At the beginning of the Digital Learning and Leading Program, I was fresh out of the school year. I was coming from the innovation of my old campus and accepting of new ideas. I had no idea how my new campus/district/state would be. I wanted to jump right into innovation. I knew I had started with a growth mindset because it was embedded in me from my previous experiences. My students were not in as much of a fixed mindset. Coming to this new campus, I have had to start from scratch and help my students evolve from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. It definitely has not been an easy feat, and we are still working on this with my students and coworkers.

This year I have been very upfront and honest with my learners. They know I am new to this curriculum and standards, and we are working and learning through this together. When they see my struggle and me trying to fail (sometimes on purpose) forward, it hopefully is allowing them how to see a healthy struggle and how to overcome this. As a class, we try to have conversations on what a grade means. I allow my students to redo anything we work on. They have to fill out this form on paper and can earn up to full credit. We have a conversation that their grades are connected to their learning, and if they are growing and learning, I want their grades to reflect that. Slowly, I am integrating one or two assignments per unit that are graded through standards-based grading. I am hoping this will help my students focus on their growth and not only the grade. On our first checkpoint, my students were extremely upset with their grades. They were upset that they were not getting the grades they were used to. This was partly my fault because of the test I created. I had not prepared them as well as I should have to answer these higher-level thinking questions. I have been working on creating more opportunities for these authentic learning activities in class and integrated them into their learning. My students have started to graph and color code their understanding of specific learning goals. When they saw they mastered 3 out of 5 learning goals, students felt better about their overall grade because they saw where they could improve and what they were mastering. On the Unit Test, they set their goals, and their attitudes(and grades) were much better because they were focused on their learning and making growth. My goal is to help my students in finding growth in everything they do. I want to help them visualize their growth and develop a growth mindset about their learning.

For myself, I feel like I have gone backward this year. I was at a place of innovation, and if I tried new things and failed, it was OK. I was comfortable with my teaching and standards for the first time. This year, I was thrown into the unfamiliar with new standards and less direct support from the curriculum department. I was used to having my voice heard at the district level, and now I was back to step zero. The first couple months of school, I was down on myself. I felt like I was being a terrible teacher. I was not used to so much criticism and micromanagement. I sunk down to a place where I was stagnant in my lesson planning. It was surface-level learning with a few lessons of authentic learning. My current class in the Digital Learning and Leading Program has reinvigorated my goals. I feel like I have new goals for myself and my students’ learning environment. I want to make sure I am actively planning my students’ learning backward and finding authentic learning activities for my lessons. I am going to work with my mentor at my campus to start my Innovation Plan at my campus level. The criticism I will have will only help me grow my Innovation Plan and self.

References

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine Books.