How Can Growth Mindset in Education Be Used?

Are you wondering if you can use growth mindset in education?

Impeccable educators are always on the lookout for new strategies to use in the classroom to benefit their students.

As an educator, your passion is to ensure students fulfill their true potential and move to the next stage of life. You help them accomplish this by assigning readings that keep them aware of new challenges, experiences, and activities that test and drag them out of their slumberland.

But a new teaching approach doesn’t focus on the curriculum or lesson plans. Instead, it focuses on an educator’s overall approach to instruction and student interactions. This approach is known as a growth mindset.

Some critical factors need to be in place to efficiently teach learners a growth mindset. So, how do you teach growth mindset in education successfully? Let’s find out.

Benefits of Growth Mindset in Education

How Growth Mindset Can Be Used in Education

1. Modeling

Modeling is one of the most remarkable and efficient techniques an educator can implement to ensure stable mindset growth.

Teachers need to put themselves in their student’s shoes and try to be part of the process by also learning so that both students and teachers acquire new skills by learning new things.

When students see the learning drive of their educator or teacher, they also get encouraged and motivated to acquire knowledge and be part of the beautiful learning journey.

2. To Develop Love for Learning

Growth mindset drills a culture on students where they feel like they are not satisfied without new acquisition of information.

It makes students believe that they can do anything and fulfill any dream through hard work and determination, making them spend more time on their course material. 

However, you should praise and embrace hard work and knowledge acquisition in the same light.

Eight out of ten times, learners applauded for their hard work and effort try the same challenges again. By the end, they emerge victoriously.

Students respond and do well when their effort is praised. They develop the urge to learn in and out of the classroom.

3. Teachers Can Use a Growth Mindset in Education to Improve Career Success

According to the study conducted by McKinsey and the company in 2017, close to 375 million workers or employees will have to abandon their roles or acquire new skills before 2030.

For students to be successful in the future, they should do away with the stagnant mindset when they approach their careers.

Instead, they should be versatile and ready to learn, unlearn bad working habits, and be prepared for new challenges. There’s a need for growth and development in workplaces, even in the current situation.

This is evident in Robert Half’s study, where 84 percent of companies are ready to hire and train workers who lack specific fundamental and crucial skills.

Continuous learning and adaptability are traits desired by many companies and organizations, and only those who are eager will survive the test.

4. Evolution Outside the Classroom

The growth mindset will not vanish when students close their books or laptops. It’s an ongoing trial and error method to give learners an all-rounded experience in and out of the classroom.

Children grow and develop effectively when they understand how they can learn and benefit from trial and error in their daily lives.

An accurate drive to personal growth indicates that a learner is continuously developing. It starts with positive self and behavior change, and then it slowly transforms into effectiveness and self-knowledge.

A growth mindset can directly impact and lead to new opportunities, less risk aversion, and improved relationships.

5. A Growth Mindset Can Be Used to Find Opportunities in Failure

Failure is excruciating and uncomfortable, but it can still play to the learner’s advantage if they have a positive mindset. Mistakes depend on how you look at them and turn them into your strength.

When a student has a growth mindset, they view failure and mistakes as good opportunities by effectively learning from their shortcomings, consequently becoming better.

When students can look and work through their failure to be better, the classroom knowledge they acquire will be golden as failure is a recurrent part of learning.

It’s impossible to be perfect in everything, and so when a student takes failures as an opportunity to do better, they grow immensely.

6. Trying New Things and Ideas

Rather than expect healthy responses to mistakes and failure, a learner that believes in a growth mindset will most definitely try strange things for their development.

However, students with a static perspective will be scared to learn new things as they always see it will fail or be difficult.

Students who have embraced a growth mindset know that failure and difficulty are part of the never-ending learning process. And this urge to overcome failure will make children try new challenges with the mindset of overcoming the difficulties they face along the learning way.

7. To Develop Persistence

It’s expected that when the going gets tough, most kids will take the easy way and quit. But, teaching students growth mindset will help them have a mind-shift on how they deal with complex circumstances through personal encouragement.

Instead of students or learners letting go quickly, they check the cause of the problem or challenge through a growth mindset and figure out a way to overcome it even if they don’t get the result they wanted.

8. Helps Cultivate a Sense of Purpose

Is your life purpose-driven? If your answer is yes, clarify what your purpose drive entails, but if you find yourself making more steps backward than forward, then it’s time to have a purposeful life.

Contemplate and meditate for some time and see what idea and information you come up with. If you like it, make it a pillar that drives you forward to achieve all your set learning goals. That’s the only clear-cut step you can make to get closer to building a productive growth mindset.

9. Growth Mindsets Can Help Face Education Challenges Bravely

If you notice that you mostly get terrified when you face challenges, you have to pause and reframe the state of affairs in your mind. Contemplate the difficulty and turn it into an opportunity to shift your view to make your push forward without fear.

Similarly, coach yourself on different tactics to implement for how you interact with new people, acquire new skills, or navigate through a difficult challenge without fear of failure.

10. Can Help Embrace Imperfections

Generally, it’s unlikely for people to learn something valuable or attain an achievement without committing silly mistakes. Teaching students a new perspective on mistakes by focusing on growth mindset interventions is the best gift you can provide them.

Learners should be encouraged to see mistakes as many steps toward success other than setbacks. Set aside time for you and your students to discuss and reflect on failures and success and how they correlate.

11. Teachers Can Use Growth Mindset in Education to Acknowledge their Students’ Efforts

For a growth mindset in education to be effective, teachers must acknowledge learners’ strides and effort and not just the academic outcomes. Commend them if they explore a new strategy, ask vital questions, demonstrate grit and motivation, and practice rather than focus on their intellect or talent.

Once in a while, give your students compliments to show that you appreciate how far they’ve come. Ensure they understand that hard work is the first step to acquiring a valuable skill and that the learning curve never ends.

12. Enhancing Formative Feedback

Formative feedback is a way of engaging learners or students to reflect they should approach and evaluate learning constantly. It helps both teachers and students develop an ongoing learning process.

Similarly, a summative assessment can be in terms of final projects, performance review, and mid-term exams: these are great ways to assess teacher or student mindset and performance at the end of a particular unit.

13. Growth Mindset Can Help With Better Math Thinking

Most neuroscientists have realized positive brain efficiency in learners during math thinking. This holds other factors constant such as intelligence, working memory, age, anxiety, and reading ability.

14. Impact Better Grades in Struggling Students

Besides these other benefits, a growth mindset also directly impacts academic performance.

According to a study conducted in Chile, learners with a growth mindset inculcated in them scored top (34 percent) compared to the bottom (7 percent). However, learners with a fixed mindset scored less than (28 percent) than the top (12 percent).

Note that even one hour of mindset growth can have a massive impact on a student’s development.

This was evident in a specific study where 12,000 freshmen were introduced to a concept that made them believe the brain becomes more innovative and potent with rigorous learning and the grades go up proportionately.

Moreover, students enrolling for math courses also went up.

Schools Need to Start Embracing a Growth Mindset

A proper growth mindset prepares learners for self-improvement and new opportunities to be exploited, that’s why it’s important to use growth mindset in education.

Provide your child with real-life learning and a greater understanding of crucial concepts they learn in school by considering real-life experiences.

A growth mindset helps you and your kids overcome severe obstacles in the learning process and acquire a new skill.

It helps you appreciate how essential determination and persistence are for ultimate success. Change the way you think to change the way you learn.

Make sure to check out my list of 15 Growth Mindset Lesson Plans You Can Use and 18 Growth Mindset Activities for Kids

Read more about Grit and Growth Mindset – What’s the Difference & Can They Be Used Together?