Understanding fixed and growth mindsets

1. Hand out or provide access to the ReachOut.com article 'How to challenge a fixed mindset'.

2. Ask students:

   • What is a mindset?

   • What determines our mindsets?

   • How can we develop a growth mindset?

   • Why is it important to think about how we think?

Ask students if they can identify the famous person and guess how they ‘failed’. You could create a slideshow of faces, or divide students into groups to research each person.

Albert Einstein

• The failure: His teachers called him ‘slow’. He didn’t start to speak until he was four or five years old.

• The success: Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Colonel Sanders

• The failure: Sanders’s recipe for fried chicken was rejected 1008 times before a restaurant took a chance and began making chicken the Colonel’s way.

• The success: KFC is now a worldwide brand, making billions of dollars a year.

Oprah Winfrey

• The failure: Winfrey was fired from her first TV job and told she was ‘unsuitable’ for television.

• The success: Winfrey became a billionaire through her popular talk show and television network.

J.K. Rowling

• The failure: Rowling’s Harry Potter books were rejected by 12 publishers before she was finally offered a publishing contract.

• The success: Rowling’s creation is now the subject of books, movies, stage productions and theme parks.

Katy Perry

• The failure: Perry left school at 15. She was signed with Columbia Records, where she recorded new music over two years, but was dropped before the record was completed.

• The success: Perry has won numerous awards and is worth an estimated US$125 million.

Michael Jordan

• The failure: Jordan is credited with saying: ‘I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’

• The success: Jordan entered the National Basketball Association as a professional basketball player for the Chicago Bulls, where he would go on to win six championship titles.

1. Students work in pairs to solve puzzles.

2. After each activity, students are to reflect on and discuss with their partner the following questions, which are written on the board:

   • What did you learn by doing the activity?

   • What things did you say in your mind or out aloud when completing the activity?

   • What mistakes did you make that taught you something?

   • Can you apply this learning somewhere else when completing challenging tasks?

   • What did you try hard at during the activity?

Puzzles:

• Jigsaw puzzle (teacher supplied)

• Sudoku

• Rubik’s Cube (teacher supplied)

• A puzzle from Sequence puzzles

Class discussion:

1. At the end of the activities, students use Post-it notes to answer the following questions:

   • How did you feel while completing one of the activities?

   • What mistakes did you make?

   • How did you overcome these mistakes?

2. Place the Post-it-notes on the board/wall for other students to see and invite them to read them.

3. As a class, encourage students to discuss their mistakes and how they tried to overcome them.

There are six eggs in the basket. Six people each take one of the eggs. How can it be that one egg is left in the basket?

Answer:

The last person took the basket with the last egg still inside.