Reflecting on the topics for Module 7, I was reminded of my daughter’s book by The New York Best Selling Author Todd Parr entitled “It’s Okay to Make Mistakes.” As the name suggests, it talks about common mistakes children make. The pages say “It’s okay if you spill your milk. You can always clean it up.”, “It’s okay to fall down. You can always get back up.” and “It’s ok if you are clumsy. You might invent a new move.” The book contains common and little mistakes that children make. No matter how little these mistakes are, parents’ reaction to these mistakes and failure have a big impact in our children’s mind set and a bigger impact in how they will learn and succeed in life.
If grades are high will they strive harder? and learn more? What if the grades are low? Do our children view failure as an opportunity to grow and improve? To persevere and work harder? Or would they go home, play safe and be afraid to do challenging tasks because of fear of failure. As a parent and educators, I can promote the growth mindset at home and in the classroom. The Growth Mindset is made popular by Carol Dweck. She views intelligence as something that can be improved with hard work and perseverance therefore challenges and mistakes are opportunities to learn and grow.
With the growth mindset, feedback can effectively move forward teaching and learning. Feedback is valuable Information for the efforts to reach the goals. If these feedback are acted upon by learners with a growth mindset, then assessments will improve learning. Grades instead of labeling and blocking the learners, will just be numbers. They will serve as a guide and reference for teachers and learners for the learner’s work. Growth mindset can help learners see grades as a source of motivation.
The challenge for educators on top of providing effective feedback and grading with accuracy is also to help in cultivating the growth mindset in our learners. The efforts educators put on feedback and grades will be lost if these fall into “empty soil” .
We want learners to look at feedback and grades as opportunities to grow learning.
Charry's Teaching Odyssey 