 Welcome, everyone. I'm Karen Fastenpower, part of the DL MOOC team. Today is February 27th, and in this week of DL MOOC, we're talking about academic mindsets, and we have two great teachers who are going to talk to us about what they're doing in their classrooms with academic mindsets in this session. We're also really excited to announce this week that we have deeper learning badges now available, and we have two badges. One for those of you who've experienced deeper learning through DL MOOC, and another called the Deeper Learning Guide for people who have helped other learners experience deeper learning. And we've already awarded two of these badges. So the first Deeper Learning badge went to Jeremy Jorgensen, who is a teacher in Northern Wisconsin. And to get a badge, you just have to post a link that shows some kind of evidence of how you've experienced deeper learning. And Jeremy posted a reflection about DL MOOC, and I just want to read a short part of that. He talked about several parts of the MOOC that helped him experience deeper learning and how that translated into his classroom. And he says, as a result of my participation in DL MOOC, I have my seventh and eighth grade students conducting self-selected orbital studies in the areas of cells and cell growth and physics of the Winter Olympics. I've also been able to deepen my relationships with my eighth grade math students in my attempts to promote a growth mindset. This discussion of learning from mistakes has been powerful and has improved the culture of the class of reluctant math students. And so I know that brought a big smile to all of our faces at DL MOOC. And I would just encourage everybody to look at these badges. On the DL guide badge, the first one was awarded to Jen Zuko. And the evidence that she shared was her students blogging as a part of her class. And so if you, these badges are posted on the homepage of DL MOOC at DL MOOC.net. And you can apply for those badges, and you can also see who else has gotten the badges and what they submitted. So just a reminder, if you're watching this on the YouTube page, you can go to G-plus page and have an option to put in questions. And we'll have several opportunities during this protocol where we'll be looking for questions and feedback from you. You can also tweet your questions and thoughts with the hashtag DL MOOC, and we will be monitoring that. So at that point, at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Laura to get us started on our discussion. Great. Welcome all. This is an exciting panel. This past week, we had a great panel on Monday. And it's exciting to have a number of the folks here who are on the panel on Monday to be part of this collegial conversation. And so we're going to kind of jump into this collegial conversation. And what I'm going to ask folks to do is just take a moment to introduce themselves, who they are, what they do, and where they're from. And we'll start really with Carissa. You'll be the first one to go. And tell us who you are, and we'll just go through the list and have everyone. But welcome, and we'll get started right away. Great. Hi. I'm Carissa Romero. I'm the Associate Director of PERTS. 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 at Stanford and a former TA. So I'll be speaking a bit from my experiences as a researcher, but also from my experiences as an educator. And Carly, why don't you go ahead? Hi. My name's Carly. I'm a junior at High Tech High, North County. How's it going? My name's Ryan, and I'm also a junior at High Tech High, North County. Charlie, you want to come on in? Hi, yeah. I'm Charlie Linnick. I am the art teacher at High Tech Middle and also a graduate student from the High Tech High GSE program. Ryan Gallagher. Hey everybody. Ryan Gallagher from High Tech High. Good to see everybody. Hey, I'm Ed Bresenio, CEO of Mindset Works, which provides curricula and teacher professional development to foster student agency, including academic mindsets. Great. Man, Kevin. My name is Matt Strand, and I teach seventh and eighth grade English at Polaris Expeditionary Learning School. And I'm Kevin Denton, and I teach seventh and eighth grade science and math at Polaris Expeditionary Learning School. And I'm Rob Reardon. I'm the president of the High Tech High Grad School of Education. I'm upset. Thanks, Rob. We're getting to the next slide right here. And the way this conversation is going to work, at least if you want to forward us, Greg, is that we're going to be looking at some student work, and we're going to be using a protocol to have this conversation. I'm going to be our facilitator or MC of this conversation to keep us in check and also keep us on our time so that we're here for one hour. I'm going to quickly just go over the protocol with us, and then I will guide us through the conversation. But the way this protocol works here is that Matt and Kevin are going to have about 10 minutes to give us an overview of their work and their dilemma. If you're on the DL Google Plus or the website, you can pull up the blog post and also see all of their work there. But they're going to take about 10 minutes to give us an overview of what their work and their question. After that, our participants, the folks in this room, and of course, everyone watching, will have about a minute to write up some clarifying questions to our presenters. And our presenters will have about five minutes to just answer those questions. After that, we'll move to what we call probing questions. And probing questions are deeper questions. They are not advised in disguise. And again, before we do those, we'll have about a minute to write some questions, and then we'll jump into a conversation with the presenters on those questions. After that, we'll ask our presenters to kind of turn off their camera, and we'll have a conversation about their dilemma, their question, and see how we might help them think about this issue in a new way. After that, our presenters will turn their cameras back on and their audio back on, and they will give us a reflection of their new thinking. It is not a play-by-play of everything that they heard, or what they like most, but really just any new thinking that has occurred to them through this conversation. And then lastly, like any good educators here today, we'd like to debrief how we did as a community here. Did we ask them good questions? Did we push them? Did we come up with new strategies? Did we attempt to answer their question? Not the question we think they should be asking. That's always really important. So we'll make sure that we stuck to our protocol. And then, last but not least, whenever we have these conversations, there's always something we can take away for our own practice, regardless of whether you're at a foundation, if you're in a classroom, if you're a teacher, you're a student, what about this conversation is coming up for you, and how do we take what we talked about today and adapt it to ourselves? So with that being said, I'm going to go to the next slide and just quickly remind us of our norms. And in this case, of course, we're going to be hard on the content and soft on the people. In any given situation like this, we are sharing our work, and it's always challenging and scary to do so a little bit. So we want to be hard on the content and soft on the people. This is about the work they're presenting, not about them. And then secondly, we want to be kind, helpful and specific. It will not help Matt and Kevin for us to say simply, this is great. I love this. Let's be specific. What do we like about it? And then also what constructive feedback can we give? And then the very last is a key is to step up and step back. We have a nice group of people here, a nice size, but we want to make sure that we monitor our airtime. So if you're someone in a Google Hangout or in a staff meeting that likes to talk a lot, you might have to step back. And if you're someone who doesn't normally step up and share your thoughts, take an opportunity to do that and step up and share your ideas because I'm sure that we know that they're very valuable. So without further ado, I'm going to turn us to the next slide and turn the conversation over to our presenters. And we're going to show their slides as we go and give them about 10 minutes to talk