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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
In Learning without Fear: A practical toolkit for developing growth mindset in the early years and primary classroom, Julia Stead and Ruchi Sabharwal provide teachers of this age group with a colourful collection of strategies and resources designed to nurture young learners' resilience and learning capabilities. Having a growth mindset can really empower young learners to take risks to extend and deepen their learning. There is, however, more to it than simply adding 'yet' to 'I can't do this'. In Learning without Fear Julia and Ruchi tackle this misconception head-on, combining bite-sized theory with the practical tools and techniques that will enable teachers to map out their pupils' growth mindset journey from the early years up to their departure for the challenges of secondary school. Together they share tried-and-tested lesson ideas, questionnaires and examples of outstanding practice taken from their own very successful classrooms all colourfully packaged into a complete toolkit that illustrates both the 'why' and the 'how' of successfully embedding growth mindset in early years and primary settings. The book begins with a discussion of the benefits of instilling the traits and attitudes of a growth mindset early on in a learner's life, and presents a selection of mini stories that serve as simple springboards into exploring the mindset of young learners. The full-colour illustrations that accompany the stories are also available as free downloads for teachers' own use in the classroom. To help educators boost their pupils' engagement and empower them to visualise a route to success, Julia and Ruchi advocate employing the analogy of a learning journey from Stuck Island to Got-It City. This involves navigating Challenge Ocean, and the authors make this voyage more achievable by providing a survival kit of learning techniques designed to encourage pupils to take ownership in the face of struggle and to use metacognitive devices when tackling tricky tasks. The book's comprehensive series of 39 lesson ideas one for every week of the school year are tagged with symbols to help teachers seek out activities suitable for their desired lesson focus, pupil groupings, time allocation and age range, and there is also a chapter dedicated to the ways in which the children's progress can be assessed. Suitable for both newly qualified and experienced teachers of learners aged 3 to 11. Learning without Fear was highly commended in the professional books category of the Nursery World Awards 2020.
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PRAISE FOR LEARNING WITHOUT FEAR
In Learning without Fear, Julia and Ruchi tackle some of the myths relating to growth mindset and show how there is much more to this complex field than positive thinking and increased effort alone.
Beautifully illustrated, this terrific book covers the field of growth mindset in a way that is both accessible and thought-provoking – providing subtle insights into the difference between failing and failure, and how to support children to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable, for example. Furthermore, it shares wonderful resources, stories and case studies to help teachers make authentic growth mindset possible for every child in their classroom.
Learning without Fear will be incredibly useful for primary school teachers. An absolute gem.
Mary Myatt, education adviser and author of The Curriculum: Gallimaufry to Coherence
Forget growth mindset mantras and posters – instead read this more nuanced, comprehensive exploration of a range of strategies designed to achieve success in early years and primary settings.
Learning without Fear accessibly and practically describes the critical elements of learning without fear, and also delves into pupil self-regulation and the pitfalls of praising the child rather than the process. It is filled with anecdotes and ‘mini stories’ – case studies of children’s typical negative school experiences or thoughts, skilfully turned into success stories – that all come to life in the book’s colourful, welcoming pages, which also feature plenty of research evidence and the authors’ personal classroom experiences.
This delightful publication then culminates in a bank of powerful and easy-to-follow lesson ideas, which – together with the rest of the book’s content – will help educators develop in their learners a growth mindset that will benefit them both in school and beyond.
Shirley Clarke, international formative assessment expert
Learning without Fear is a fantastic introduction to growth mindset in the classroom which skilfully debunks some of its common myths. Accessibly written and based on sound research, the book begins with a discussion on how to assess your own mindset and invites you to consider its impact on your practice. Julia and Ruchi then move on to offer practical ways to introduce the concept of growth mindset to children across the primary school age range, explore its importance as an ethos rather than as a bolt-on lesson, and provide strategies to embed growth mindset throughout the curriculum.
This book will be a valuable addition to the library of both experienced teachers and those new to the profession.
Angela Goodman, Head of School, Waterloo Primary School and part of the #PrimaryRocks team
By distilling a wealth of research on growth mindset and metacognition, Learning without Fear provides the classroom teacher with a go-to compendium of ideas and strategies to fully embed a culture of growth in the classroom.
