 Hi everybody and welcome to our week on academic mindsets out there in the DL MOOC world. This week we invited you to restart your MOOC so we thought there was a lot of value in having everybody join us and we know that at different points everybody gets behind and so we encouraged you to start anew this week with academic mindsets and so we've seen a lot more activation on our G Plus community and we love that. A couple of things I want to reference before I pass it over to Rob and the rest of our panel. There's a new spoken word piece called How Deep is Your Learning from our MOOC TA extraordinaire Michelle Clark so I encourage everybody to look at that at the front page of our site. There's also a survey that's been passed out in your emails so please take that so you can give us a little feedback on what we've been doing, what works for you and some advice for our last couple weeks of this MOOC. There are two deeper learning badges that have been sent out to the deeper learning community so make sure you set those out. It's from the P2P website and again you can reference the blog if you have any questions on those at DLMOOC.net. Just one thing that I wanted to share, there was so much great work out there but one thing in particular that sticks out to me and the rest of the DLMOOC team was Verena Roberts and I'm sorry if I pronounced your first name wrong who's co-facilitating an ED722 class with her group of future teachers and I think she's doing some really exciting work and she's as she mentioned in her blog post she talked about lurking in the background but I think that she shared some of the learning that's been going on and I think that's been really exciting. One thing I just wanted to share from her blog is she said I'm floored at the transition in their blog posts speaking about her students and the participation in learning throughout the web with a wide variety of learning. She continued, they're not learning in isolation. As a result they contribute to what price calls a global learning commons. They're collaborating, creating, learning that is just that is bigger than just one person and I think that really highlights what we've aimed for with this DLMOOC which is connecting you with other like-minded individuals and hoping that you can kind of take this learning back to your site. She also shares an example from Gail Corbett one of her students in the class and her example that she brought when she brought in an expert including her son to talk about Minecraft so I encourage you to check that out again that's a deeper learning MOOC that's on our blog. So enough from us I will pass it over to our moderator extraordinaire Rob Reardon who will introduce the rest of our panel so thank you. Thank you Ryan and hello everyone welcome to this edition of the deeper learning MOOC. Tonight's session is on academic mindsets and in my mind and in my mindset it's very closely connected to a student panel that we had a couple of weeks ago where it was a panel during the week of personalization student voice and choice and so on so we had a panel of students talking about teaching and learning and actually at one point I said I said in the in the conversation that it sounded as though the audience based on some of the questions that were coming in thought that the students were too good to be true and they certainly were good and we'll find out some more about that tonight because everything that they said during that session in one way or another implicitly referenced academic mindsets and the kinds of conditions that are critical to student growth and development in schools so that's what we're about tonight to talk more about academic mindsets what they are why they're important how to foster them in in our learning environments and we'll go right now to introductions of the panel I'll start I'm Rob Reardon I'm the co-founder of high-tech high and the president of the high-tech high GSE where we devote a lot of thought to the elements of program design and instructional practice that's foster student loan learning and growth both for our adult learners at the GSE and for the students in our K-12 schools and ask our panelists to introduce themselves their affiliation and their connection to academic mindsets let's start with you it everyone I'm every senior CEO of mindset works which provides teacher professional development and curricula for schools to develop student agency including positive academic mindsets great thanks Ed and Steve hi folks my name is Steve Mahoney I'm the founding principal of the Springfield Renaissance School in Springfield Massachusetts were 612 schools part of the experts your learning network and the deeper learning partnership great to be here all right thanks Steve and Jen hi everyone my name is Jen Sharlo I'm a doctoral student here at Harvard Graduate School of Education my studies are focused on implementing social and emotional learning or character strengths in schools and in school systems and I'm also working with a new nonprofit founded by Angela Duckworth called the character lab great thank you Jen and Carissa so I'm Chris Romero I'm the associate director of Perts and we're a center at Stanford University that develops and evaluates programs that teach adaptive academic mindsets to improve student achievement I'm also a guest lecturer here at Stanford and a former TA so I'll be bringing my experiences both as a researcher and as an educator great thank you Carissa and Camille are we able to hear Camille does that work that works great and working on non-cognitive factors including academic mindsets for the last two years Camille I'd like to direct the first question your way just for our audience what are academic mindsets anyway and why why should we care so academic mindsets are beliefs that students have about themselves in relation to academic work about themselves and the tasks that they're being asked to engage in and why we should care is because the willingness to engage in a task has everything to do with their beliefs about themselves and the work they're being asked to do and and there's clear evidence that student beliefs really drive their motivation and engage that and we know that the students don't actually learn anything unless they're actively engaged in thinking about something so in order to get them to willingly engage in things they have to hopefully the department believes