中文
HOME
HOME / LATEST NEWS / Content

Grade 6: Youth Development Class—Growth Mindset

September 24, 2020

In the Youth Development class of September 17th, grade six students learned about keeping a growth mindset by discussing, playing a game, and watching a few videos that were linked to the topic.

During the ninety-minute lesson, the teachers arranged several activities for the students, including a “Question and Answer” part. Growth mindset is basically the framing of people’s perspective that they adopt to handle and interpret information in their daily lives. To allow for the students to understand the topic better, teachers gave the students a survey at the start of class. The point of this survey was not to compare each student with their classmates, but to identify their different learning mindsets, and help them to create a personal goal of either achieving growth mindset or gaining the courage to improve their mindset.

After students completed the questions over about five minutes, they then calculated their results.A low score meant that the student most probably has a growth mindset; a high score meant that the student most probably has a fixed mindset; an score in the middle meant that the student most probably has a little of both. Growth mindsets are usually more suitable for people in modern society, and there are few key reasons that they arethe best option. Firstly, people with growth mindsets are willing to learn more new things not just for their grades, but for their pure interest in the topic. Secondly, people with growth mindsets tend to treat mistakes as opportunities for improvement instead of as signs of failure. Thirdly, these people believe that no matter how people are born,they canimprove themselves through hard work.

The Q&A part ended with a few conclusions being made based on the discussions of the class. A person’s family can, and will, affect his or her mindset, especially when he/she is young. So students may have completely different mindsets just because they had different childhoods. From these two conclusions, the students learned the importance of their environment and how easily they can be influenced by it. Also, they realized making a mistake isn’t always a terrible thing. As long as students can learn from it, use it to improve themselves, and try not to make the same mistake again, the error is worth it. As the teachers say, “Fail early, fail often.”

A few videos were played after the lively discussions, and from the specific descriptions in the videos, the students gained a wider range of knowledge about the theme. Human brains are like muscles, and people can make them stronger by training them. What changes the structure of the brain and helps it improve is not what people are good at, but what they struggle with. A comfortable life will not lead to much brain improvement, but a life with stimulating challenges will. Neuroplasticity is the ability for your brain to grow and change, and students need to challenge their brains with things that are complicated for them to achieve this growth. Knowledge is power, and humans need that power to become stronger individuals.

From the lesson, students learned that having a growth mindset is often the key to success in life. People with growth mindsets focus more on making improvements and learning for themselves, not others. Becoming proud of being the best at something can make a person brittle, and their pride from being at the top can cause them to eventually snap. Having a growth mindset instead means remaining flexible through constant practice and improvements, and also learning from one’s from mistakes.

(Written by Tianyue Zhao 6(1) Supervised by Ms. Portillo Pictures by Teachers)