about it. For those watching online and for those in my audience, it's always great to take notes and sometimes jot down clarifying questions as you go so that you can be thinking as you're listening. So without further ado, I'll turn it over to those guys. Matt, Kevin, take it away. Great. Thank you. So our question is how do you explicitly teach academic mindsets and make it meaningful and authentic for students? And we've been grappling as colleagues with that particular question and in teaching adolescence to become learners, the research seems really clear and there's a lot of things that we can find when we look around our campus and in other classrooms. But in the literature, the practice is not as clear as the research is. So Kevin and I have been experimenting with ways to blend this research with our instructional design, with structures in the classroom in a way that complements that work. And just off the bat, what we're finding is that this is about crossing the bridge so that this work doesn't feel like an add-on. It doesn't feel like compliance or busy work. And it's certainly not decontextualized from the work that we're doing on a day-to-day basis. That it's not just our words, but our actions for teachers as well as students. I feel like I know Eduardo already. I've seen so much of his work that this is the way we are now beginning to do our work in our classrooms. And so the first piece I wanted to talk about in my first slide is how I've had students assessing their own progress in a story. So Lou, you can go to the next slide. Thank you. So I have an interactive whiteboard in my classroom, but this sort of thing I could see happening on a chalkboard or with sticky notes. But when students were writing stories, we were in the drafting phase. And at the beginning of class, they were just anonymously assessing their own progress throughout class. This gave them an opportunity to see how much progress was being made once they put effort into it. They're seeing growth over time. But at the same time, it was reinforcing the content of plot development in an English classroom. Lou, could I see the next slide, please? Thank you. From there, something I've been experimenting with recently is how to help students identify what their next steps are after they receive some descriptive feedback from me. So this is more of a problem solving approach. And what you see here is students initiating what level of support they needed. At the top, you'd see that they are feeling more independent. They knew exactly what they needed to do to improve an essay. In the middle, they kind of wanted to start from scratch, but they felt comfortable with taking on the task they understood, but they weren't happy with their original work. And then lastly, a student who really was wanting some more one-on-one support and more scaffolded help. But in all these cases, I tried to give them very explicit next steps. So this, those are more individualized approaches and kids thinking about their own progress and needs. But a little bit different approach is the peer critique. I talk a little bit about this on the blog. And you can see that on this document, we're using some of the same norms. This takes more work to help kids get to this place. We're trying to create a sense of belonging through these norms of trust, just like we are in this Hangout. And I've done some really intentional work trying to help them be familiar with some very narrow targets that have to do with writing and then leading them to a place where they're building understanding through their social interactions. So there's another example of this in the blog where participants can look a little bit more closely. But coaching kids over time how to name those strengths so that they can have some efficacy and feel like I can do this and also have some clarity about the next level of work. At the same time, what I like about peer critique, once it really begins to work and is healthy in the classrooms, that it's reciprocal for the person doing the critiquing, they're also finding that they're reflecting on their own work. Their peer's work is really a mirror for their own practice. And once they get back and begin that revision process, they're thinking critically about their own work in a new level. And my reflecting on academic mindsets really keeps taking me back to just the idea of beliefs. And beliefs are already changed for anybody about anything. And it's sticky because it requires a meaningful discovery if people are going to really change their beliefs and students. And so how to do that has made us think a lot and how to turn that into something actually explicit, a strategy. And so what I've tried to kind of experiment with this year is the old goal-setting task that we do with students. But I often kind of give up after a while because it's not meaningful for them and it isn't translating to success for them and they just want to be done with it. So really trying to take that structure and turn it around and help students discover some things through weekly goal-setting about their academic performance and discover some changes that they really like and that that would change some beliefs, which would then translate into some behaviors and outcomes. So quick overview, I have students write me an email each week just kind of updating me on how they're doing in school and with their grades and trying to find some specific actions. Lou, if you want to just jump to the next slide. Really do some. So this is Farrington's work and what I've tried to do is attack the learning strategies as a way to build some perseverance and some behaviors that then would feed back to those mindsets and create that loop again. I'll go ahead with the next slide too please. So I do some explicit instruction, half throughout the year giving examples, just talking about what makes strong goals. These are middle schoolers so they tend to make wishes more often than goals, what they would hope for but it's not usually tied to specific action. So just coaching them, scaffolding some things. This is just explicit instruction, again decontextualized and very dangerously teetering on unmeaningful work or busy work in their minds. Go ahead with the next slide. A typical week they'll send an email then to me. I'll get emails just from students. Updating me you can kind of take a look there. We're going to look at some specific ones. There is a good bit of text but I've tried to highlight some of the phrasing just to kind of make a point. Go ahead with the next one. Thanks. So here's Brooke, a seventh grader just learning to write goals. You can see in the beginning of the year vague, focused on grades, not on learning, kind of not tied to any sort of specific action. I will try to really do good, help bring up our grade. Again we start to see some of these these messaging, this messaging that kind of I'm hoping to change around. And then next slide please. As the year goes on, she starts to identify some things like tests on Thursday with actual timelines and give herself a specific action like studying and working with other students. And as you can see just a couple weeks ago she's really starting to drop the grade language, the grade messaging, and it's a lot about how she measures it, is how well she thinks she did, and if she's proud of it she has real specific goals. So just proud of how Brooke's doing that. See the next one. Please. Also through that then I provide specific feedback. It's not necessary to read all of this but just the coding. So I'll take phrasing and I'll take some of their work and I'll give real specific feedback and encouragement to them but also challenge them in their messaging. Kind of in the middle of this paragraph she's she's talking about studying to make her grade better and so I'm just encouraging her to think about the learning targets. But then at the end she has some real vague actions. I have a B in English but I'm revising something so that will make that better. And so just getting her to name those things and own them. Next slide. Just a couple more slides. These are some of the fruit I guess of the work that I'm excited about. Here's Michael really kind of realizing that by setting actionable goals and following through with it that he's seeing change. So you can see