Introducing Growth Mindset and Cornerstones to St. Michael’s
A bit about the journey and timings…
How would you describe your brain? My brain is like…
What if I told you that your brain is like a muscle?
Wha What are Growt wth h Mi Mindsets? The idea comes from the research of the psychologist Carol Dweck. A mindset is simply a belief – a belief about yourself and your most fundamental qualities like ability, faith (or lack of it), personality, political views, talent and so on. To put it another way, a mindset is a way of thinking about something concerning yourself. We all have mindsets. They can be growth, fixed or a mixture of the two.
Gr Growth th Vs. Fix ixed What experiences do you have of fixed and growth mindsets? Do you agree that intelligence and talent can go up or down? For everybody? Can you prove this?
Growth Mindset Case Studies
After 15 years of perseverance and 5,000 prototypes, James Dyson finally succeeded with his idea for a new kind of vacuum cleaner. It quickly became a global best-seller and made his products a household name. But during his years of development, he says, "I wanted to give up almost every day." His success, he frequently says, is built on failure.
Gr Growth th Vs. Fix ixed Think about some of the things you want to accomplish in the next few years. How could your own mindset support your ambitions or work against them?
Reframing
http://www.st-amands.oxon.sch.uk/curriculum/successful-learners
Reframing Away from Trait-based Praise That’s great. That’s great because you went • • through three attempts first, before settling on the one which works best. Super work. Super work – I can see how you • • changed your thinking in response to the challenge. It’s wrong. It’s wrong – can you tell me why? • • Talk me through what you think. You’re a genius. You’ve produced something really • • impressive because of the effort you put in over the fortnight. You don’t get it. You don’t get it yet, have you tried… • •
Language is key. Staff use this in their teaching and marking but parental support will always help reinforce and embed.
Teachers will give children time to reflect on their work during class. Children will use teachers marking comments to support their reflection time. Children will use collaboration partners to support their own reflections.
We are supporting students with collaboration. They will change seats weekly as well as be given more support in how to work in pairs and small groups. Collaborating with others helps them to work in a group but also challenge and improve their work, as well as support others.
Cornerstones has an innovation unit that will support and build children to create, design and / or produce a unique piece of work from the topic. The innovation stage is a week long part of the curriculum In addition to this, children are encouraged where possible to us their imagination, be willing to try new things and think about ways of solving different problems.
Cornerstones • The Cornerstones Curriculum is a creative and thematic approach to learning that is mapped to the new 2014 Primary National Curriculum to ensure comprehensive coverage of national expectations. Our new curriculum will be delivered through Imaginative Learning Projects (ILPs) which will provide a rich menu of exciting and motivating learning activities that make creative links between all aspects of our children’s learning. • We believe children learn better when they are encouraged to use their imagination and apply their learning to engaging contexts. Our new curriculum will provide lots of learning challenges throughout the academic year that will require children to solve problems, apply themselves creatively and express their knowledge and understanding effectively across the curriculum. • Cornerstones also provide a rigorous essential skills framework that outlines the end of year expectations in all subjects. These essential skills are tied to activities and are age related so that staff can track children’s progress and identify their individual learning needs.
At the "Engage" stage, children: • Gain memorable first-hand experiences, such as going on a visit or inviting a special visitor into school. • Enjoy ‘WOW’ experiences. • Get an exciting introduction to a topic or theme. • Begin researching and setting enquiry questions. • Get lots of opportunities to make observations. • Develop spoken language skills. • Take part in sensory activities. • Have lots of fun to fully 'engage' with their new topic.
At the "Develop" stage, children: • Improve their knowledge and understanding of the topic. • Develop and practice their new skills. • Compose, make, do, build, investigate, explore, write for different purposes and read across the curriculum. • Research their own questions and those set by others. • Follow new pathways of enquiry based on their interests. • Complete homework activities that support their learning.
At the "Innovate" stage, children: • Apply skills, knowledge and understanding in real- life contexts. • Solve real or imagined problems using everything they’ve learnt. • Get inspired by imaginative and creative opportunities. • Revisit anything not fully grasped at the ‘Develop’ stage.
• At the "Express" stage, children: • Become the performers, experts and informers. • Share their achievements with parents, classmates and the community. • Evaluate finished products and processes. • Link what they have learnt to where they started. • Celebrate their achievements. • Please check the website for what these will be as they will be shared very soon.
Five key reasons to adopt topic based teaching 1. It’s more fun to teach and learn using a theme. We believe fun is a key ingredient in learning. If children are happy, they are confident, and so are teachers. This magic combination makes teaching and learning so much more effective. 2. It harnesses curiosity to motivate learning. As a school, we feel this is a very natural way of learning. A child or adult finds something that intrigues them, maybe a foreign stamp or a stone. They want to know more and so they start on a journey of collecting ideas and information. With the stamp, the child finds out about its source, the geography of its people, the music of their homeland, the art work within it. They investigate its richness, draw its setting, sing its songs, write letters to find out more, investigate in books and on the internet. The learning is never sluggish, but is vibrant and exciting. 3. Educators facilitators of learning. The teacher is no longer simply a provider of facts copied from the board and learned for homework. Instead, because the boundaries of exploration are far wider than even the teacher can predict, he or she becomes a learning manager. A learning manager not only teaches the children, but they guides children while keeping open the opportunity for self-guided discovery.
Five key reasons to adopt topic based teaching 4. It teaches children how to learn. With theme-based learning, children are opened up to thinking more for themselves, following the thread of a topic to explore and discover more. It gives them a taste of moving from one related area to another related area and one builds on another. It's a way of learning throughout life. It draws in the child’s family. Parents more easily become partners in learning around a theme. The family, with its own interests and views, can more easily become involved, thus broadening the spectrum of the whole experience.
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