St. Peter's R.C. Growth Mindset
At St Peter’s RC Primary School, children, staff, parents and governors are all learning about Growth Mindset.
As a way of developing our pupils’ learning skills, we have been encouraging them to develop what is known as a ‘Growth Mindset’ and you child may have talked to you about this already.
‘Growth Mindset’ is based around the research of Professor Carol Dweck who talks about the power of our beliefs (especially around challenge). We can either have a fixed Mindset where we let failure (or even success) define who we are, or a Growth Mindset where we see setbacks as opportunities to grow and improve ourselves.
At St Peter’s we believe the best thing to do is to teach children to love challenge, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. We are teaching this every day through our curriculum, especially focussing on our Maths Mastery programme we have in school. For our children to understand that when we are making mistakes, it can be seen as a positive learning experience to develop resilience, patience and our problem solving skills and motivation.
Every class has been looking at, and learning about the two types of mindsets that children and adults can have, a ‘fixed’ mindset and a ‘growth’ mindset. Below is an overview of the traits of each:
How can you help at home
- Praise the amount of effort your child is putting into things rather that how clever they are;
- Talk to your children about their brain being like a muscle- the more the use it, the stronger it gets;
- Encourage your children not to give up if they are finding something difficult;
- Challenge your children to try something new or challenging.
- In school this term we have been reading 'Mistakes are how I Learn' by Kiara Wilson and 'The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes' by Mark Pett and Gary Rubinstein. Ask your child about the stories. Can your child remember what the stories are about? You can watch the stories being read out loud together using the videos below.