some of the bolded phrases. I did this in my grade now it stands higher because I did this my grade came from a C to a B and this last phrase I love. When I decided I do these things I did not think the changes would be so obvious but they were and I'm glad for it. If we have time for just this last last example I love this because it takes it out of the classroom and Toby is now transferring what he's learned about goal setting into his personal life. So he's talking about making a goal around wanting to learn Java but some of the problems that keep getting in the way of that and so he's making specific goals he put a sticky note up on his desktop to remind him to code for 15 minutes every day and that it's his choice because he wants to do it and so I'm just proud to see them taking it into their personal lives. Thank you guys could you just do us a quick favor here and just restate your question for us that way we have a kind of focus for our questioning. Sure so the dilemma then is besides some of these things how do you explicitly teach academic mindsets and make it meaningful and authentic to students and not just something that's part of the schooling and not learning process. Great thanks guys so what I'm going to ask our our participants and also people watching kind of at home to take about a minute to think or write on a scrap piece of paper if you will a clarifying question and I reminder that a clarifying question or is a factual based question a data question that our presenters can answer relatively in a quick way they have a short answer how long you've been teaching how many students do you have in your classroom how often you see them basic factual based questions so I'm going to give us a minute and then our panelists are just going to go in and turn their microphones on and just start asking questions of our presenters so we'll take one then as a group to generate some questions okay my timer has gone off we're going to jump in here and Charlie has the first question she wants to ask the presenters a clarifying question so Charlie go ahead yes I was curious you guys use the terminology academic mindsets and I was just wondering if your students when they're in class know that term and use it in the classroom take this um earlier in the year I did some workshops on the growth mindset um students were we watched Eduardo's TED Talks video they got to uh even I would pause the video and they would anticipate what happened they would hypothesize what the outcomes would be um throughout the year we're using all kinds of things like learning targets and the messaging is consistent the term academic mindsets is new to students but they have had some exposure through our advisory period on a google form that we created that asked them to reflect on some specifics that we didn't get a chance to talk about yet so I think they're more familiar with growth mindset language and learning targets less the specific phrase of academic mindsets so I have a question for both of you I just wondered do you do you both share the same students or do you have students that are not the same that are in your classes we do yeah we're fortunate we have about 95 students who go through both of our classes we're all singleton departments and we get to loop with them for two years as well so a lot of this work that we do in the beginning of the years we're in our crew advisory structure has a big payoff because we we have them for more than just a year and we share them so they're the same message yeah do you have my question so when you set the plan together you can be talking about the kids that you share as well as the work that you might be doing sure my question here is do you have do other do the kids see other teachers besides you and are they using similar structures in their classes as well um that's part of the the shift that we're trying to make uh kevin and i have been you know doing some experimenting and learning from each other i'm adapting some of his practices and we we make shifts as we go and um just yesterday we did a presentation to a lot of our staff about uh how we've been implementing um this work to help students begin to own it in an authentic way um there's a lot of practices in our school that align with deeper learning and with literature but it's not unified or tied together in the messaging and that's the part we're trying to help um our colleagues understand as well as continuing to hone the systems that we've been seeing some progress with and i would add to that that we did um create kind of an academic mindset reflection form that we did with all students in the middle school very similar to um what parts just put out the the survey um and we created it just on google forums i think we have it in the blog to share for anybody who wants to take a look at it and we just had every student reflect on a various academic mindset um specifics and they shared that with their students in our conferences uh a few weeks ago so that wasn't because it was unified throughout the whole middle school um i have a quick question for for matt um uh in the tier revisions that you showed uh those are not if i understood it correctly they're not anonymous and they're public right yes they're public just in that class period yeah um and there's a there's a pretty strong culture in the classroom um pretty healthy and students also get some experience with social skills um through our advisory structure so like i said there's a lot of pieces that are really embedded but we're really looking for those the way to tie everything together in a more cohesive way not only for us and for kids but for all of the teachers to move to the next level mm-hmm and say i have another question um so i know that the students were kind of aware of the idea of growth mindset i was wondering if they knew kind of the opposite end about fixed mindset and if they had maybe at the beginning of the year i know they looked at the videos but maybe if they connected a little bit more with growth mindset or fixed mindset like maybe like a quiz or just share outs or something like that um we did you know expose them to the idea of fixed mindset and every once in a while is they are grappling with their own stuff whether it be um stuff at home or academic or emotional sometimes we need to help them reinterpret what they're saying and help them look at it in a new way and see it as an opportunity um there's a video that's in the blog that i encourage our participants to look at um where some of our current students are talking about the growth mindset versus fixed mindset and i think they really capture where they're at in understanding it um not all students are there but it's it's taking root in our culture and students are becoming more familiar with with the language and the mindsets themselves and it's pretty neat because even one of the students who's kind of we're speaking of in the video just yesterday in matt's class she was having a total fixed mindset about something he was able to go back to that and say do you remember what that was like do you remember what that felt like and where are you now and and it's pretty cool um because she then you know she could face that and and grow from it nice great um and actually i i'm diverting here could you give us a 30 second overview of what crew is before we move on to crowding questions i knew that so crew is essentially kind of like an advisor period um i would say half of the time that we have with them which is pretty short it's about two hours a week it's four days a week um and we have about half of it is helping them with their just academic performance checking grades making goals um producing a portfolio that they share with their parents or student-led conferences is is how we do our parent-teacher conference and then the other half i would say is more culture building we have circle ups check in do initiatives or deal with an issue that's maybe where some of the the mindset um instruction might might come in just as a part of a conversation with students so it's kind of a mix great so we're going to move on to thank you for that clarification on just for folks who don't quite know what crew is in their own school settings um so we're going to move on to probing questions and we have about eight minutes um and