The Growth Mindset

Kindergarten doesn’t just happen. It requires many emails. I honestly don’t know how teachers prepared for kindergarten before the inbox. Did they just shout at each other from across long distances? (Now that I think about it, maybe we still to that? “Anyone have a stapler?” “What time does the next meeting start?” “Why didn’t I go to law school?!”)

But all joking aside, there’s more to preparing for a new year of teaching kindergarten than sending and receiving and ignoring emails. There are spreadsheets. And besides for spreadsheets, there’s even more work: classroom setup, curriculum planning, meetings, and workshops.

Which is exactly how I spent last week at my school’s in-service. And throughout the many meetings, conversations, and workshops, a term that came up was “the growth mindset.”¹ The first time a co-worker mentioned it, I immediately scribble this image down on a coffee stained napkin.

Redrawn here, because I lost the napkin.

“Growth Mindset” can sound like another catchy slogan from the never-ending wave of self-help, social-science, hack-your-life-for-a-better-tomorrow genre, but there’s also nothing new under the sun, and the growth mindset had been important to my sanity as a kindergarten teacher before I ever heard the term.

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Because phoning it in² is fun, but it’s unsustainable. If I’m not attempting to improve as a teacher, if I’m only doing what I have to do, if my goal is to simply get through the day, then I don’t think I have it in me to get through the year.

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Part of the joy of teaching kindergarten for me is cracking the code, solving the puzzle, somehow getting these kids to learn how to do something new that they’ve never done before. So, how do I teach better than I taught the year before? How do I expand my repertoire of teaching tricks, pedagogical knowledge, social and emotional awareness, as well as everything else that goes into being a teacher? Well, step one is doing my darnedest to be open to learning new things and refining old things.

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And it’s not just that! These students that I’m supposed to teach are real human beings, albeit shorter and more prone to ear infections. What makes them laugh? What do they love to do? Because part of the challenge, and part of the joy, of being a kindergarten teacher is saying goodbye at the end of the year to a cohort of zany kids who you truly got to know and watch grow, and welcoming a whole new batch of hooligans at the beginning of the next year who are basically strangers. You have to do what you did all over again, hopefully better, and with an all new cast of characters.

I couldn’t possibly go through the motions in a job like that.

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Not that I’m my “stellar” self each and every day. I phone things in all the time! I was phoning it in when phones were still attached to the walls with a coiled chords. But still, as much as you can, you gotta show up each day and be present. Kids can tell. So that’s what I try to do. Even when I’m tired, or sad, or excitedly looking forward to winter, spring, or summer break, when I’m in the classroom, I do my best to be in the classroom.

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And you may be thinking, I’m not a teacher, but this resonates with me. Well, it might! I don’t have the only challenging but rewarding job out there. But I do have possibly the only job where one person can paint a blue dinosaur, another person can lose a tooth, and someone else can swing across the monkey bars for the first time, all in the same day.

If it sounds exhausting, it is! I might have to phone it in a bit.

Thanks for reading, and good luck being the best you that you can be!

-Avi

1. Originally coined by Dr. Carol Dweck.

2. To phone it in is to do something with low enthusiasm or effort.