Recently in school, we have been focusing a lot on having a “growth mindset”. We have been keeping a Growth Mindset Journal too, to keep track of our growth mindsets. But to understand what all of that means, we first need to understand what a growth mindset is.

 

As shown in the picture, there is also a fixed mindset, the opposite of a growth mindset. It’s hard to give an exact definition of having a growth/fixed mindset and what that means, but the examples shown in the picture give us a good understanding of what it means.

You may also have made the connection to being open/closed minded, and that is similar, but not exactly the same. For example, being open minded is more or less being more comfortable with trying new things, whereas having a growth mindset is realizing that you can learn new things and acquire new skills and that it isn’t the end result that matters so much as what you learned to get there. The same goes for being closed minded and having a fixed mindset.

As I mentioned previously, throughout this unit we have been keeping a growth mindset journal to talk about and keep track of our growth mindset. We did a growth mindset challenge where we were given tasks that had to do with our growth mindset and we were to write about them in our journals. They were mostly questions about our growth mindsets. I really enjoyed doing this growth mindset journal. Here is mine:

There were also countless growth mindset memes made by my fellow classmates. Here are a few of my own creations:

We were also asked to make “growth mindset selfies”. We had to think of a long term goal for ourselves and put that goal over a picture of ourselves. My goal started out as “I want to be more open minded about learning French”. Now, I really really don’t enjoy learning French. I know it’s mandatory here in Canada, but there’s something about the language I just don’t enjoy. I’m not entirely sure what it is. Maybe how it sounds. I would much rather learn something like Italian or ASL. But that’s besides the point. Anyways, after some critique and a bit of admittance about what I do like about French, my goal became “I will have a more open mind about doing things I don’t necessarily like but have to do by finding things I do enjoy about them.”.

Here is my growth mindset selfie:

 

Well that’s pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed all 456 words of this blog post and I’ll see you next time

Bye!

Dylan.