Growth Mindset and the Power of Yet.

The power of “yet” means that there is a belief in knowing you are close to achieving that specific goal or something you learned which will be challenging and you will get there soon, but not “yet”. As someone who had a fixed mindset at one point, I changed to a growth mindset. I remember having a hard time accepting feedback for growth, which always made me nervous and anxious. Today, I humbly accept it to improve myself. 

At the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year, we found out our accountability rating as a campus. We were in the “Needs Improvement” area, therefore we were under TEA’s radar. So, every now and then education consultants from our local service center came in to meet with us as content areas to vertically align our lesson plans; staff from the service center who were associated with Effective Schools Framework (ESF) also came in as well to interview us and observe us. Being that we were under this, we changed our practices around our campus, our campus culture, and changes in our own classrooms. It was a difficult process, but we weren’t where we wanted to be or rather “difficulty just meant not “yet”.” (Dweck). 

Fast forward to the 2023-2024 school year, I implemented practices that my principal suggested in my goal setting conference at the beginning of the year, along with Capturing Kids Hearts. When I would conference 1:1 with my students about their unit testing data, they saw themselves going up or down. If they saw themselves going down, they wanted to do better and be better; if they saw themselves going up, they wanted to go up more and would set up a higher goal to meet. I saw tears at times, but I told them “Hey, we can fix this. It is why I meet with you all about your writing”. I will say I saw so much improvement from those 1:1 writing conferences and their data tracking. They saw what happens when you fix your writing, and they were excited about their results. More importantly, they saw what happens when you surpass your goals with a growth mindset. They never once let these conferences get themselves down, nor did I let them. Instead, they grew proud of their writing and goals. All in all, you can say “growth mindset transformed the meaning of effort and difficulty.” (Dweck).

A quote that really stuck out to me when I was reading Dweck’s “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” was “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.” (Dweck, 2006, p. 7). We had a difficult and challenging two years to improve our situation; we all accepted our feedback to grow individually and as a campus; we werern’t where we wanted to be at the end of the first year, or rather we weren’t there “yet”, but we made it our goal. We thrived and were hungry for the most challenging moment in our teaching careers, and we flourished as a campus. 

References

Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Succes How we Can Learn to Fulfill our Potential. New York: Random House.

Dweck, C. (n.d.). Developing a Growth Mindset.