Professional Learning with Professor Carol Dweck and James Nottingham

Yesterday I had the privilege to start my new (northern hemisphere) school year listening to Professor Carol Dweck and James Nottingham speaking on the theme of “Developing a Growth Mindset for Learning”.

It was an inspiring, engaging, challenging and relevant learning day- with lots of fun too!

Reconnecting with Carol Dweck’s research on developing a growth mindset for learning and hearing how this research is continuing to flourish in new fields, beyond the classroom and into the world of universities, the sports field and business, was a great experience.

At the core is the recognition that we are all a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets and we need to “befriend” our fixed mindset persona, so we can recognise the triggers that prevent us taking on new challenges and empowering ourselves and others around us to treat “mistakes” as learning opportunities.

It is not easy to adopt a growth mindset and stick with it. It takes patience, resilience and perseverance. We need to be aware of our context, our setting and how we can begin to move to this possibility of a school wide approach to growth mindset with the view of creating “Human Potential”, which will allow our learners to develop skills over time, have a belief in themselves and make a positive contribution to society.

If you are interested in finding out more about developing a Growth Mindset in your school or continuing the conversation, please do email me, I would love to hear from you!

Meanwhile I am going to keep practising my own growth mindset in my attempt to learn Spanish!