Growth Mindset

Hello there, Aedan here. In maker class we have been learning about growth mindset. Growth mindset is a way of thinking, it’s a state of mind where you can make mistakes and see them as areas for improvement. A growth mindset is the opposite of a fixed mindset. With fixed Mindset you know where you do well and you know where you don’t. You have expectations for how good or bad you should be. With a growth mindset you find areas to improve and areas to excel and with a fixed mindset you try to get to your expected level of excellence, but when things are to hard you just give up. We started off learning about grit and we took a test to identify where are level of grit was. Grit is your need to get something done. One of my favourite quotes has to do with grit and it explains grit in a great way. “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you will be successful” – Eric Thomas. If I took the test again, I think I would do a lot better because I am more aware of growth mindset and grit. Here are the test results.

We watched lots of videos throughout the project and they all taught us about different aspects of a growth mindset. We first watched a video called Timo The Cat. It was about a cat that never gave up until he got to his end goal. In this case it was getting onto a hammock without falling off, but in real life this grit can help you with many things like finding a job or winning a competition. After watching Timo The Cat and learning about grit we were ready to learn more about growth mindset. To learn about growth mindset we watched a video called Growth Mindset Animation. It taught us about growth mindset in a very unique way. The video used the The Tortoise And The Hare as an example of growth vs fixed mindset. The tortoise took longer at the beginning, but soon beat the hare because of his mindset and how he overcame setbacks and challenges. Some more videos we watched were Why You Need To Fail and Success. They are complete opposite things, but you need both of them to have a growth mindset. I liked the Why You Need To Fail video because it looked at failure as room for improvement instead of failure. After watching those videos, we watched a video about Long Term Goals and why they’re important. Our big project for this unit was to make a long term goal selfie. This video helped me understand more about why we were doing this unit and how important it is for us. While watching these videos we made sketch notes. Sketch notes are notes that you also sketch on. Here’s one of mine.

After lot’s of learning we were prepared to tackle the main project. Our goal was to create a long term goal that we could overcome by the end of this school year. After multiple drafts on our goals we found the perfect one. We took a good picture of ourselves that resembles who we are and put are goal on the picture. I have been playing hockey for many years now, so I decided that the picture was going to be of hockey. Here are my drafts.

The first two drafts are similar, but I didn’t like them that much so I scraped them and started over. I made a new draft with a photo of me playing hockey and some simpler text. It turned out good, but after some revision I made a new one with black text and no background box. It turned out great, so I used it as my final draft. I’m proud of my final draft and I feel more aware about my mindset after this project. I decided to make a book about all the things we learned. This book has lots of my work in it and it’s a showcase of my learning.