This book has the potential to change every primary school classroom in the land, and should be a key text for any primary teacher training course.
Colin Grimes, teacher, Rothbury First School
A must-read for anybody working with children, Learning without Fear offers a fresh approach to looking at growth mindset and provides a whole host of excellent ideas, resources and practical examples. Can teachers make a change? With this book, yes they can!
Graham André, teacher, Lanesend Primary School, speaker, #PrimaryRocks organiser and eduTwitter influencer
No teacher need be concerned or fearful about developing a growth-mindset philosophy in early years and the primary classroom. Learning without Fear has it all here for them.
Nina Jackson, author, award-winning speaker and education consultant, Teach Learn Create Ltd
Julia and Ruchi have produced an instantly accessible, practical guide which explains some of the key concepts central to growth mindset and metacognition in such a way that will help everyone who works with children. The book’s mini stories are an excellent medium to get learners to think about different scenarios, and the references to research are useful for anyone who wants to explore the literature around growth mindset in greater depth.
Learning without Fear is a really valuable resource which will spark debate and discussion among staff teams and help teachers to reflect on the language they use and the behaviours they model in school.
Ruth Swailes, school improvement adviser and education consultant
If you’re interested in optimising the conditions for learning in your classroom, this practical and well-informed guide is a great place to start.
Jonathan Lear, Deputy Head Teacher, St Catherine’s Catholic Primary School, speaker and author of The Monkey-Proof Box
For John, my dad. A template for life, and the person who taught me to be fearless. – J. S.
To Ekta and Vibha; my sisters and best friends, who both, in their own unique way, have inspired me to believe that I have a voice worth listening to and who continue to provide the acceptance and safety needed to express that voice. – R. S.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As much as I am an adult working alone during lesson time in my island of a classroom, I am never truly in isolation. My acknowledgements run as a two-pronged river. On the first, my teacher self has had plenty of people inspire me to be fearless in my practice, and in my career ambitions. Dave Houghton – my first ever head teacher – who believed that new ways of doing things could work very well, who wrote notes of encouragement regularly during my NQT year, and who left me to it to learn from my own mistakes, thank you. For inspiring colleagues like Janet Worsley, Ros Carter and Estelle Castro, thanks for teaching me things that I wouldn’t have learnt on my own. I must also mention the trainee teachers who I have mentored on their first steps of the teaching journey: you taught me how to encourage, mentor and enable. I loved sharing with you. And who would I be without the hundreds of children and families that I have shared my time with over the last 15 years? They are the experts and they are the ones from whom I have everything yet to learn.
The other prong of the river are the people who have enabled this book to be written. To all at Crown House Publishing, thank you for believing in the project, and for being patient while we wrote alongside our teaching commitments. Your wonderful team have been supportive and ever-knowledgeable. To the people who have allowed me space for this book to be researched and written – especially Johanna Partridge, my mum – thank you. To my husband, Darren, thank you for your pride and encouragement in all I do. And to the two little case studies who I endeavour to bring up with a mindset disposed towards happiness and self-belief: Alistair and James, you’re who this is all about. – J. S.
Teaching is an endless roller coaster of highs and lows, achievements and failures, fear-inducing moments of uncertainty and euphoric flashes of success, but I wouldn’t change any of it, for within teaching I have found my fire and my passion, and the classroom has given me a space in which to thrive. It has been a privilege to share my experiences with other teachers and I am humbled that I have been able to express all that I believe about teaching in something as precious as a book. As a young girl I always aspired to write and illustrate my own text, so thank you to all at Crown House Publishing for putting your trust in us and for your unwavering patience. Thank you also to my writing partner, Julia, for pushing us to write a proposal, which we powered through in one sitting. I certainly wouldn’t have been brave enough to even imagine that my ramblings would translate into print.
