Fail Small, Succeed Big
SUPPORT A GROWTH MINDSET
The Technology
Utilizing technology is an excellent way to help foster a growth mindset in the classroom. As a teacher you have a deep understanding of your content and by developing new teaching strategies via new software and hardware, you open your classroom to possibilities that might otherwise be missed. For example, technology can be used to create assignments where students must struggle (and fail small) in order to succeed. Along the way, teachers should communicate to students how their efforts and strategies led to success, or how their strategies failed and what they might do to revise those strategies in order to achieve. That’s also another effective use of technology: as a means to communicate very specific, effort-based feedback that encourages a growth mindset.
The technologies presented here have a low barrier of entry, but they have the potential to make a difference in your teaching and student learning outcomes.
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Clickers
COLLECTIVE LEARNING
Several important aspects of a growth mindset is providing feedback, allowing opportunities to learn from mistakes, giving students time to ask questions, and encouraging effort rather than praising intelligence. Clickers can create a platform for students to engage with their learning and if they fail it’s on a small scale. As a teacher you’ll have an input database that you could use to inspire future learning growth.
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Check out these websites for more information:
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2) gosoapbox
SmartyReader
CRITICAL READING ELEVATED
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have an application that changes based on your students comprehension levels? What if your students could receive real time, immediate feedback during critical reading assignments? SmartyRead can do this and more! You even have the control of changing how scoring is handled so you can simply show the total number of questions answered correctly rather than the typical percentage.
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Instructables
LET THEIR IMAGINATION SOAR
Students don’t have to be restricted to traditional learning goals. Websites like Instructables provide tutorials for creating virtually anything. When promoting a growth mindset it is empowering to allow students to dig deep and come to the realization that they can make an idea a reality. These DIY projects can lead to other amazing technology such as Scratch. Students could even create their own instructable that students in other classrooms could follow!
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We hope that the information on this site has helped you better understand the power of failure as a learning mode. We also hope that we were able to give some useful advice on how to integrate growth mindsets and failure into your own classroom. In conclusion, remember, we all must fail small if we wish to succeed BIG!