that it's something that they can do well and therefore choose to engage in great great thanks Camille Carissa you know we've talked a little bit about what people do talk about habits of mind and other characteristics of the learner that dispositions for learning and so forth I gather that academic mindsets one of the things that is a little different about academic mindsets is that there's a research space behind them and could you say a little bit about that about kind of the evidence behind academic mindsets yeah so there have been decades of research done on some of these beliefs and some of the beliefs are kind of just starting to be researched so there have been there's been a lot of work particularly on people's growth mindsets their belief about whether or not intelligence can change and that work has shown that people who believe that intelligence can change are more likely to take on a challenge because they believe in the malleability of the brain really their primary goal in school is to learn and that's what they see the point of school as being because if you believe that you can become more intelligent the only way that you can do that is by learning new things related to that they're also more willing to put an effort and take on challenges they see challenges as really the real opportunities to learn and so I think that's kind of related to self-efficacy but self-efficacy has a little bit more to do with believing that you have the resources so even if you think that intelligence is malleable if you don't think that you have the means to become smarter then you're gonna kind of lack self-efficacy and there's been a lot of research on on the importance of self-efficacy as well the work on relevance and purpose at least the experimental work is kind of newer and that work is also showing you know strong relationships between persistence and academic achievement and sense of sense of belonging I think a lot of the students actually spoke to this on the on the all-student panel and that is even more compelling than the research base there but in terms of the research base that's that's been showing that particularly for students that come from stigmatized groups feeling like they belong in an academic community feeling like this is a place where people like them can can succeed is is important for both their their well-being in school but also for their academic achievement yeah and part of that sense of belonging has a lot to do with teacher-student relationships I know that the students on the panel were saying things like you know the teachers make me feel like make me feel worth it make me feel the worth is worth it and that I'm worthy of the work and someone else that said you know what makes my school we need unique is that we are really connected as a school so that sense of belonging really came through through very strongly in that student panel right and DeBron was saying things like the principal greets every single kid by name and that the teachers know all the students names and he thinks that it's really important for kids to feel like they're at home when they're at school yeah yeah so we've I'm wondering Steve if you would just talk to I mean there's there's a question out there about so what does it look like in a school that is kind of emphasizing or attempting to foster these academic mindsets what what are we looking for well you know I think it's important for folks to understand that that you know our school is about seventy eighty percent kids who receive free and reduced lunches and about eighty percent kids of color so we're working you know with with the kids that are all too often kind of statistics that the fall by the side when we when we open the school I think one of the first things that we do as a school is we wanted to think big but be small so you know making sure that the scale of the school is such that you can that you can foster and sustain you know really good relationships with you know we've got a hundred kids per grade but we also have kids grade six through twelve so when I'm working with John Togba you know I'm working with him and his family for seven years and that you know when you have kids in the same place for seven years you you can instill in them the sense of I believe in you you're safe here we know you and you can fail and we're not going to go anywhere and I think that that you know one of the things that that we like to do as a school is to is to really celebrate kids taking risks and failing and then learning from those failures. I get two very specific structural pieces that we do we have four habits of work so they come habits of mine but very much what we think are as the ground floor for what makes for successful learning so one of our habits of work it's the same grade six through twelve every course is that I can assess and revise my work and so we value that as much as we value the learning targets or as much as you know a test score that a kid has it's as important if not more important in our culture those habits of work are the only things that make up our honor roll so our honor roll is really about you know kind of effort and and and you know kind of perseverance and grit more than it is about objective performance and then I think the other piece that we do that's really important is that we have a real focus on authentic assessment that the kids are are asked to push to support to demonstrate what they know and how they know it in multiple ways they have real-world applications and I think that that speaks to what the earlier panelists was saying in terms of if they don't see a use for it if it's not compelling to them in a way that they can connect to then they're really not going to care about the work and if they don't care about it they're certainly not gonna learn so there are a few ways that we get at kind of relationship and making that crossover between relationship and academic progress and academic growth yeah and sense of purpose I mean caring about the work meaning seeing that the work has some purpose I was interested that you mentioned the notion of of failure and pushing through and learning from failure which was something that our student panelists were very strong about about ten days ago Gibran again was saying that you know that never be scared scared to fail because that's how you learn in life and Paris also on that panel said we