Campie Primary School

Sarah Williams our Educational Psychologist led a family learning session on Growth Mindset. The session explored the research that underpins this approach and went on to share some ideas of how the language we use can support the development of a growth mindset.

Follow the link to download a copy of Sarah’s presentation.

Growth Mindset Campie 2018

This week children will continue to practise ‘being in the pit’ and will draw upon all the key attributes and strategies that we have looked at over this focus.

Although this will be the last week of our ‘If I don’t sweat it, I won’t get it’ focus, we will continue to make reference too this learning as children tackle new challenges.

The Learning Pit is a tool that learners will be introduced to which helps them to visualise the process of managing challenge. When a learner is posed with a question or enquiry that they perceive as ‘hard’ we can support them to tackle this in a positive way.

We will be using the ‘Learning Pit’ which was developed by James Nottingham to help children respond to this cognitive wobble.

Our purpose in school is to learn.

The ideal conditions for new learning:

• Tackling a  concept or skill that will require dedicated mental and physical response that elicits thoughts such as ‘This is hard’ or ‘I can’t do this’ and then using all the skills discussed previously will result in deep learning. (Even although it feels demanding and stressful!)

‘We must not only prepare students for tests in life but the tests of life.’

Art Costa

Don’t give up – you are closer than you think!

A focus on Growth Mindset can improve resilience by:

• Emphasising the belief that ability can be developed
• Provide opportunities  to reframe challenges and setbacks
• Normalising mistakes and failure as learning opportunities
• Encouraging and rewarding persistence and effort
• Identifying alternative ways of achieving success

In this first week looking at resilience learners will be given the opportunity to develop an understanding resilience:

Key features of resilience include:

• Bouncing back
• Managing emotions
• See failure as a form of helpful feedback
• Taking 100% personal responsibility
• Resourcefulness
• Problem solving skills

Our aim is to nurture an ethos in the school where children feel confident that they are able to embrace challenge and therefore as a consequence that not being successful first time is part of this process. This builds on the last focus on how making mistakes is an integral part of the learning process.

‘Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time.’ Marabel Morgan

This week children will be looking at the power of perseverance.

Facing challenges requires children to be aware of the characteristics or attributes that they will require in order to be successful. This focusses on the attributes that we should nurture in learners to support them in seeking and managing challenge.

Challenge should be viewed by learners as ideal learning opportunities, a chance to extend their knowledge and skills beyond their current levels. ‘Be a better version of me!’ Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t achieved something you would like to . . tell yourself . . .

As we learn, we may need to try different approaches in order to be successful. It is important that we see this as an important part of our learning and recognise these as achievements. We can then use this knowledge in future tasks.

We are continuing our focus on how mistakes help us in the learning process.

Do you have any examples you can share with your child about a time when you learned something new as a result of a mistake or, how you continued to practise despite making mistakes and eventually achieved something worthwhile?

Why don’t you share this experience?