W08 Journal

• What's the one thing that everyone needs to know about learning?

The one thing we need to know about learning is that every single human is born ready to learn. It is often that we see people (children and adults) frustrated because they are not getting something and simply keep failing - but it is essential to remember - that IS learning. All the stumbling blocks, the failures ...they lead to learning and eventually mastery.

Let's consider Dr. Carol Dweck's career work on Mindsets.

• How do Dr. Dweck's ideas relate to everything that we've investigated so far? What big connection is there to be made?

The biggest thing I take away from Dr Dweck's ideas is that we can encourage our students to believe in themselves and their power to learn. Many of the ideas we have studied so far concentrate on learners reinvigorating their desire to learn through student centered activities, meaningful discussion and an open learning environment. Students can learn at their own pace and can set their own goals becoming both self-regulated learners and life-long learners. We need to take the challenge and retrain our students - if the can grasp the idea that they are  in control of their learning because they can learn from the processes they take and the failures they step back up from, they will be successful.

• How do these ideas relate to the perspectives on STEM learning (e.g., conceptual change, models & modeling, social cognitive, situated learning)?

These ideas relate to the perspectives of STEM, because many STEM activities revolve around students learning from each other more than the teacher This can be acquired through exploration in group activities as well as small group or whole class discussion. Students in a STEM setting keep on searching for the answer even when faced with difficulty or initial failure - and this is exactly what  a growth mindset would teach our students.

• How do the examples in this video illustrate a growth mindset?

The examples in the video feature many individuals who initially failed at something. They may have even been told by others that they could not come back from the failure. The individuals went on to do something great in their lives - some of them are still doing great things. This is all about the growth mindset. If the individuals had had a fixed mindset they would have given up when they did not do well, but instead they increased their efforts and turned their failures into a success. 

• How do we translate this into straight-forward, applicable policies and practices for STEM?

I think the best way to translate this into our schools is to start training our students with the growth-mindset. The ideal situation would be for this to begin the minute students start school, but as Dr. Dweck says, mindsets can change. We an begin incorporating this now, in all our grade levels to help all our students succeed. But, again ideally, we should start this very early - show students how the process of learning, the idea of failing is how they can get stronger in whatever they wish to do. Then, without exaggeration, the possibilities will be endless, especially as we encourage students to explore in a STEM setting.