To all the authors of all the books that have guided and encouraged me both professionally and personally, without your words to provide friendship, comfort and guidance, I probably wouldn’t have pushed myself to strive for the future I have created. To my first ever boss, Darren Smith, for igniting a spark that I hadn’t yet felt and suggesting a career in teaching. Thank you for seeing something in me that I couldn’t. To my tribe of dedicated colleagues at Dunmow St Mary’s Primary School, thank you for pushing me out of my comfort zone, encouraging me to take risks in my classroom and helping me to hone the craft of teaching. Thank you to Becca and Marie for all our debriefs in the prep room, for the shared wisdom, courage, empathy and laughs; you both kept me sane during the tough times, without you both I wouldn’t have taken that leap of faith into school leadership. Thank you to Julie Lilly and the entire #LearningFirst community for providing a cause and an audience for my ideas, giving me the positive feedback that I needed in order to dare greatly. Without you I never would have had the audacity to put my ideas to paper. To my oldest friend, Michelle, for all the long-distance support and lengthy conversations about writing which helped me to overcome that initial blank page. To Sarah May, for forever championing me and helping me to see that my accomplishments are valid and deserved. To all the pupils and parents I have engaged with over the years, who have each had a hand in shaping who I am as a teacher – in particular to the last class I taught full-time. I watched you develop into impassioned, inquisitive and collaborative learners, and saw you reaching beyond any limitations set by those who couldn’t truly see what you were made of. If this book aspires to do anything, it’s to help ensure that more pupils are nurtured to harness their potential so they can achieve well beyond their expectations. To all the other supporting characters I have met and the relationships we have developed along the way (you know who you are), thank you for each teaching me something about myself which has undoubtedly contributed to my compassion as a teacher.
Finally, thank you to my family, particularly my parents. To Mom for your unconditional faith and guidance and to Papa for teaching me the value of hard work. To my husband Adam for being a continuous source of encouragement and support. Your IT skills, eye for proofreading, countless cups of tea and endless patience have made all of this possible. Thank you for helping me to see that I could get there in the end. Finally, to my two little miracles. I hope you grow up to be as fearless and resilient as I know you can be. I can’t wait to meet you. – R. S.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
This is a book that has grown out of our experiences in the classroom, our further reading and our professional dialogue, so it seems logical to start by introducing ourselves. We’re Julia Stead and Ruchi Sabharwal, and between us we have over 20 years’ experience in the primary classroom, right through from Reception to Year 6. We share a passion for teaching and learning and, when we began discussing our pedagogy and practice – and realised the effect we were having on our learners – concluded that it was worth sharing our ideas. So we started writing this book. Here we each draw on examples from our own classrooms and experience, which are woven alongside insights from our wider reading and brought to life with Ruchi’s colourful illustrations, which are available to download to use in the classroom.
One day, we were sat discussing the atmosphere in our classrooms. Ruchi reflected, ‘So often in my classroom learning feels stunted because the children sat in front of me are scared. Scared to ask, to try, to question and to challenge. Scared of getting it wrong, of being slow, of looking stupid, of letting their teacher down and of being exposed as anything other than clever, right or “good”.’
We agreed that every single pupil we’ve ever taught has experienced moments in which they were inhibited by fear, and some never quite got over it. But surely this wasn’t good enough! We knew that these children hadn’t always felt like this. As babies and toddlers, they were inquisitive explorers of the world around them, bold in their risk-taking and courageous when it came to pushing through failures and trying again. So what happened? At what point did the intrinsic curiosity of very young children become stifled? Was it in the classroom? Through exposure to competition? When did our pupils become self-conscious about their ability?
It was rather serendipitous that Ruchi stumbled across growth mindset in the work of Carol Dweck when she was sent on a course about teaching success.1 She is so grateful to the perceptive head teacher who sent her on it, because that day changed her life, and she thinks the head knew that it would. It might sound dramatic but believe her when she says that sitting with a group of like-minded colleagues who challenged and debated their own approaches to teaching and learning, and understood the impact this could have, gave her career a huge injection of agency.
Anyway, after discovering growth mindset, Ruchi started to think about her own fixed mindset and how this had inhibited her growth. Throughout her experiences in school, for whatever reason, she had convinced herself that she was not a mathematician and that she couldn’t do certain things. So, of course, she never even tried. She would rather avoid something altogether instead of risking messing it up and, worse still, risking others finding out that she wasn’t as good as they thought. What she realised through reading Dweck’s work was that she was limiting her options because of her fear. This was a real light-bulb moment and she quickly realised how powerful it could’ve been if her own growth mindset had been nurtured at an early age. If she wanted to be a mathematician, there was no reason for her not to try and work at it. As it turns out, she absolutely loves teaching maths now and it’s because she has worked hard, tried new approaches, developed new ways of teaching and learnt with her pupils. Before this, if you caught her on a maths course or in a meeting, she would’ve sat at the back – cocooned in her own fear of failing and avoiding questions at all costs. In fact, she probably wouldn’t have even attempted to interact for fear of her colleagues seeing her flop and then immediately asking her to kindly leave the profession and close the door on her way out. If teachers feel that way, imagine how the pupils feel when they are quizzed on their seven times table and are expected to give an answer within three seconds! She revealed this fear to Julia, who, of course, had experienced the same feeling.