as a reminder for all of our panelists probing questions are really the deeper questions why is this really what we're really trying to understand is what's really happening at the heart of this issue why is this why is this a dilemma for you what are you hoping to achieve what is your vision for this in a perfect world what would this look like as a note these are not advice in disguise these are not suggestions to the presenters they're not questions that begin with have you thought about I wonder if you've tried those are great pieces of advice and we're going to hold on to those and we're going to talk about them during the discussion so you have a question that starts with that hold on to that thought because we want to bring it in but our question here is really kind of use go deeper into what their dilemma is really about and what's really happening around that so we're going to take about a minute again here as a group to come up with some probing questions and then we'll jump in for about eight minutes addressing those questions so everyone you have about one minute to think of some probing questions okay so let's get started I know Rob Rudin has a question ready to go okay I'm curious about your the whole process of goal setting and so on and I noted that you were saying that at the end you're trying to get the move them away from from the from thinking about grades in terms of the goals I also saw though that on your initial goal setting sheet the first line was about grades in this course I have a grade of and then it moved from there so I'm wondering about what's what's the thinking behind that that the starting with the grades and how do you move them towards the discussion of getting away from grades yeah thank you that's a that's a great question and I guess you caught me a little bit because I do have them kind of put their grade out there just so I have an idea of are they passing are they selling are they struggling at this point in the week because we do this weekly or bi-weekly if you could put the slide up out with the two highlighted colors yellow and blue in there but yeah so I I guess I see your point I do ask them to declare their grade and yet I think what I tend to see with students is that they they they assume that their academic goal or that their goal is to get a good grade and so what I'm trying to steer them towards is to show them that the grade is just a reflection of how they're how they're learning and so to keep the conversation focused on how to how to be a better learner you know I I talk a lot about my kids about the difference between schooling and learning and so schooling grades are a schooling feature a necessary feature but what we're really trying to focus on is the learning and so you can see midway down here I I think I've already pointed that out and you know the this line here on the her geography goal she says I have an A in geography but I'm expecting to be challenged by geography chest on her test on Friday so I'm in good shape there and I I really encourage that kind of messaging because she's talking about the challenge that she's facing and that she's expecting it and you kind of get the sense that she's not afraid of it but that she's preparing for it so just trying to encourage them to get the right messaging focused on growth and not just on doing all of this for for a grade cool thank you I have a question so I would love to hear a little bit more about what you mean by explicitly teach what do you mean by explicit and why are you interested in it when I think of explicitly teaching I'm thinking about helping them understand the language and the underlying belief systems of the fixed mindset and the growth mindset and learning some of the messaging and beginning to see some of the structures in the school with new eyes but then there's the part where where the what we're doing with our words and our actions are we're steeped in academic mindsets and growth mindsets and belonging in a learning community and so we're in the flow of it rather than the stopping and the naming of the particulars if that makes sense I think add to the slide that's up right now from Farrington's and and at all their work the explicit teaching I think is coming out of that learning strategies box you just go back to that last slide please yeah there you know and just looking at we teach kids strategies but that can be it can fall on his face if there's not the academic mindset behind it the belief behind it that it's going to do anything and so that's I guess the heart of our dilemma is how do you kind of get the strategies out there and yet have it translate into a belief that then motivates intrinsic perseverance and change academic behaviors that kind of thing great thanks I know Carly has a question yeah um so what do you think the balance because you said that grades are important as well what do you think the balance between that having a student value their grades and having an academic mindset is I think that students as well as teachers tend to be steeped in the importance of grades I think that's a big part of our culture and taking a step back from that and helping them see that that's more of the endpoint and thinking a little bit more critically and intentionally about their the strategies that they're taking to get there that the grade will be a reflection of the effort and the perseverance and the the connection to their work but rather than speaking in terms of goals as empty containers really doing the intentional work around the strategies themselves and making those as tangible for kids and the grades are important in the real world but it's and they'll continue to be important but what underlies those is even more important and that's the part that we're trying to help kids connect to so Mike I'm curious which practices that you're currently doing do you feel like are really working so which one do you feel like students already find most authentic and meaningful and which ones do you feel like you're struggling with the most and why I would say even the work that we've shown you is underneath that and behind all of this is plenty of other non examples of kiddos that it that haven't embraced it this is a great slide to land on Toby or Michaels they've got it you know like they're starting to see the connection between the decisions that they make and the actions they set up and then what that results in so it's translating but I still have more more examples that aren't that see it as busy work that only do the do the goal setting because it's an action or because it's a required assignment and they're still they're still seeing it the hope is and Matt I've talked about this hope is is that we spiral around this and I really realize that I have to I have to persevere and be humble also and take feedback from kids to keep tweaking these these structures these strategies and so I'll you know I'll admit to the kids okay you know what I gave you too many goals this week why don't we work why don't we bring that down and you just be a little more thoughtful on two classes instead of all your classes or so taking feedback from students on that and then just keep coming around and showing these examples like Toby's to my other students and helping them see that there's value outside of just doing it for a grade and crew I'd like to jump in here if a question from our online community here Kenneth Slayman asks um can you tell me if the idea of mindset migrates into the learner's family and social structure so talk about mindset and a little bit about the demographics of your school and how that what's the interaction going on there I think a good starting place for us would be in this we've just kind of started this work but in developing our academic mindset reflection that is posted in the blog that was our way of helping families become a little bit more aware of some of the language we are kind of guiding them towards the growth mindset and academic mindset and what we are hoping to see kids do that demonstrates a responsibility for learning and so we broke that we we did look at Camille's work and tried to connect that those findings with the language that currently exists in our school it was also a way because kids were rating themselves on how they felt like they were doing in each