Positive Thinking and Growth Mindset (with Printable!)

9/13/2017

Happy Wednesday! Today is International Positive Thinking Day! So today’s resource focuses on Positive Thinking and the Growth Mindset.

Say hi to
Keep Tryin’ Lion and
Keep At It Rabbit!
See below for a printable tool to use them in your classroom or at home

Keep Tryin' Lion

Keep At It Rabbit

If you’re not yet familiar with the Growth Mindset, it’s a way of thinking - backed up by scientific research - to develop perseverance and resilience in the face of difficulty, and it opens up doors to new successful and quantifiable strategies for teachers and parents, in fact for anyone who is with a child when that child encounters something difficult.

Check out one of Growth Mindset researcher Carol Dweck’s talks (see video).

Embrace and praise the process, she says, celebrate the effort and the progress, rather than praising the general ability or the easy success.

When we approach tasks with a Growth Mindset, we - and our students! - go in knowing that skills and intelligence are not set in stone. Instead, when we increase our effort and persistence, our brain creates new connections and we get smarter!

Dweck's research teaches us that our minds are always growing, and our abilities can always be developed. She encourages children (and people of all ages), to stop thinking “I can’t”, and start thinking “I can’t YET”.

I wish I’d been taught to think this way years ago!

It’s pretty awesome that the human brain is constantly producing new connections between neurons - we really do keep learning throughout our lives! Of course, this process of learning and creating new neural pathways is fastest and most active when we are young. So here's where we come to our resource for the day...

We want to offer a Growth Mindset tool that we like in our classrooms, for you to use in your classroom or your home!

So once again, here are...
Keep Tryin’ Lion and Keep At It Rabbit!

When a student encounters something s/he finds difficult, and decides to try a new strategy or put in more effort, instead of walking away - or whining “I can’t do it! It’s too hard!” - we celebrate the student by recording the effort on a Keep Tryin’ Lion or a Keep At It Rabbit and tacking it up on the corkboard. (Pardon the handwriting)