Developing Growth Mindsets: Principles and Practices for Maximizing Students’ Potential

Human beings have tremendous potential to acquire new knowledge, develop new skills, and improve their brains throughout life. By explicitly teaching learners about brain plasticity and malleable intelligence (the idea that they can become functionally smarter through effort) and by modeling and teaching specific learning strategies, teachers can help students experience higher levels of success as they develop a growth mindset.

Discovering that learning changes their brains helps students develop this growth mindset-the belief that they can improve their knowledge and skills through the use of learning strategies and with guidance and support from teachers, coaches, and mentors.

Donna Wilson and Marcus Conyers share strategies and techniques for developing growth mindsets based on their BrainSMART ® program for bridging the science of learning to the practice of teaching and elaborate on their seven principles for developing and sustaining growth mindsets:

Understand the mindsets. Keep plasticity front of mind. Learn with practical optimism. Set growth goals. Get the feedback needed. Improve methods. Focus on progress, not perfection.

By maintaining a growth mindset about your students’ learning potential and applying learning strategies and techniques like those shared in this book, you can guide your students to continually develop a growth mindset-and experience a positive, upward learning spiral of success!