With the new redesign of this blog this morning, there was a mistake in the email subscriber option.
If you subscribed today, and many have, you have been receiving an individual email every time a new post appears. In addition, it was only containing part of the post – you had to go to the blog to see the whole thing.
Sorry!
I think I’ve fixed it now so that anyone who has subscribed today – or in the future – will only receive one early morning email containing the entire content of all the posts from the previous day.
If, by some chance, I messed-up and wasn’t able to fix it because I don’t really know what I’m doing (not an unusual occurrence), then Edublogs will take care of it on Monday.
Thanks for your patience…..
With the assistance of the wonderful Sue Waters and the rest of the Edublogs staff, this blog has a brand-new design and lay-out that is ready for prime-time!
Come check it out, especially if you are among the 17,000 readers who see blog posts by RSS Reader or email, and who never have to directly visit the blog.
We still need to make a few more minor adjustments, but even those should be in place no later than Monday.
I’ll write a post-or-two next week pointing out some specific features.
Let me know what you think!
During this month, I’ll be taking a break now-and-then from blogging to both take some R & R and to finish-up some more extended writing projects.
During this short break, I’ll be re-posting some of my favorite posts of 2018.
You might also be interested in A Look Back: All My Favorite Posts From The Past Eleven Years In One Place!
Sarah Sparks over at Ed Week has a great write-up about a new study finding that praising effort alone is not enough to promote a growth mindset among teenagers – we have to praise specific strategies/actions they took.
As Sarah points out, educators often talk about growth-mindset praise as focusing on effort, so this study is a good reminder we need to also include talking about “process.”
My suspicion, however, is that many educators are like me – we use the “praise effort, not intelligence” mantra as a way to describe what we should do, but that our actual practice also includes emphasizing the specific actions/strategies the students used.
Here’s a piece adapted from one of my books where I wrote about this very topic:
Teacher feedback should focus on praising effort, hard work and specific learning strategies (“I noticed that you were practicing pronouncing the words and asking your partner for advice before you read that passage to the class, and it really showed”). This type of feedback has also been called “process praise” Just encouraging students to try harder can fall into the rut of “If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.” Without the appropriate learning strategies even the hardest working student might not be successful.
As David Yeager, Gregory Walton and Geoffrey L. Cohen wrote in their article, “Addressing Achieving Gaps With Psychological Interventions”: “Effective growth mindset interventions challenge the myth that raw ability matters most by teaching the fuller formula for success: effort + strategies + help from others.”
You should read Sarah’s article. However, if you can’t get past the paywall (I would encourage you to subscribe – it’s worth it!), another important part she writes about are recommendations from Professor Mary Murphy for other ways to help students develop a growth mindset:
Providing opportunities for students to reflect on their own learning.
Highlight mistakes in the everyday practice of learning.
Use group work where peers discuss what they each struggled with and explore individual strengths of different students.
I’m adding this post to:
The Best Resources On Helping Our Students Develop A “Growth Mindset”
The Best Resources For Learning How To Best Give Feedback To Students
You might also be interested in:
The Best Posts, Articles & Videos About Learning From Mistakes & Failures
The Best Resources On Student & Teacher Reflection