of those strategies we were hoping that they would begin to see that there were some in that survey that they had not tried yet and so is trying to generate some thinking on their part it's something that we've only done recently but they did lead conversations with their parents for about 15 minutes where they walked through and spoke to why they rated themselves against each of those criteria and then they went on and began to show evidence of their learning that hopefully parents could see a connection between their academic mindsets and the the learning products themselves I'm curious can you tell me a little bit more about the parents involvement in your goal of the academic mindsets maybe like how they were supported or how you involve them in this goal Sure, yeah I mean I think the the best example is what Matt described for sure is you know typically in our student live conferences kids will get out their portfolios and should share their work with their parents so the conversation quickly goes to oh wow that's all you had or whatever and you know and some parents kind of know a little bit more about how to how to encourage their students and some don't and so what we intentionally did is we put this reflection right up front and it actually took the first half of the conference to kind of set the tone for parents that that the work was actually a product of whether or not the students were taking advantage of strategies were how their beliefs were coming out about themselves as learners so I guess that I know not already to spoke about it but I guess that keeps coming back as the most powerful example we've tried yet with parents just the most explicit with parents and our principal has done a a good job of connecting our parent community through newsletters and Facebook and pointing to videos and articles and ideas that from his eyes exemplify those ideas that he's very much in tune with as well he's read Carol Dweck's work he's in conversations with us about how to to make academic mindsets more tangible and connected to our educational program so from his end he's educating the parent community through through news blasts and and YouTube links and articles and such thanks guys so we're going to move into our discussion and I know one of the things that it's a challenging dilemma here is because we want to ask more questions of the presenters and sometimes we don't get to ask all of our questions so of course in this in these conversations we're assuming good intent of what they're saying and also just kind of going off with what we know knowing that we always have follow-up questions for presenters and always follow-up conversation after these but in order to keep us moving and to get their question answered we're going to move into our discussion so we have about 10 minutes for our discussion and if you want to go to the discussion slide Louis that would be great and what I like to do is to just minus remind us all of our question here it says how do you explicitly teach academic mindsets and make it meaningful and authentic for students so that's the question we're hoping to solve for our presenters here they thought pretty deeply about it so we're hoping to answer that question and we're just going to jump in and I know Rob Bearden has something to say and I know a lot of our panelists have something to say so feel free to start jumping in folks and we'll start with 10 minutes Kevin and Ryan to help us kind of focus our conversation on the dilemma I'm going to ask you guys just to kind of turn your camera off for this so that we can just focus on the dilemma great all right folks let's get started okay this is Rob I'd like to join it to jump in with some warm feedback I think that deeper learning is dialogical in nature and I'm just really impressed with the amount of and the character of the dialogue that is going on between between these guys and their and their students dialogue about the work and and the way that they're tracking it and seeing progress seeing development in it and students thinking about their own learning okay no you're all right and I'd like to completely agree with Rob and I I think it's like a really creative way and how they had the weekly email updates and I think that really like spoke to how like growth mindset is and how you can really change the from a fix to a growth mindset and I think that was really creative I'll ditto that and also I mean there's such great for me such inspirational practices that Kevin and Matt are doing thank you for sharing them with us and with everybody else and I love the way that two of you are clear about what you want to do and are collaborating toward it and are pushing the envelope and want to take it much higher and that's just really inspirational in terms of specific things that I mean I love that you know a lot of the things that you're doing you're not grading the self-reflections or making them high stakes and making student progress visual and using peer critique and having students be you know valuable coaches in the process and I could talk a lot about a lot of the things I love that you're doing so thank you for showing the way yeah one of the things that just just really really excites me about this whole experience and the things that they're really aiming for is that their passion and drive and their importance in this really radiates with the students and to really seek this like long-lasting meaningful way of thinking that is just going to radiate in the student slides in their classrooms and beyond is just is really inspiring and just wonderful I'm really impressed with how seriously they're taking the questions so they really are engaging in an iterative development process and really involving the students so they mentioned that other students really appreciate when they hear these messages from their peers rather than from them and they're also revising the materials based on feedback from students and I also really like that they're acknowledging the importance of grades but changing what grades mean for students so they said that it's just a reflection of their learning and I think that's a really powerful message for students and we have some warm feedback from the DL community from Mary Morgan Ryan who says student reflection and goal setting being front and center during parent conferences is really a great thing and talk about student voice and taking ownership I'll jump into a warm some warm feedback too I was really impressed by their they've thought about this really deeply and in the sense of how do they make an explicit idea so it's peer feedback that Carissa mentioned and also the concept of having the kids really think deeply about their grades and their goal setting I think the hard thing about goals is you think about them and then you forget they're really making smart goals with their kids in academic and I think that's something that can you know regardless of the what your content are I mean I'll say like the common core anything can their structure that they have to teach their the mindset actually can relate almost any content error it could be the common core it could be the the science standards whatever it is but they're thinking about very strategically how do they have kids set a goal the action plan and whether they met it and I think that's a nice it's it's a thing that can apply to any content error but also any kind of aspect of their life so I will open the continue the conversation for warm feedback but I do want us to move us on to how might we help them answer this question how might we help them really think about explicitly teaching academic mindsets and they're really making it meaningful for kids so let's jump in Eduardo I think is ready to go sure so what one thing that I think I'm also very interested in this question of how can we explicitly that develop this in students and I think that being in my view of being explicit is very important and to me being explicit is about being clear and so in teaching learning strategies whether it's being clear about the learning strategies about what's working and what's not working having students think about the language and share language about what they're seeing and you know how they see their abilities how they see feedback how they're receiving feedback how