There is a lot of talk about the negative impact the COVID-19 crisis might have on our children’s’ education. So I have been focussing on how we can minimise the damage and turn the situation into an opportunity to engage students in real-world problem-solving through resources like our free Learning at Home course and the other resources listed below.
For all of us, the impact that COVID-19 has on our wellbeing will largely be determined by our attitudes towards the imposed restrictions and how we view the situation. So I think this is an ideal time to encourage children to reflect on the mindsets they bring to their learning and to support them in developing more helpful and positive mindsets. This could well be a time where our children develop skills and dispositions that they may not have otherwise had the opportunity to acquire.
In this post, I want to explore how we can help develop our students’ mindsets during COVID-19 and introduce the concept of an Innovation Mindset. This post was inspired by this helpful graphic spotted on social media (if anyone knows the original creator please let us know so we can credit them properly).
I believe any article about mindsets should acknowledge the work of Carol Dweck whose thirty years of research identified two specific ways of thinking that characterise the way we view ourselves and define our own personalities. Dweck defines these ways of thinking as having a fixed or growth mindset. A recent article outlines how Carol Dweck believes we can nurture students’ Growth Mindsets through protest and pandemic.
At Makers Empire, we talk a lot about children being able to identify, define and solve real-world problems by developing an Innovation Mindset. To summarise these three mindsets:
Fixed Mindset is the belief that our intelligence, personality and creative abilities are static. A person with a fixed mindset believes that they cannot change their characteristics or get smarter no matter how hard they try.
Growth Mindset is the belief that intelligence can be developed, and characteristics are malleable. A person with a growth mindset believes that can improve their characteristics and become smarter if they put in the effort and challenge themselves. I’ve written previously about growth mindset in 10 Growth Mindset Questions To Ask Students and Levelling up a Growth Mindset.
Innovation Mindset is the belief that we can use our skills, intelligence, and characteristics to improve whatever situations we find ourselves in. A person with an innovation mindset has creative confidence in their abilities to solve problems and find better ways to do things.
Now let’s look at how our students might apply these mindsets to the real-life scenarios people are currently experiencing. You can download the above graphic as a printable PDF at the bottom
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