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A Look Back: We Did A Great ‘Growth Mindset’ Lesson With Our ELLs This Week – Here’s The Lesson PlanFor the next several months, each week I’ll be republishing posts from the past that I think readers might still find useful. This post first appeared in 2016.
As regular readers know, I’m a big proponent of helping our students learn about a growth mindset (see The Best Resources On Helping Our Students Develop A “Growth Mindset”). One of my most popular posts this year was about a growth mindset lesson I did with my IB Theory of Knowledge students (see I Did My Best Job Teaching A “Growth Mindset” Today – Here’s The Lesson Plan and Here’s What My Students Think Of A Growth Mindset). This week, my colleague and co-author Katie Hull (see our new book, Navigating The Common Core With English Language Learners) and I decided to modify it substantially and teach it to our English Language Learners. Katie had used adapted a growth mindset lesson from one of my three student motivation books earlier in the year with her advanced ELL class. However, I had not yet figured out a good way to teach it to my Beginner/Early Intermediate class. We decided we could spend three days doing a lesson that would refresh her students’ memory, introduce the concept to my students, and provide excellent English language-learning opportunities to everybody. Here’s what we did: MONDAY Katie reminded her students about the growth mindset concept by introducing this graphic . Students reviewed it and then each wrote a short story about when they applied a growth mindset to their lives. She explained that they would help my students the next day learn about a growth mindset, share their stories, and help them write their own. She assigned each of her students to be a teacher to one of the students in my class. TUESDAY I brought my students over to Katie’s room. They entered one-by-one and were welcomed by their “teacher” to a seat next to them. I then quickly introduced the growth mindset by saying – in English and Spanish: “Growth mindset means you look at life in a positive way – you look at problems as opportunities to learn and grow and not as obstacles. You also believe that you are not born with a fixed intelligence — that you can be what you want through effort.” I then explained that we would watch two short videos that would demonstrate an element of a growth mindset. My students job would be to write down what those elements were, and their “teachers” would help them write in English. The videos were the same I used in my IB lesson:  
We paused after each one, asked my students to share (with the help of her students), and Katie wrote down these responses:
Katie then shared the growth mindset graphic and explained the differences to the entire class, with her students helping mine to understand them. She then asked each of her students to share the story they had written about when they had applied a growth mindset in their lives. She asked my students to think about, and tell their “teachers” about a similar incident in their lives. She further explained that they would write about it the next day. To wrap up the day, I then distributed this positive self-talk sheet that can be found in our ELL and the Common Core book, which the advanced ELLs helped my students to complete and practice. WEDNESDAY My students spent twenty minutes in my classroom working on drawing and writing about the story they had told their student “teachers” the previous day. I then brought them over to Katie’s class where their teachers helped them complete writing their story. As students completed them, I would bring them down to the computer lab where they would type them in a Word document. Here’s a photo of some of them working together:
After school that day, I tweeted about an interaction I had with one of my students:
THURSDAY Today, both classes when to the library where they copied and pasted their stories into the comments section of our class blog. In addition, Katie’s students helped my students leave comments about the stories shared there. You can read all of them here (a few students still have to complete posting them). It went very, very well. In fact, it went so well that Katie and I are planning to do similar lessons where her advanced ELLs teacher mine every other week. We’re kicking ourselves about not doing this earlier in the year but – better late than never!      Around The Web In ESL/EFL/ELL
Eight years ago I began this regular feature where I share a few posts and resources from around the Web related to ESL/EFL or to language in general that have caught my attention. You might also be interested in all my Best lists on teaching ELLs. Also, check out A Collection Of My Best Resources On Teaching English Language Learners. In addition, look for our latest book on teaching ELLs, The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox 2.0. Here are this week’s choices:
ESL Materials has lots of … ESL teaching and learning materials. Project-, Inquiry-, & Task-Based Learning is from The Barefoot TEFL Teacher. Here are two resources for IELTS support: ELTSpot and IELTS Letter Writing Coach. ELL students can watch this video and then talk/write about what they saw: 
 With “Learn Everything,” Google Strikes Out Again In Trying To Make AI Useful
Google has been trying hard for years to come up with useful ways to use AI, and they have developed two of them – NotebookLM and Google Storybook. Their latest AI experiment, Learn Everything, is actually a pretty cool idea – take a picture of something you want to learn about and, in theory, it will immediately create an illustrated slideshow explaining it. For example, I took a photo of my pen, and it created this slideshow explaining how pens work. I had even asked it to explain it using language a Beginning English Language Learner could understand – it ended up doing it in language accessible to a high Intermediate/low Intermediate ELL. Really, the only thing that would distinguish this tool from any AI chatbot would be if Learn Everything could come up with illustrations that helped explain the topic. Here, it failed miserably. Though it’s images were cool-looking, they didn’t really offer the reader any help in understanding the text. I gave it one last chance to convince me of its usefulness by taking a picture of a pen and asking it to use the image to create an English lesson for Beginners (I had seen an app that did this), and it told me it couldn’t do that. Oh, well….  Globy Compares Countries’ Data & Shows Visual Results
There are a fair number of free tools out there that let you compare economic and demographic data in different countries, and you can find them at The Best Tools For Comparing Demographics Of Different Countries. Globy does the same thing, with one major difference. It shows the results visually, and give you various options – line graph, bars, table or map. This could come in very handy in the classroom.  This Week’s “Round-Up” Of Useful Posts & Articles On Ed Policy Issues
Here are some recent useful posts and articles on educational policy issues (You might also be interested in seeing all my “Best” lists related to education policy here): 
This is great from Peter Greene: The Teacher Who Helped Launch An Entertainment Empire
Data shows a correlation between declining student test scores and the rise of cell phone use is from NPR.
What Diane Ravitch has learned in her decades on both sides of the school reform fights is by Matt Barnum.
 Onions: What does it mean to say that you understand something? is by Dylan Wiliam.
Charter school advocates fear their future at the Labor Department is from Matt Barnum.
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