learned so much more when from what we what we fail at Jen I'm wondering how this the academic mindsets and in terms of sense of belonging and sense of growth mindset and predict a sense of purpose and so forth how do they connect with the work that you're doing around social emotional social emotional learning sure I'm just gonna pull up a slide right now cool and you guys see that it should say how does it look in a school system did that work I don't know Ryan I don't think it's up maybe try to slide sharing one more time yeah it goes oh there it is perfect yeah I think what Stefan was talking about is really important and I just bring this picture to show everyone because you know in a lot of my work I'm thinking about like how do you implement these things school-wide I know that it's expeditionary learning like one of their tenants is around success and failure so you'll see like in the first in the first part where the standards and assessment like what are the core values that you embody as a school and how do you align staff and common language to make sure everyone is following in the same direction you know and one of the things Stefan didn't mention but I want to add to the conversation and it's in this inner circles around teachers and school leaders modeling the way so how are your observations set up you know for school leaders how are you going in and giving teachers feedback and do teachers also have a sense of growth mindset and are they willing to not only have have the conversation about what their goals are and what they're going to do to get better in the confines of their observations but even when they're standing in front of their classrooms are they admitting you know to students that they failed or that they didn't do something the right way you know the lesson before so these are the kinds of things from systematically like we'd want to be thinking about all the different levels of a school system and how we embed growth mindsets or any other character strength throughout the entire system great Steve you want to just say a word about I know that you're you're interested in modeling mindset behavior growth mindset and other mindsets in your students want to say a word about how you go about that at your school yeah so you know I think that you know Jen's basic point that that you know the adult the conversation that adults have about school that dominates the culture the school is really important especially learning schools have a structure called crew which is similar to a homeroom on steroids it is I have a crew of sophomores I've been with them for two years I'll be with them for another two years when they graduate so we travel through high school together and these kids have to do student-led family conferences and passage portfolios and senior talks one way that so when kids choose a physical challenge teachers are choosing a physical challenge with them as well so I was mentioning to Rob earlier tonight I'm Mike my Emily's Emily Resto has never played a team sport in her life and and she went out for swimming this year because that she had to do a physical challenge so she was on the swim team and and she could barely you know swim the length of the pool without you know standing up at the start of the school year the end of the year she's able to finish her races experience a team sport blah blah blah but I'm running I'm training for the Boston Marathon and and so teachers and students are taking on challenges simultaneously that are both personal to them and that are also related to the school the whole school knows that my goal for this year is to do a better job of supporting middle school math and I've challenged kids to ask me how's it going with middle school math and unfortunately they've taken me up on that challenge so you know every day when I'm greeting kids there you know I'll have a couple of kids like so I was going to middle school math what did you do about it yesterday and so trying to be very public about where we need to get better as adults is is absolutely critical and having small kind of family units built into the structure in the daily schedule the school day allows us to have those kinds of personal relationships where kids can my kids know that I got kicked out of the Peace Corps and that I recovered from getting kicked out of the Peace Corps and so those that you know we've created a space for teachers to really share those kinds of stories as learning experiences for kids great all about relationships I think so I have a question from our audience and that it is from Celeste Kirsch who asks can you offer some suggestions for ways to build the philosophy of growth mindsets into assessment projects into assessment practices I should say would anyone want to take a crack at that well first no no please I've done too much go no no so one one thing that I'd like to point out is that a growth mindset and other academic mindsets or something that we can assess and we do assess as we do daily work with students so we've we've referred a few people in the panel have referred to watching the video of the old student panel that we watched two weeks ago or so and we could tell that they had positive academic mindsets from the things that they said so as we observe students and also as we observe colleagues as we observe our family members and interact with them speak with them see how they behave we assess mindsets and I think that is a great way to assess mindsets now on the assessment process we assess work there are ways that we can do that in a more conducive way to academic mindsets or not so if we focus on growth and improvement that's something that fosters a growth mindset right as opposed to a real connection a real emphasis on grades like you know everybody is gonna get an A plus like that's just focusing the performance rather than the growth and learning or you can give students feedback on the work itself like how they can improve or on their behaviors you know when they're doing something gritty you can you can point it out to them and say how did how how did you become better at that how are you becoming how are you fostering that in your life more regularly what are you going to do differently in the next two weeks for them to to think through that so those are some some ideas but it's definitely a big complex topic just to jump in somebody asked how can you promote a growth