LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Dave Paunesku on student self-reflection

- One important way that teachers can enhance a growth mindset is to really help students self-reflect on their own learning. So in the LearnStorm activities we try to be really intentional about creating a lot of room for students to engage in self-reflection. And one of our goals in doing that was to really kind of help teachers create that really self-reflective environment and really get the school year started that way. And hopefully that's something that can then be carried forward for the rest of the school year. It can be really easy to learn a bunch of stuff and not realize that you're learning it in the absence of self-reflection. And self-reflection can really help us recognize what we're doing, can help us connect it to why we're doing it. It can really help us internalize more deeply certain ideas. When teachers help students reflect on their own learning, they can think about well, what are the goals they have for their learning? And then as they're going through and accomplishing those goals, if students are self-reflecting on that and they're seeing those goals as a part of being on a growth trajectory, it'll help them get to whether it's a good grade or becoming a better writer, or a better mathematician. That's ultimately more motivating for students and it really helps them see, really see that they're making progress on that trajectory, which is a lot more motivating then just kind of taking off things that don't really seem to be that related to each other. I think one particularly important kind of self-reflection is when students hear teachers, or hear themselves, or hear their peers self-reflect on the ways that struggles have helped them improve. It can be a really good reminder that struggles aren't kind of the endpoint of something. A struggle doesn't mean that you should give up and that you're not cut out to do something, but to the contrary, if we use the right kinds of strategies and we persist and maybe if we get help from others, we can overcome strategies and become better learners or better mathematicians or better at whatever, better skateboarders, better at whatever the task might be.