Motivation
This project was not only important for me as an educator, but as learner myself. During the first summer session of the Penn BSTR program, we learned about growth and fixed mindsets and I began to reflect on my academic career and how much of it had been impacted by having a fixed mindset. I told myself “I was just not good at math, or science, or drawing, or sports” and I never improved in those areas.
My fixed mindsets were clearly not only informed by my own inner critiques and lack of confidence, but by the world around me telling me girls weren’t good at STEM, and it was okay to not be competitive in sports – girls with muscles are weird – or draw well – what did you want to be? a starving artist? – as long as I was good at something else. And that became writing. My works were displayed almost every month along the corridors of my elementary school for “Writer of the Month.” You can imagine my dismay when I didn’t receive the prize one month or two, or when arriving to high school and realizing I was surrounded by many “good writers,” I no longer felt I had a talent I could fall back on and consider as the “type” of person I was. Unknowingly, I had set performance goals on myself to succeed insofar as completing a given assignment, and I only engaged in tasks I knew I would perform well on, avoiding plenty of other opportunities that were challenging, out of my comfort zone, for fear of failure. I did not get the opportunity to try so many different things and because of this I limited how much I was able to learn about myself and what I was capable of. Upon reflection, I know all too well that fixed mindsets are dangerously limiting and have consequences on how entire lives pan out.
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My inquiry project became an opportunity to model and share my experiences with fixed mindset with my students, and to embark the journey of growing our growth mindsets together. Keeping a teacher journal just as my students kept their student journals, I largely benefitted from reflecting and reviewing my setbacks in order to have future success. I shifted my own goals for the project constantly, as my Penn professors know. Without realizing, I had expected both my students and I to somehow achieve a growth mindset overnight! In those times, I reminded myself: “It is important to recognize that believing intelligence to be malleable does not imply that everyone has exactly the same potential in every domain, or will learn everything with equal ease. Rather, it means that for any given individual, intellectual ability can always be further developed” (Blackwell et al. 2007). I am on my growth mindset journey, so are my students. It will take time, patience, and, ironically, motivation and persistence: the very things I sought to improve from the get-go.