mindset in an environment of high-stakes assessment and I think some of the things that Ed was just talking about kind of speak to that so you as a teacher still have control over the language that you use in your classroom so even if you're forced to give lots of assessments even the way that you talk about your assessments can promote a growth mindset so you can have students use them in a more growth mindset way so you can tell them this will help you know where you are and we can use this together to help you get where you want to be and help you reach your learning goals so I think even in environments where we're more restricted where schools don't have as much freedom there are still things you can do to promote a growth mindset yeah I think that I think that we're always trying to balance in in our instruction and in our classrooms the the demands of external standards and so forth with our effort to promote an environment where kids are developing internal standards and I think that the the conversation about assessment goes right there the invitation to kids to participate in assessing their own learning I think it's a key piece of of assessing for mindsets Camille did you want to go ahead this is Steve I think you're absolutely right about inviting kids to be a part of their own assessment and for those folks who are concerned about how you do the growth mindset in a high stakes you know go go go kind of school I think that goes back to Jen's point which is you at certain at at one point or another the adults in the school are gonna have to make a stand and they're gonna have to say we need to make time in our schedule we need to make time in our program for there to be a thoughtful kind of recursive and repeating look at how I've grown what I well how am I different how am I better where do I need to go and and people the adults need to understand that that that may have a cost a short-run cost in terms of disrupting business as usual but the long-term benefits in terms of what kids get out of that and how kids respond to that and the quality of learning and the quality of and would I think in my experience more than offset the short run costs of well now you've taken six minutes away from my classes I can't cover as much content how they're gonna be ready for the SA2 subject test and then they're not gonna get into Harvard right and you know I think adults in the building have to be very clear about you know you can't have a focus on growth mindset and on academic mindsets if all you're gonna be focused on is grades you've got to chop time away from the latter in order to get at the right we have a question from Charlie settles and that let's see if I can pull this up he was asking saying and then asking ultimately it is the student process engagement which makes the growth mindset come alive how can this type of mindset be off become authentically the students if the interventions promoting it are stealthy Carissa would you like to tackle that one yeah so I think that's a really interesting question because I do you know in our our field we have said a lot of times that having interventions be stealthy is important because you don't want students to feel like you're telling them how to think you don't want to promote a growth mindset by saying this is a fixed mindset this is a growth mindset you need to have a growth mindset you're thinking about it all wrong that's obviously gonna create defensiveness in students but you can be explicit in certain ways and that's really valuable so you can tell them that you know the brain is actually really malleable you can teach them about the the new neuroscience that's coming out showing that when you learn new things your brain brain forms new connections so that's something that we do in our our parts interventions and something that mindsets works does in brainology and that's been shown to to work really well so you're being explicit and you're telling students that when you work on really challenging things that's when your brain is growing the most and so you're being explicit in that way but you're not approaching it in a way that can lead kids to be defensive yeah and I would just want to add you know teachers can use behavior language just like Camille was saying to enforce the mindset so there's a big difference between good job you got that right and you know highlighting the actual behavior and saying something like it looks like you've been utilizing your flashcards to study every day and that's really helped you to learn from your mistakes I could see you're learning a lot more right highlighting the specificity of what the student did is really really important especially because it helps them to be able to repeat that positive behavior all over again and no sorry go ahead and see please after you all right so I would add that I totally agree and and the things that Jen is talking about add sense making to the experiences so that you know we learn through language and so that language whether it's internally thoughts or language between people or reflections that students doing in the piece of paper are you know I don't think of them as stealth because you're using language to describe what's happening and what strategies you're using and that is important to foster academic mindsets the other thing I'd point out is that you know a lot of the work in the field in the research has been done on interventions but the greatest value of that is to understand the psychology and why these mindsets are important it doesn't mean that the best way to foster these academic mindsets are short interventions I think that you know the best way to cultivate these academic mindsets is through the type of culture that Steve talked about that Jen talked about where every adult in the school is is is at the same page about what we're trying to do what our core values are what our outcomes that we're trying to achieve with students how we're going to go about it and then everything that we do on a daily basis fosters those academic mindsets and and positive behaviors and strategies and so the interventions are great to help us figure out what do we need schools to be but then we need you know schools need to be this on a daily basis every day not just through quick you know short interventions yeah I think Ed what you're saying in a sense is that it's it's not so much about interventions it's