Dive Brief:
- Mindset Man, a caped superhero, teaches students it’s OK to make mistakes and that if they put in enough effort they can improve their performance at West Woods Upper Elementary School in Farmington, CT.
- Assistant Principal Michael Wilson writes for Getting Smart that growth mindset has become an important part of the school culture, with students talking about it together, teachers integrating it into their classrooms, and administrators modeling the process of learning from feedback or mistakes.
- Mindset Man was originally created for a school assembly but when administrators and teachers realized the superhero resonated with students, they kept him around — now the masked man high-fives students as they enter the building each morning, talks to them in the halls between classes and serves as a routine motivational tool.
Dive Insight:
A growing number of school districts are starting to focus on growth mindset as a critical component of K-12 student success. When students come to school with a fixed mindset, they tend to think failure proves they’re not good at something and that is the end of the story. If they can develop a growth mindset, they are more likely to persevere through these challenges, understanding their failure is likely temporary.
A recent study by Motion Math set out to study the impact of coaching students to think differently about being challenged. The game tested mindset coaching’s impact on engagement, challenge, persistence and mastery, finding students who got the coaching were significantly more successful in each category.