Growth and Motivation TIPR

1. A growth mindset  requires students to think differently about how they are learning, and when they fail. A specific example of a class where I observed a teacher promoting growth mindset, was a creative writing class. This teacher believes in failure, and getting students to look at failure in a more positive light. When I first walked into her classroom a few weeks ago, her classroom looked pretty unorganized and messy. However, as I watched her teach and chatted with her a little bit after, she told me that she believes in a student-led classroom. A place where students felt safe, and were allowed to work through struggles. The class began with her directing the student's attention to the questions they had put on the board the last class period. She left them to think about the question "what do I want to know more about in creative writing?" The students then put up their responses, and she used those responses to guide her lesson planning.  This is a great example of intrinsic motivation. Since the students don't know these answers, and they didn't all have to put up a question, the ones that sincerely wanted to know were able to pose their question in a non-threatening environment. The teacher motivates her students by the way that her class is set up, she expects them to be able to share what they wrote at the end of the class period. After her mini lesson, the students have time to write on their own. Each student spent the time working quietly after she allowed them five minutes to talk to their neighbors. This was a good mix between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation since she expected the students to produce something, but the students wanted to share their work with each other. She also demonstrated how failure could be beneficial as she put her own work up on the screen and wrote with the students. I  thought this was a good example of growth mindset since the students were able to see how she dealt with writers block, and how many times she edited her work. This allowed the students to see that deleting your work was not a bad thing. I also saw how she developed self-efficacy in her students. After each student read, she asked the rest of the students what they liked about it. This helped the writers see what they were doing well, and continue to develop that in themselves.

2. I think the students might need a little more structure in the class. A lot of them walked in the classroom, immediately grabbed a chrome book, put their headphones in, and didn't look up for the rest of the class period. These students, while they obviously had intrinsic motivation, didn't seem to interact with their peers. One of Maslow's Hierarchy levels shows that students need a sense of belonging. Perhaps these students need more of a positive classroom environment and they would feel like they could interact more with the other students with that. I would like to see what happens with an assessment in this class, or what happens when they finish their story. Currently, the students are in the beginning stages of writing, so I'm not sure how she will handle peer review and such, but it would be very interesting to see how the students react.

3. I think to combat the structure issue, I wouldn't let the students get the chrome books until the lesson is over. This way, the students would be able to focus and interact more during the group work, and then allow them to work individually. I also think doing more to cultivate class culture would be positive, and help develop the environment