more about culture it's more about the culture yeah and I would add that the type of stuff that we've been talking about in deeper learning in this whole all the topics this is exactly the type of things that foster you know great academic mindsets in students whether it's project-based learning that makes the work really relevant and you know the critique that that helps people grow and focus us down on that gross process all these strategies that we're talking about in deeper learning foster academic mindsets and also it's important to to to figure out how do these things foster beliefs and let's be deliberate about fostering these beliefs in in in students thanks Ed Camille I know you've been waiting to say something let's hear that I just wanted to pick up on what Steve was saying earlier in terms of grading practices and then also pick up on what Ed was just saying so I think that the messages we can students are are critically important but it's also really important that our day-to-day practices set up so if you give the message to students that hard work will stay off and their and their ability will bear with their efforts but we can truly only get one shot at getting something right then ally our work so it's really critical I think particularly around grading practices that we think multiple opportunities to demonstrate their learning and if they do something or do something kind of mediocre and then that's the only time they really get to show what they know on that thing it's really hard to offer a growth plan in that kind of way thank you Camille Carissa I know you wanted to revisit for a minute the notions of intervention and stealth yeah first I just want to add to what Camille and Ed were saying about the importance of the school culture so even when we do direct to student interventions where we just teach students a lesson a short lesson that the brain is malleable and that doing hard things is what leads your your intelligence to grow we see bigger effects on students change in mindset when they're in a growth mindset school so students are more responsive to that message in a school that's already supporting a growth mindset but interestingly it in the fixed mindset schools you actually see a bigger impact on achievement so probably be because those students are not doing as well in fixed mindset schools so they tend to be lower achieving and just to jump in on the intervention stealth thing I think what researchers what we mean when we say interventionist a change so that change could be to what the individual student believes that change could be to a classroom or that change could be to a whole school and I don't think that that anyone would say that just focusing on you know the the student is the only thing we should do and in terms of stealthy I think what we mean there is we just don't want to deliver the inner intervention in a way that students feel defensive so we don't want to call it an intervention like hi we're intervening on you and and we think this is going to make you do better in school so I just want to kind of kind of wanted to clarify that great thanks for that clarification Carissa we have a question here from let's see if I can find it here it is Helene Marshall asks or she says I teach students mainly immigrants and refugees with limited or interrupted schooling many have never participated in formal education they have no concept of an academic mindset how does one introduce academic ways of thinking in this population I wonder if anyone would like to take a stab at that of that wonderful question okay Camille Camille did I see you I'm happy to jump in Camille I think you're a mute unless you want to unmute go ahead Ed we'll get Camille on that there she is go ahead Camille yeah okay so we talked about those mindset what we haven't talked about the other mindset for example one is I belong in this learning community and particularly for people who don't have experience of formal learning it could be really critical to first try to foster the idea of belonging in a community of thinkers and making people feel comfortable and welcome in that community and and to help people feel like they've got but their intellectual capacity is something that you trust and value and believe that they you know they belong there and I would say that that would be kind of the thing about academic mindset great great thanks Camille Ed did you want to add something yeah so to build on that so Camille talked about the belief I belong in this learning community one of the four academic mindsets that we that we showed at the beginning of of of the call and and there's we can think about how how you know in the cultures that we're talking about the way that we foster those beliefs in all students also fosters the same that believes international students and I would add that imperious of transition that's that's a particularly great time to foster academic mindsets and I I moved to the US from Venezuela and my engagement in school increased immensely when I moved from a school in Venezuela where for example the work we were doing was not relevant at all to me to a school in the in the US where we the type of work we were doing was very different I found I was I found a lot more relevant and my behavior completely changed because my belief completely changed about the nature of the work I was doing and there was a lot of opportunity for growth so in if we foster a culture that fosters these beliefs in everybody when students come in where they come from abroad or from within the US that's a period of transition for them and when they enter that environment they're trying to figure out what does this world look like and what you know how can I be successful in that world and and students and they they adapt those they they take on those beliefs really quickly based on you know entering a new environment that is going to foster those beliefs yeah I think I think the effort to to immediately create a community is really really critical in those situations anybody else want to weigh on that on that Steve or Jen yeah this is Steve Mahoney and I think that that I was saying earlier or typing in earlier it's okay to use people from outside of the academic kind of world to to demonstrate this kind of mindset you know so you know Rayjohn Rondo I know there's a there's a Yankee fan out there who probably doesn't know who Rondo is