe and say to themselves, "Things come easily for students who are intelligent."

We might see some of our highest performing students display a lack of effort. This is because, according to Dweck, they have been tagged as gifted, genius, or a natural. If they try and put forth effort and are not successful, they feel like a failure. It’s easier to not try so they cannot fail.

Students who choose to display a growth mindset understand that even the best and brightest people have to work hard to achieve goals. Growth mindset students try their hardest and if they fail, they use that failure to learn what they should do differently next time. In our classrooms, we must encourage our children to make mistakes and teach them how to analyze and learn from them.

Failure

Dr. Carol Dweck cites a New York Times article that references when failure becomes transformed from an action (I failed) to an identify (I am a failure) we are in the fixed mindset.

Failure for our students who display a fixed mindset is something that is always remembered, and will often times prevent them from opportunities. When our students are afraid of failing, they will often times not take risks, such as participating in an academic competition. If he or she is already the best speller in class, why enter a competition and risk losing (failing)?

Students who choose a growth mindset are still affected by failure, but they learn from it. The student choosing a growth mindset would enter the spelling competition and when he or she lost, approach the winner and learn about the strategy that was used. If a student who chooses a growth mindset fails a test, he or she analyzes the errors that were made, and studies to ensure not making that same mistake.

Through research, scientists have learned that we can actually help our brain grow based on how we process failures. When we learn from our mistakes, as growth mindset people do, we become more intelligent.

Praise

What we praise our children for will determine what they focus on. While we can all agree that it is important to praise our students, we must be mindful of our attention.

Dr. Carol Dweck shares how praise impacted students she worked with. When students were praised for their effort and hard work, they continued to learn and grow. When students were praised for being "smart", they developed a fear of failure and losing that title of “smart”, and their learning was stifled.

Students love to be praised and will continue to perform the action that earned the initial praise. If we say “An ‘A’? Wow, you worked so hard on this!” our students will continue to work hard so they receive praise. If we say “An ‘A’? Wow, you are so smart!” students focus on the outcome and the identity associated with it (being "smart") instead of the effort they had to put into earning that score.

In the classroom, let our motto be “Praise the process, not the person”.

In addition to the type of praise we give our students, feedback has an impact on our students' mindsets. Please take the time to view this Growth Mindset Feedback form (Word) from Mindset Works for examples of different types of feedback we can provide.

Success

Dr. Carol Dweck’s section in her book Mindset titled “Is success about learning – or proving you're smart” takes us through the two mindsets and how they process success. For our student who chooses a fixed mindset, everything is a competition. School is not about learning something; it’s about proving you are better than others. These students are afraid of taking risks and trying to learn something new because if they do not learn the concept faster than others, they have not succeeded.

Our students who chose a growth mindset thrive on learning. These children believe that you are only successful when you have learned something new. School is about learning and they try hard to feel that success.

To help our students displaying a fixed mindset begin to display a growth mindset, we must create a safe learning environment where they are not afraid to take risks and mistakes are embraced. We should praise our students for hard work and effort and make them feel good about trying.

When our students are struggling to reach a goal, we let them know that they just aren’t there “yet”.

Resources

Classroom Resources

A HUGE thank you to the teachers who have shared growth mindset tools they created to meet their own needs! Please be sure to email Abbey.Stewart@fldoe.org any resources you have created and would like to share with the teaching community!

Two Mindsets Student Chart (Word)

Video on Grit

Another HUGE thank you to the team and Mindset Works for allowing the FDOE to share some of their resources on this page. For additional resources from Mindset Works be sure to visit www.mindsetworks.com and register for free access. You may also purchase the Educator Toolkit on that site, which has some wonderful modules to help us deepen our understanding of how to practice a growth mindset in our classrooms.

Effort Rubric for Students (PDF)

Feedback Tool (PDF)

Framing Tool (PDF)

The following resource is from an external website: www.youcubed.org.

Classroom Norms

Professional Learning

The following resources are links to external sites that have mindset articles for professional learning.

Academic Mindsets for Learner Success

Boosting Achievement With Messages That Motivate (PDF)

Even Geniuses Work Hard

Mind-Sets and Equitable Education

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids (PDF)