For adults, this feeling is often referred to as ‘imposter syndrome’, the psychological belief that despite proven competence and success, you are inadequate and that any achievements you have had have been down to sheer luck.2 This leads to the fear that one day your luck will run out and you will be uncovered as a fraud. In schools, the threat of exposure is hard to avoid because teachers have nowhere to hide; our successes and failures are transparent to all and we are highly accountable. It is so important for teachers to embrace the mindset principles we are trying to encourage our pupils to adopt.
So, one course and countless books later, not only did the weight of our professional influence and moral responsibility truly hit us, but the fundamental belief that the link between mindset and success fed into all aspects of learning landed full-force too. We knew we had to develop ways of weaving this into every strand of classroom life, and we wanted to make sure that there was impact in our endeavour. This meant rethinking how we taught, understanding when to sit back and thinking carefully about our questions. Underpinning this was the sky-high expectations we held of all our pupils. So much so that they started to hold them of themselves. What we learnt during the two years that we dedicated to refining this approach with two classes of Year 3 pupils was that although children can be extremely resilient, this is too easily challenged; it takes very little to switch a child off from learning. We understood how quickly a learner can label themselves, feeling incapable or that they are not worthy or good enough. This can happen in a split second, in the middle of an English lesson on a Wednesday morning, when everything had been going fine and you least expected it. But the moment a child feels stupid is the moment they can become disaffected. It can be a fight to bring them back if you don’t notice and act quickly.
On the other hand, we also learnt – and wanted to share with others, hence the motivation for writing this book – that through flipping your thinking, by bringing everything you do back to learning, by modelling success and failure, and by letting go and giving your pupils opportunities to explore, you can achieve some truly amazing things together. Through careful planning, differentiation and assessment you have the absolute power to transform learning behaviours. It is not always easy and we face challenges that can get in the way sometimes, but it is very possible and the strategies for doing so are in this book.
The words, ‘Have a growth mindset!’ were rarely used in our classrooms. Instead, what we developed was a little learning community, in which children genuinely felt pride when they tried, regardless of the outcome. This was the first stepping stone to making our pupils braver. When they felt brave, they wanted to be challenged, they wanted to be independent and they wanted to know how to get better. The biggest achievement with our classes was in nurturing positive relationships, and in how well all the children worked with each other. There was no fear of competition: over time, through our classroom communities, we learnt each other’s strengths and used collaboration as a conduit to improvement. The more we worked together and allowed space for everyone’s ideas, the more confidence emanated from even those pupils who had never experienced this feeling before. Over time, through the methods outlined in this book, pupils who previously felt too anxious to share their answers felt safe enough to participate, and everyone wanted to listen. We are so proud of these pupils and, although we’ve been teaching for many years between us, we feel that we learnt an awful lot from them too.
Although growth mindset has been talked about in education for long enough now that most teachers and schools see the benefit in adopting the principles, what we really want you to take away from this book is that relationships really do lie at the heart of everything we do in the classroom. Forget posters about how great mistakes are, and superficial encouragement about perseverance. Changing a mindset goes so much deeper than taking some ideas from Twitter or Pinterest. Here you will find a practical model that you can use to start embedding some of the qualities associated with a growth mindset. But hopefully this is just the starting point for you and, together with your class, you will discover your own nuggets of greatness and success that will form the basis of your very own learning community. We urge you to continue the legacy and share any successes, no matter how small, with your colleagues because you might just light the spark of an ember that was already glowing and – without even realising it – inspire someone else to take a risk.
1 Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (London: Random House, 2006).
2 Angela Watson, 7 Ways Teachers Can Push Past Imposter Syndrome, The Cornerstone for Teachers [blog] (12 November 2017). Available at: https://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/truth-for-teachers-podcast/imposter-syndrome/.