but Star Point God for the Boston Celtics has been out injured and he's just started to come back and play again and his coach gave him Carol Dweck to read and and when he was interviewed his first interview about coming back they asked about his attitude and he says I've read this great book that is teaching me how to learn from my frustrations and my failures instead of just getting stuck there and so we use a lot of our kids we have examples of people that they know in their community or you know broader community that are using the same kinds of mindsets that are going to make them better students it just makes you a better person if you have that kind of mindset and so I think for some kids the place to start is okay they can't identify with someone who says look I I couldn't do fractions at the beginning of the year and now I'm doing multi-variable equations that doesn't mean anything to them but they will understand someone says look I came here speaking Jack as far as English is concerned and now I'm no longer you know in a pull-out class I'm in full you know English emerged in most classes and you can do this too and so I think that that's you know again you know what's relevant to their personal experience yeah I think go ahead Jen no I I think um Steve is completely right you know a lot of times when I do trainings with teachers even social workers they say oh I want to teach the student a mindset and I always ask the question well how do you think that they've exercised this mindset before in any other aspect of their lives and if so ask the student to to talk about that and then just highlight the fact that oh you had a growth mindset during this experience you can utilize this in math and reading and in your new context and so oftentimes we don't have to teach them how to do something because they've already done it in a different context it's about us highlighting that for them so that they can begin to transfer it right great we have a question from Summer Howard Sumner Howard who asks how much does personalization of the school experience factor into growth and academic mindsets where it is more is it more about a general culture of excellence I think Camille wants to take that one Camille right Camille personalization I think matters critically because of that in part because of that sense of belonging that you feel like someone recognizes who you are and wants you at the table and but also I think in terms of communicating with their own experiences I think if we hold high academic expectations but we're not really paying attention to individual students in terms of what they are understanding where they're struggling then it's a lot harder to kind of provide this support sort of the opportunities for them to see their own growth and development so the more there is an adult or multiple adults who really are paying attention to each you know for that student's learning I think that goes a long way in helping students feel like both do it it's also a lot easier for itself we had we had testimony like that from on the student panel from Dora who was saying that students can feel when when teachers care about them and and that that was hugely important to her and her her peers in in school does anyone else want to chime in on this this balance between it's almost a false dichotomy I think between personalization and culture of excellence yeah I think creating projects and an environment that is relevant to students creates an environment of higher academic excellence so that was a huge thing for the the students on the student panel Gibran said in addition to what helps with the project he said you can't really do a project that you don't connect to and another student said you know letting students know how this is going to benefit them in the future is important for them really really feeling motivated so I think that idea of personalization is really connected to the academic mindset of purpose or relevance which we haven't spent as much time talking about but I think is is a pretty big one and there's a lot of really interesting research coming out showing how purpose and mindset can work really well together and having both of those adaptive mindsets is even better than just having one or the other great we have a let's see Jen you had a let's see a one-minute video I think that you wanted to share with us yeah just on this idea of you know I think it's both personalization and culture so I just have a short clip of a teacher who creates um who creates a structure in his classroom that supports growth mindset even though he doesn't explicitly uh say that that's what he's doing so I'm gonna do a screen share real quick um bear with me a half a second let me know if you can see that yeah all right and then let me go ahead and press play let me show you another here my students are reading a book in here trying to define the word using only Shen can you turn up the volume on that by any chance it was kind of like a system okay okay what made you say that because it said he was fat and he was sweet so he knew it was a person and then um we kept reading on to find more conscious groups and said he is a man of the yellow suit so we were like oh so he's a system okay I want you to keep reading and check the definition because sometimes when you see a new word like that and it keeps getting used over and over again you'll get more context as you go okay the man of the yellow suit side but of course I had to find out where they were taking her carrying a shotgun maybe a spy asking a lot of suspicious questions well I think that's like his like a guard or something now because yeah maybe a guard the one who will be carrying a shotgun seems like he's trying to figure things out right so the question is is it possible that constable is a name for someone um that that that maybe we're not used to seeing that name used for but someone who who may actually have a job even in our own you know we have people who do what this this guy does in our city we have to keep looking for clues as to what he's doing to figure out who he is and what a constable actually is okay if you keep reading and you keep seeing what he's doing I think you'll start to figure it out Mike check yeah so I'm gonna pause it there and you know the student could have stopped and said oh I can't do it I can't continue I can't figure out what it means but she didn't or