they're giving feedback so using clear language I applaud kind of that that goal and I think it's very important some ideas that I had like as a conversation went on one is I love I asked Matt about whether the some of the things that he does are public and his answer was and we have a great culture that facilitates that and I love like I I would challenge like I think in an awesome like culture if you take it to the next level those self-reflections that Matt talked about which I think are awesome that he's doing anonymously to make it you know more something that students can more engage with um is there a way my question I have is is there a way to eventually make that public so that you know students not only not only are okay with making their their self-assessments public but they actually want to make their self-assessments public because if other students know what they're struggling with and what their goals are then they can get help from their peers toward those goals so as one example then you can facilitate explicit conversations about those goals and on that line I wonder whether if I wonder what happens if if the students own their goals more so like they are they are setting their own goals and they might be in academics or they might be in other things so you're focusing on what they really are interested in now and they're really interested in helping toward those goals that they really own and then once they get into the growth process and they see their own growth and they see each other giving and receiving feedback and helping one another then whether you could transition to other parts including more academics so those are some ideas I had that were inspired by the conversation yeah I would me too Ed I would want to jump in there and just pick up on what you said about anonymity I mean and go back to the original question which Matt and Kevin's question which is how do you explicitly teach academic mindsets and make it meaningful and authentic for students and one of the really important mindsets is I belong in this community of learners and in my view anonymity is the enemy of community and so that well while we well where we want to protect people through anonymity perhaps and what we're working towards as you were saying Ed is moving towards a place where we are sharing openly and supporting each other openly and then the other point that you were making was I'm thinking of another academic mindset too meaning the mindset of purpose that this work is important to do and the question that I would love to have asked in the in the session and didn't but I think it's a question that's behind any effort to teach academic mindsets is what is the larger purpose of the academic work that we are engaged in and what is its importance and how can we convey and discuss that and enlist students in important authentic work in the service which is the essential backdrop for the development of academic mindsets so I think those are you know great suggestions to kind of more broadly connect these goals to students to things that students value I'm going to make a different suggestion that I think could fit nicely but accomplishes another goal so one thing to do might be to make the goals project specific so it might feel more authentic to students if you're creating learning goals around a specific lesson that's something that I've learned in working with Joe Bowler in the ed school and I think that it's a really obvious way for students to start goal setting because they know that it's tied to exactly what they're learning in a given class one of the things is I love hearing about all these goals and these students really aiming for these goals and succeeding and I will always remember one student telling me that to make a growth mindset something really relevant for them and to remind them to believe that they can achieve these things was to have that proof was to constantly show students that they have made growth that they have succeeded that they've made these goals and to show them things like looking at their work or looking at their portfolios hearing things from their peers and really just constantly showing them like constantly like here's where we started here's where you are now and you've made it and you succeeded in this amount of time and look at all that you've done and I just you know I always remind remember her telling me that I had to prove to my students that they have succeeded that they have made those goals So I'll just jump in with something from the community Charlie Settles says making thinking visible seems to be an important component of your teaching and he wonders to what extent think allowed strategies are used and then I would just build on what Ed and Rob said about making this public and just say that technology is a tremendous tool for making some of this public and building community within a classroom and it can also be just super engaging for students Jump into to as I think kind of the last thing I think our students have something to say and then I'll then I'll turn over them but I think what Edward was saying about this idea beyond academics and the greater purpose you know young kids are always trying to learn how to play piano and all these outside things and I think how do we make it authentic for them how do we translate the things they're already doing on video games for example and online technology that they're already pushing themselves beyond they could possibly imagine and bringing that to the classroom and so I think starting with conversations with kids of you know how did you get to level eight in Dungeons and Dragons I just dated myself there but how do we get to level 10 of Warcraft or whatever in that because those that's real to kids because they're working on that right there and how do we translate that to the academic world because they are doing it and they are doing the free time and how do we have them connect with that and then connect that to the how they're working in schools I'm going to have the students have the last word and then we'll close up this part of the conversation All right well I just wanted to say I think yeah like what you were saying it's a lot more like feasible for students especially like in athletics and things where you can really think of like you're growing and your practice makes perfect and all that and I think that is really applicable to growth mindsets but I don't think it's necessarily applicable in a student's head as much and I really like your idea of having it where you see like that you're like improving because sometimes you even are improving but you don't really like you can't really tell that you're that the students improving and that they're growing and how they're learning and I think that by providing ways to like acknowledge that and making it public information that it really actually will help them explicitly teach the mindset and make it meaningful and I think that's a great answer to the question so we're gonna so we're gonna move on to our last part of the conversation the last bit last final parts and this is an opportunity for our presenters Kevin and Matt to turn their camera right back on and they're going to give us kind of a reflection on the things that they heard as a reminder guys this is not you're not watching the NFL football we don't need to play by play of everything you just heard but really just any aha any things that kind of struck you or kind of open your mind to something else so we'll give you guys just about three minutes and go ahead cool start love to add suggestion about kind of starting with choice goals and helping them more naturally kind of get that evidence that they're growing and that they can succeed with effort and but around things that they're already interested in and then just kind of translating that back in with something maybe a little more decontextualized with the academic regular love that suggestion loved the suggestion that purpose is the backdrop of the development of academic mindsets loved the suggestion about learning goals around specific lessons and projects some I'm going to roll in tomorrow I think just that was a great kind of timely suggestion and I love the idea that belief requires proof and believing and changing those beliefs changing those mindsets just