Progress Memo #1

So far, what I can safely say is going well in my inquiry project is the actual project I am working on for my PBL unit with my classes. My students have been motivated and we are on track to begin our filming and editing next week. Then I can begin to collect some of my big pieces of evidence and data on how well/not well this project unit has supported their growth mindsets.

I will say I am feeling incredibly stuck and unsure on how much reading and work is going into my literature review which I will submit next month since I was not able to this past summer. Because I felt the work I did over the summer was moot with the changes I had to make last minute about my project, I have started the year not really knowing what I am doing, only hoping for the best. I have an ever-growing reading list and I don’t know which research is tied to which or how to make it all make sense together, or if everything I’m reading is even necessary.

I have already changed my direction of the project once, in the sense that it is now only one PBL unit and ideally in the future I would want my whole school year to be project-based to really be able to see the long-term effects that authentic projects can have on mindsets. I feel like I won’t be able to have sufficient evidence to make any definitive answer.

I’ve also fundamentally changed how I think about mindsets for myself. The reading I’ve done over the past several months has led me to realize that mindsets can take a lot of time to evolve and we are actually somewhere on a spectrum between the two kinds of mindsets. It should be perfectly fine for my students to leave my classroom somewhere on the spectrum; I just hope they are, at the very least, getting closer to a “growth” mindset than from wherever they were before. Watch below a snippet of an interview with growth mindset researcher Carol Dweck discuss some of the misunderstandings people can have about mindsets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Xr-8A2ziE

The current question I am pondering, though it is scary for me to dwell on too long on as it is the whole point of my project, is: are growth mindsets necessary at all? Assuming my students do not leave my classroom, achieving a growth mindset, that they just move further along on the spectrum, does that mean my teaching or their overall experience with PBL has been less effective? Do all students need to succeed and be motivated to do so in every class?

I think my inquiry group initial meeting was helpful for me to realize that we are all a little unsure about the outcomes of our projects but we are all still very passionate about what we are doing, and being passionate about our teaching is perhaps a catalyst sufficient enough to produce some effective learning for our students. My peers helped me see some different ways to approach my data collection, as well, since a lot of us chose to do student journaling, we could compare our various methods of doing so.