the teacher could have given her the answers but he didn't and it's so like it's creating these kind of structures in your classroom to promote growth mindset that really is you know it's just like the underlying culture piece um without explicitly having to say this is what growth mindset is can you you know student repeat it it's about honoring thinking and taking time to think it sounds like I really like how that that teacher was highlighting that you know if you read it again you'll get it so it kind of sends the message that the way you learn is by putting in effort and you know he's really focusing on that process like he's showing students that this is what learning is it's not just getting answers right and I love that great thanks thanks and thanks Jen for sharing that clip thank you we have a question from trolley settles how might we bring into academic communities things valued in wildly diverse or low sES communities how might we let such communities give input into the defining of the academic objectives well this is Steve and again I um I have a hard time seeing that as a I don't think that that you are faced with an either or I think that you know uh good in this day and age to get to get kids who have so many other options for their attack for their attention um uh you need to be very explicit and intentional in showing kids why what you're doing is important and relevant for them now and you know two years three years four years six years down the road so uh and and and that is very much about having a constant open and running conversation about why what we're doing matters to to the kids and to the families so for example uh you know we we you know every parent wants you know ask any parent in any community anywhere in the united states of america in first grade or kindergarten do you want your kid to go to college every hand in the room is going to go up right you know because that's but but in in my city you know 90 percent of the hands that go up they don't have they don't have a real you know firm uh uh particular specific idea of what that means um as far as how do they support their kids what does that mean from them and so you know part of you know the work that we do is giving families and students very specific examples of very specific structures they can use both in the school and outside of the school to get to things that they've connected that are of value for them right so the quadratic formula may not be of value to them you know 10 years from now but having a really good paying job and being able to live in a place where they can take care of their family and pursue the life that they want that does matter to them and uh and bringing people in who look like them and talk like them and grew up like them who've gone through the process and now are living the kind of life that they want to say stick with this it's not easy now you may not ever get easy but you will get better at it and when you get better at it you'll get to a place that you want to be so i don't you know um yes uh intervention research around uh about the mindset of of uh what we learned this week in science connect to something that you care about and so students could make those connections the teacher never had this you know say hey this is connected to you know x y or z but you just left the distance to the students to make their own connections with the work that they were doing and uh and the students who were able to make uh have the opportunity to write about that ended up being uh you know doing much better science and having kind of long-term more interest in science than students who were just summarizing the week's work instead of trying to make that personal connection so we don't always have to know in advance what the value is for it we just have to get them the opportunity to reflect on what value they see in the work today okay carissa feel free to jump right in on this yeah i just want to add there kind of a lot of different ways that you can make school have value to students so you could know of course the obvious way is to bring in things that interest them now so a lot of students on the panel said that they like integrated projects because it's easier for more students to find something they like but you could also help students understand how the subjects they're learning might help them in different jobs in the future and you could even have them suggest that themselves like kanila saying you could they might kind of know that this is important but they don't call that to mind regularly so it's hard to stay motivated when things get tough so another student on the panel dora was explaining that her teacher motivated her to like math which she never liked before by showing her how it'd be relevant to career she was interested in the future and you could also help them understand how school can help them lead the kind of life they want to live so like what steve was saying and particularly in low income communities a lot of motivating factors are things like school and then education could help them give back to their families and communities and that they'll be able to grow up to be the kind of person that has something important to say about the world and they can participate in conversations that that make a difference in society so those are kind of different levels of relevance or purpose. Great Ed I know you wanted to add a couple of words on this and then this is going to be our last question and we're going to do our traditional round where we just go around and everybody gets a final word the last thing that they that they want to say before we close up Ed. Sure I would just add that it is also helpful in this topic to get to know students and their backgrounds and their families because sometimes you know we have this idea that what we value is what's important and we have to foster these values in students but if we honor where students are coming from and their strengths and try to figure out how do we build on those strengths and sometimes you know students might come from very difficult situations that require a lot of resilience in ways that we don't generally think about how can we honor what they care about and create ways for them to pursue those things that they care about in school and then make those connections for you know help them make those connections as time goes on. So part of it you know