Mrs. Freed, you taught me that!

Here is another one good thing post!

Yesterday my students were practicing evaluating functions using function notation, which really is just another excuse to practice order of operations and exponents work.  One of my students was working on a problem and called me over because he got stuck.  "Mrs. Freed, I don't know what I'm doing wrong."  I took a look, saw that he had already tried it twice, looked over what he had done and pointed out a mistake.  He was able to quickly fixed it and moved on with the problem.  I recognized this as a huge improvement from last year, and took the time to acknowledge it.

"One thing I see you doing right now is persevering when you encountered something that was challenging.  You didn't give up.  You didn't quit.  You asked for help.  You persevered.  You moved on and kept going.  This is a huge improvement from last year that I think is helping you be more successful."

He looked at me, laughed a little and replied, "Mrs. Freed, you're the one who taught me to do that!"

Next week, I'm planning on asking him what I did that helped him learn it, because I want all my students to learn it!

-Kathryn

Mindset

I am currently reading Mindset by Carol Dweck. It is very interesting to me as I personally feel I have not done a good job of promoting appropriate student attitudes where they feel they are in control of their learning. This is also difficult for me as when I feel as though I give them opportunities to be in control many (like more than 50%) choose to do nothing. And I cannot figure out how to motivate them beyond that, but thatis a complaint for another post.

So I have been working on giving growth mindset feedback and redirection to students.  I have one student who has demonstrated to be particularly receptive to it.  When he came in for help the other day he was saying and acting in a helpless manner. His statements were along the lines of “I can't do this" and “I don't know how".  I gave him my less-than-great growth mindset feedback. It went something like this  “You may feel that way right now, but I know you are capable of this. You just need to put the effort into it and it will come. You can do this."

Not the best wording or smoothest delivery, but it worked! I walked away and when I came back he was making significant progress. I gave him some growth mindset encouragement, “Look at how much you can do when you work hard."  He did get stumped a little bit, but he persevered, asked for help, and used what he knew to overcome. I was amazed by how immediate the results were 

(No, it doesn't work this way for all kids, but what amazing immediate results). 

I even saw effects of the mindset change it the following day in class as we were discussing a differing topic.

That is a little victory.

Happy Tuesday!

-Kathryn

#MTBoS30

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