Mindsets & me..

I am obsessed with growth mindset and absolutely love the idea of levelling it up with moonshot mindset which I was introduced to by Moonshot Incubator rep Chris Bell (twitter @cbell619 or @moonshotinc) during the 2018 EdTech Summit in Singapore.

Moonshot mindset (to my understanding) is growth mindset with the added element of believing that you can achieve things that right now have never been achieved (e.g. astronauts dreaming, developing and using technology to get to the moon).

Despite my love of growth mindset and the embedding of it into all that I do as an educator, leader and Maths teacher I realised that I do not hold a growth mindset for myself! I fully believe that everyone else can achieve whatever they want to achieve if they work hard, get focused, trial different strategies and persevere. However, I didn't believe this for myself often seeing my daily tasks and interactions with a fixed mindset.

In my old job as Head of Department I would so often sort how I thought my planning, teaching, leadership, implementation, delivery etc had gone into two piles: awesome or awful! I would then fall into a view point that I was either awesome or awful at my job based on the most recent judgement! This 2 point sorting system was like riding a fixed mindset rollercoaster, when you're up you are up (elated, smashing it, wow) and when you were down you were down (black dog on the shoulder of pessimism).

So how do you change this mindset for yourself? Here are my steps to success.

1. Be aware! When things get tough in school ask yourself "am I believing that I can get better at this or do I now just think I am completely rubbish?"

2. Talk about these emotions and what went wrong with your trusted peers. I am eternally grateful to all of my trusted peers along the way - you know who you are!

3. Start trying to see how you're feeling about things on a 10 point scale rather than a two point scale with two extremes on it. See my current 10 point scale below.

4. When things don't work out start thinking about what led to it not working out as pie chart and realise how tiny a part of that pie chart you are sometimes! See my second picture below.

5. Get watching/reading some of Jo Boaler's Mathematical Mindset material on her twitter (@joboaler), her website YouCubed or take her Stanford University course! Or if you're not into the Maths side of things get reading some Carol Dweck or take this Future Learn free course about the science of learning! All awesome PD!

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