getting to know students and really honoring them and and not looking down upon them and getting to know their parents and their communities is going to help us build these academic mindsets in students. Okay thank you Ed and we're about to draw to a close here so I'm going to give everyone on our panel the opportunity to say one final last word we'll need to keep it brief but I know that we're good at that so let's just go around who would like to start with that one final thing you would like to say to our audience. I can go. Go ahead Jen. I just want to say thank you for having me and I'm really excited to see what people do with this and the research on how it gets translated into real life strategies in classrooms. Great thanks Jen. Who's next? I think Danielle. And they are always in the process of trying to to affirm the mindsets they already have if they believe they don't belong or that they can't really do it they'll be looking for confirmation that that's true and and every student always has mindsets about value about belonging about whether they can ability to grow with their efforts so we should keep in mind that the idea of like teaching a growth mindset you know that students always have a mindset so either you want to try and interrupt those mindsets that they've got going and trying to turn that around to more positive and more adaptive way of thinking and believing but their mindsets don't work all the time so it's not like it's starting from a mindset. Great thank you Camille. It's a great reminder. Who's next? I'll jump in so I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed being a part of this panel and I always learn a lot from hearing from the other panelists and also that you know I think it's really exciting that the research is going in the direction of understanding what teachers can do because if you know these small interventions from researchers can have such a big difference I can't imagine the possibilities for when teachers are affecting these mindsets every day in the classroom through all of their interactions with students. I think that's really important and exciting. Great thanks Carissa. I'm also you know thank you for having me here this is a lot of fun and I learned a lot. One thing out that's top of mind for me is when early in the panel when somebody asked how do we do this work in schools Steve and also Jen talked about this but Steve went to here's when we started the school we wanted to think big but be small we wanted kids to learn from failure we know we have these four habits of work which is what makes our honor code we have authentic assessments and and they're very thoughtful and also aligned as a staff as to what they want the school to be and what they wanted students to develop in school and so if for schools where you feel like you have lost that clarity or that alignment in terms of what do you think is important for students to develop and how are we going to go about it I think that's a great way to start on on this work. I wanted to say that that I think that you know a really successful you know mindset academic growth mindset whatever you want to call it starts with the adults it starts with the conversation that that you direct in schools and and it starts with you know the the examples that you are setting for kids and in in very explicit I'm going to talk to you about this kind of thing but also in you know the kids are watching right they're watching and they're always watching what we do and and they're they're they're making note of that my one of my best teachers has a big sign on his classroom door and it says caution neuroplasticity practiced here and you know it's really important that I think that you know we make this fun right it doesn't have to be serious as a hot attack all the time you know it's fun and and to make it feel like a game for kids is just another way of them of making it not so bad to fail right I mean it's like you know I did I did horrible on this chemistry test I'm gonna do better next time because neuroplasticity is practiced here so and I love being on this this was great yeah I I'm I'm struck by a couple of things from tonight's panel one is the centrality of the of the teacher in mindset's work and secondly the second piece is while the teacher is central developing mindsets is a two-way street and that and that that what if we're thinking about what is required of us as teachers to to foster academic mindsets in classrooms and thereby foster student development and growth it it's a mindset in itself and that mindset is is one which wants to know what students are thinking and how they're thinking and it's really tuned in into that so that so that the instruction can proceed in that in that knowledge this is I've learned a lot in this panel tonight too it's been wonderful to be a part of it thank you all and I'm going to turn it over to Ryan well thanks everybody you know again I don't often get the final word on these but I'm going to take it and just say that it's so great when as a practicing teacher the research supports I think the things you know intuitively in your classroom and so much of the stuff that has been said tonight reinforces the practices that I think work across the high tech schools and a lot of the schools that have been highlighted over the the course of the weeks and I think you can see that too in in the idea that we've designed each week to be standalone but as many of the panelists have referenced previous weeks which is all available in our archives so I would encourage everybody to check out that you can see that these themes and how pervasive academic mindsets in this work is in all of the areas that we've talked about for the course so please I would encourage you to check back the student panel that was mentioned heavily is also available there thank you to our gplus community for all the wonderful questions and for twitter next thursday this thursday coming thursday we have our lens into the classroom so if you're interested to see how academic mindsets can be used in the classroom specifically Kevin Denton and Matt Strand will from an expeditionary learning school will be providing some materials and have some student work samples to show if you're kind of wondering this is great but what does it look like in my classroom so I would encourage you all to join us thursday and thanks everybody for joining us