keep showing kids that they are and things will happen I would agree with all those connections something I'm beginning to think about is there are practices that I feel more comfortable with I've been doing them longer made lots of mistakes and continuing to improve such as peer critique and as kids become more comfortable whether it's peer critique or self-assessment it's not just about pushing my practice it's about pushing theirs too as they become more comfortable that it's time for more growth and more stretching and that's the art of helping kids become expert learners is knowing when it's time to push and when it's time to kind of step in and and help them reinterpret the things that they're struggling with that it's not necessarily time for the stretch it's time for growing a little bit stronger foundation before we move on thanks guys and so we're going to turn our last bit of the conversation into our debrief and this is an opportunity not for us to continue to discuss the dilemma but we'll talk about do we have a good question did we stick to the question or is there a moment that we really started to get the ball rolling and so I'm going to kind of probably turn back to our presenters here and say did we answer the question did we help you if we didn't then we really didn't have a good conversation so do you feel like you've got some strategies and then we'll have other people jump in about the the conversation yeah I I do think that there was just some great little nuggets to walk away with I mean it's a it's a big problem that Matt and I have basically just decided to dive in without a lot of examples of practice of making this explicit in the classroom and just trying things and we've bounced off each other as much as we can but and we've read the literature but to hear some suggestions from you all has been has been great like what we just talked about just clarity like adding some clarity it's been encouraging to just to hear some of the feedback about some of the work we're doing that we kind of have to have some humility about because we aren't it's probably not working all the time and so that was that was really helpful I really appreciated this process and hearing from our colleagues and making some new connections because you know we we have been operating in a little bit of isolation and that means we're not making our practice to go back to the idea that anonymity is the enemy community that we've been in our own little pocket of practice and it's pushing Kevin and I to to actually live what we're asking kids to do by accepting your feedback and being really open and and honest and thinking about our our next goals ourselves and being authentic with that so that we can be better facilitators of that work for kids so I really appreciate the intentional thoughts and questions and and the pushing that we're getting from our from our friends here in the in the hangout one thing I think about with when we have the 10 minute discussion before the presenters kind of share their reflections I've always wish there was maybe like a minute the panelists can have where they just have you know 10 seconds to share out like one advisor suggestion and everyone goes around and just kind of is just really precise just to kind of conclude the discussion great Karen Oh uh this is Ryan sorry you know one piece of feedback that I would have to say is that I just uh I tend to be someone that loves dissent and it seems like we were all in agreement and there's a lot of nodding heads and just I think the value of having someone that pushes the conversation and says like have we really thought about this is there something is there some value in grades and just that there is a lot of power in that so that was just one observation I had I do like when um someone kind of throws a a bomb and in in the conversation so maybe I'll do that next time Ha ha ha agreed how about from the student's perspective or from Rob I thought that in in in some that we as a group that we stayed with the the with the question about about addressing mindsets and and doing it in a way that's authentic and I think there's I mean there's there's more and more and more and more and more conversation that we could be having about I mean this is this is like the first step of many conversations perhaps just around moving around student agency student ownership the centrality of the teacher in all of this in developing student mindsets and yet the the end result being of unleashing students so that and and cultivating student ownership of the whole of the whole piece which we see happening actually in in the in the artifacts that Kevin and Matt have shown us it's really exciting I am I'll add that I I uh it it felt that first I love the question I I said question I'm personally passionate about I think it's an important question in my opinion I think the this format it felt rushed it felt like you know as as Rob just said we could I could learn from you know Matt and Kevin for like a week if I was with them at their school so you know just having five minutes of each one of them it just feels like you know I want to have so much more conversation and similarly I feel like we could probably have had a conversation for a long time but it's just a matter of you know we don't have a lot of time and I think we did relatively good job with a short amount of time yeah I think I'll go ahead given the amount of time we had I was really impressed with how Laura kind of kept us on tasks on topic and we were able to get to all of the things that we wanted to get get to even though there are a lot of us and we did have such a limited amount of time yeah I can I add to that because that's a great you know I always feel that way as a facilitator keeping keeping time I've got my phone as you see running keeping us going I'm I'm the separate note I would have really been interesting to have one of Kevin and Matt students in this process to see what they're saying about the mindset that would have been really interesting to see what their perspective is on the mindset so maybe students who really struggling and someone who's really getting it to be part of this conversation that would have been really cool I think the other thing that I think going on to the rush time thing is I think this is speaking of great change and it's change issues is I think one of the things that I notice about protocols is that I always sense they are a great conversation and they feel rushed when you have a really meaty topic in the sense that you feel like you don't have enough time because it is so in-depth and that's this line of a good conversation because you have lots of things to say if it doesn't feel rushed to me or you don't have a lot to say then it's probably wasn't a great meaty topic or a question that needed time the other thing that I think is important this goes out to the whole community here is this is the start of a conversation one of the reasons why we use protocols in our school is not just to answer the question because we actually will generate more questions as a result of the protocol but because we're trying to create collegial dialogue and I think one thing that particularly for schools who are just starting on this process of deeper learning is that the idea that two teachers are going to open themselves open themselves up and be vulnerable to the world and share their work opens this conversation up so when they're walking in the hallways when they're walking down to get coffee someone stopped them and says how is that going what's happening there and so I think that for me even though it does feel rushed it actually has a greater impact on adult culture in schools and so I think that I hope that these conversations are just the start of dialogue on these issues not the ending point so we're going to close the loop real quick and this is an opportunity to say your final word take away I'm going to open it up and take reflections from Carly here and I'm going to let allow my participants here to give one last word of advice one suggestion less that they wanted to do or perhaps a take away for their own practice but we're just going to close the loop and we're going to ask all the participants to either share a suggestion or a take away and you can have a right to pass should you