Growth Mindset Feedback
Overview
Providing feedback that focuses on the process conveys the importance of effort and motivates students to persist when learning.
Example: Use This Strategy In in the Classroom
Design It into Your Product
Use It in the Classroom
Watch how this first grade teacher provides specific feedback about the writing process to encourage growth mindset. By praising the process, the teacher emphasizes the strategies students use in their work and highlights how they contribute to the accomplishment of their goals.
Learn More
- Explore the Self-Efficacy subtopic on Digital Promise's Research Map.
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Teacher Modeling and Support Strategies
Teachers can support language development by using and providing syntax that is appropriately leveled (e.g. short, simple structure for young students).
Teachers support language development by using and providing Vocabulary that is appropriately leveled (e.g. using Word Wall words).
Content that is provided in clear, short chunks helps students develop their Working Memory skills.
Maintaining consistent classroom routines and schedules ensures that students are able to predict what will happen next.
Teaching students how to label, identify, and manage emotions helps them learn self-regulation skills.
Learning about students' cultures and connecting them to instructional practices helps all students feel like valued members of the community.
Overtly encouraging all students to ask when they have forgotten something creates a classroom that supports risk-taking and skill development.
By talking through their thinking at each step of a process, teachers can model what learning looks like.
Teachers sharing text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections models this schema building.
When teachers share their goals and the paths they take to achieve them, they demonstrate that learning involves effort, mistakes, and reflecting.
Talking with students about what they know about the topic of upcoming work helps activate their Background Knowledge or reveals gaps.
Reading aloud regularly exposes students to new and familiar vocabulary and texts.
Reading aloud books about skills children are learning provides another model for their development.
