Science This year Mr Alan Parsons has been discussing with staff the consequence of a “growth mindset” versus a “fixed mindset” to senior schooling and the transition that many students face. This has been mainly driven by the understanding that originates from the research work performed by Carol Dweck, an acclaimed Stanford psychologist. Much of her work involves the power of our beliefs and then the reflection and inquiries of our beliefs in order to predict that even the simplest changes can have a profound impact.
A “fixed mindset” carries with it the belief of assuming that our intelligence, personality, creativity and sporting attributes are fixed and stagnant and so embracing challenges, displaying persistence, exerting effort and learning from criticism would prove to be a useless exercise.
KATE WARING
Head of Science
Carol Dweck (2009) concludes, “Each boy’s academic progress through school transitions faced by all adolescents depends on their ability to negotiate these changes”. How is it that we as teachers can facilitate all students to have an increased resilience to these changes? Our aim as teachers is to promote a “growth mindset” in order to see the students under our care thrive and flourish. For us to achieve this goal we must encourage our students to acquire a desire to learn and therefore have a tendency to: • Embrace challenges more willingly than avoid them. • Display persistence in the face of obstacles rather than giving up easily. • Perceive effort as the path to mastery instead of effort being boring and useless. • Attempt to learn from criticism as opposed to ignoring or being stung by criticism. • Rejoice in the success and inspiration of those around us instead of feeling threatened by the success of others.
In an effort to increase the “growth mindset” for students within the Science Department we try to do as many experiments as feasibly possible in order to increase mastery, persistence, cooperation among peers and inquiry skills, while students embrace the challenges they encounter.
As the students reach Years 11 and 12, the Syllabus for all sciences incorporates the category EEI – extended experimental investigation. This dimension is incredibly useful for expanding the “growth mindset” of students as they have to develop instruments useful to investigate a hypothesis in order to answer a significant, justified researchable THE SOUTHPORT SCHOOL SOUTHPORTONIAN 2015
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