want to pass but we'll start with Carissa and we'll just go down the line here alphabetically and get allowing everyone to have the last kind of comment for them and I will have allow our presenters to have the final word tonight so Carissa take it away thanks Ma what I'm going to take away from this is the importance of involving students in this process so in terms of getting their feedback on the protocols and also assessing themselves and having their peers assess them I think seems like it's really powerful to students and makes this all more meaningful I also I'm taking away a lot of strategies that I learned from Kevin and Matt from the discussion but also from the materials that they distribute before the conversation and also like top of mind is I'll echo something that Matt said which is like a lot of this is an art and it involves judgment and sometimes you know your students may or may not be ready for public things and it you know it it depends on the relationships you have with them how the culture in your classroom the rest of school and I think it's challenging and and I plot your efforts to this and I also I'm interested in the one of the charts that you distributed before this had plots you know morning versus afternoon and I'm very curious as to your thoughts on that so I'll follow up with some questions on that later Charlie students okay yeah oh I just as a student I think it's a great a thing to learn for us because this is basically like a direct lesson like right to us and I'm definitely going to take away because I've I've played a lot of sports and I think it's a lot easier to see it in sports but I'm definitely going to use like the strategies you guys have said and really get into the growth mindset versus like the fixed mindset of oh I can't really improve as much as I think I actually can and I think I just thank you guys for all all that you've taught us I think one of the reminders that you know something that I definitely need to think about is you know we use a lot of the growth mindset language in our classrooms and I just wonder thinking how I can get parents a little bit more involved to follow through with that language at home I love what Kevin and Matt were saying about modeling growth mindset and listening and being open and and moving forward and so on it connected to what you were saying Laura about the the importance of that this is just the beginning of a conversation and kind of the isolation that one can feel when we're trying new things and maybe maybe the rest of our faculty hasn't tuned in yet or whatever I mean it's growth mindsets or academic mindsets in school start with the adults and you guys have really launched on it and and I do think that this kind of process this kind of conversation a kind of protocol driven safe conversation is something to carry back out to colleagues and to spread the the word with colleagues as well and I'll just start jumping quickly and say a big takeaway for me was just the role of making this public as we're thinking about mindsets and I think that's as true for us as adults and and educators as it is for our students one takeaway I have and this is just exactly what Rob was saying which is that it's you know just to see a community of two and seeing two teachers that are really passionate about something and the power and having someone that you can connect with and and bounce ideas off of I would really encourage that Matt and Kevin have done such great work and there's so much stuff posted on the blogs to really engage in some of the stuff that they've done that you know this format doesn't allow you to bring all of it there so really it delves deep into all the hard work that they've done by visiting the blog but thank you guys for bringing that I want to appreciate and then I will turn over to Matt Matt and Kevin here at the end I really like their strategic way of thinking about mindsets I feel like we don't particularly I myself with our students and advisory don't do this as well as we could be doing and I think the idea of making it what you've taken it's a very complex thing and making it simple with students here it is here's how I might achieve it and this is how I know and I think that is very it's very explicit and it's attainable and there and I think that's particularly for kids who are struggling in a big content area by breaking it down into little steps we've scaffolded how you can make change in an academic area whatever area it is and I think that for us it's very it's very powerful Matt and Kevin you guys have the last word and then we'll turn it over to the closers I guess takeaway for me that just is so much like this is almost like about faith it's about beliefs and how those change and I feel like I've been really brought into this I kind of just saw Matt doing some of this stuff in his classroom and ended up in and my own classroom messing around trying to copy him a little bit and then it kind of went back and forth and I met I got to meet Eduardo last summer and here some of this and and I just wanted a little bit more I guess it's the Kool-Aid the growth mindset Kool-Aid that just continues to motivate me my daughter's teacher last night I was having a conversation and she was wearing her guts out about her daughter and why her daughter's having a hard time in school I found myself kind of preaching the faith of growth mindset to her too and it just kind of I guess the takeaway is just being continually brought into these situations where people are looking for ways to help students and it's just kind of a go-to with mindsets as just a universal way to take any kid from any part of the world at any stage of life and any person really and help them just kind of rethink about how they're how they're believing about themselves and work and what to do so just thanks for letting us be a part of this process to kind of make that public and again share a little bit out of what we're trying to do and I would just my final word I guess is just a word of encouragement to dive in and just try stuff for all those listening because we I really do not have much expertise I still haven't read the entire lit review and I haven't read everything there is to say I haven't read all of Carol Dweck's book but we're just kind of trying stuff out and that's I think the heart of the North Mindset and I to for that what's fun about this work is it makes me an active learner and that's what we're really after with kids so that they're not passive recipients and so it makes me really think and rethink and question my practice and my own belief systems checking myself when I'm when I'm tired and I'm and I'm working with a kiddo and really making sure that I'm bringing my best and you know it's a little scary coming into a hangout like this and saying this is what we've been doing and so I appreciate that scariness and that risk taking because I also felt like it was supportive and friendly and intellectual and at the same time pushing and I know I'll be thinking about this for a long time and I hope we get a chance to continue this conversation because now it feels like the the reciprocity is much larger than next door and Kevin's classroom so thank you for inviting us to be a part of this it's great definitely thank you and we're going to turn over to Karen yes thanks so I'm just going to close by thanking Laura for moderating and thanking Matt and Kevin for being with us and all of our panelists and everyone in the DL MOOC community as always we'll have an archive of this session posted on the DL MOOC site so if there are others you think might be interested in this please share that and there will be ongoing conversations on gplus and twitter and I know many of our panelists here are involved in those conversations as well another way to explore this topic and put it into practice in your own work is through some of the academic mindset assessment surveys and Kevin and Matt have posted a survey that they use which we will include with the archive and it's also in the blog post and then I also want to mention the survey that Carissa and Perz put together for DL MOOC which is available at survey.perz.net and again that's posted on the DL MOOC site thank you all again and we will see you next week when we'll be discussing assessment for deeper learning