The must haves...

Motivation and Engagement...it is our basic human need in anything we approach to feel motivated to be an active participant in the process, to feel engaged throughout the process, and then to feel a sense of self-efficacy around accommplishing a task. As research states:

• Students who are motivated can succeed even in less-than-optimal environments; this is true for various racial / ethnic groups and both genders (NCREL, 2005).

• Studies show that 15-year-olds whose parents have the lowest occupational status but are highly engaged in reading, achieve better reading scores than students whose parents have high or medium occupational status but who are poorly engaged in reading (PISA Report, 2000).

To achieve this within our classrooms, educators must first have a growth mindset around what this research promotes.  As Carol Dweck states in her book MINDSET (refer to attached article):

Recent research has shown that students’ mind-sets have a

direct influence on their grades and that teaching students to have a growth mind-set raises their grades and achievement test scores significantly (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007; Good, Aronson,& Inzlicht, 2003).

       
So the question then becomes, "How are Districts, Schools, and Classrooms promoting a growth mindest? How is a growth mindset an organic part of school climate and culture? How do we begin to take the words off the pages of the research and the texts around this issue, be willing to have the courageous conversations that it takes to address this, and then be willing to put a plan in place to make sure that every classroom is a place where the growth mindset is at the core of the learning environment?


It is incumbent on us to provide collaborative conversation around mindset within ALL educational settings, and then to be prepared to address issues around the conversation, as well as be prepared for a solutions-based outcome within the process.