In December, I shared Student-Written Growth Mindset Stories written by students in my Long-Term ELL Support class (which is going amazingly well, by the way – I can’t wait to write about it more after we do our “post-assessments” in May!).

Our school puts a heavy emphasis on Social Emotional Learning, and recent research has shown the particular importance of helping ninth-graders gain an understanding of the concept (see New Study Shows Learning About Growth Mindset At Start Of Ninth-Grade Increases Resilience).

For their final this week, they had to read an NPR article on a growth mindset and respond to a prompt (you can see both at Here’s The “Growth Mindset” Article & Prompt We’re Using As Part Of Our Semester Final).

All students in the class wrote good essays, and quite a few wrote excellent ones.

I’m not going to reprint entire essays here, but I have permission to share some excerpts:

Student One:

I used growth mindset in math because I was really bad in math. I would start practicing and pay attention to my math teacher to learn more math. Now I am getting good in math thanks to growth mindset.

In my observations, growth mindset can help students a lot. For example, my best friend was taking an exam and she failed it, but it that didn’t stop her. She keep on trying. She reviewed the answers she got wrong, she looked at her notes and then she retook the test and got a better score.

Student Two

A growth mindset can help the brain get smarter and make connections. In my experience I didn’t know or understand how to do an equation. But then I learned by asking the teacher or looking it up online. Or looking at other people and how they were doing them. Then I understand the problem and learned it..

Student Three

I have shown a growth mindset in Biology. In the beginning of the year my root word quiz scores were low. Than I kept studying for them and now I get a ten out of ten every time.

My friend has shown a growth mindset. She wanted to learn how to drive a car so one day she told her mom and her mom said “yes.” She was driving but she wasn’t really good at it. She practice and practice and got the hang of it. Now she has her drivers license.

 

I’m adding this post to The Best Resources On Helping Our Students Develop A “Growth Mindset.”