Last year I wrote a post Blogging and Growth Mindset, More Connected Than You Think. which detailed how you can leverage the reflection process built within blogging to grow the growth mindset in yourself and your learners. I would like to continue that conversation here with what I intend to be a series of posts on developing conscious thought patterns that lead us toward the Growth Mindset.
First, let's continue on the thought pattern that reflection can lead us toward a growth mindset. Beware, I'm about to go down a rabbit-hole, but I swear it'll come full circle!
The stories that you tell yourself about yourself, your habits, your abilities are all an echo chamber and a self-fulfilling prophecy. These stories are running in the background of your mind each time you make an action or choice. When I make a silly error tell yourself the story that "I'm not good with technology.", whether you voice it aloud or you tell yourself the story silently in your head without voicing it, the stories are there whether you know they are or not. When you tell yourself these stories you are building your identity also telling yourself and others how you should be viewed and interact with the world.
Carl Jung says it this way, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Some of these are stories of our own creation and others have been given to us by those that we surround ourselves with, as well as the more global voices such as ads on TV, etc.
This can be a negative thing like the example that I shared above OR you can choose to leverage this in a powerful way by changing the stories you've been telling yourself and how you've been interacting with the world. If we oppose the example that I gave previously where I tell myself "I'm not good with technology." for a mistake that I made with saying something positive instead, "It's good you are conscientious about your work." since I was careful enough to see that I made the error; it's a completely different situation. When we tell ourselves and others that we value the positive attributes, we build and model a growth mindset, we encourage a positive self-view of how we occur in the world. This also enrolls and informs others in the vision that you want them to have of you and the standard that you would like them to have of you.
In future posts, I plan to demonstrate other technologies that can learners develop the stories they tell themselves through the reflection process. These are immensely important and life-altering habits for our learners, so the stakes are high and the time investment is worth it all. Jay Shetty encourages education to stop focusing on caliber and refocus our energy on character because it holds the skills that will pay themselves forward for a lifetime. I say that what I am discussing in this post and the future posts in this series will show how we can refocus on character.
First, let's continue on the thought pattern that reflection can lead us toward a growth mindset. Beware, I'm about to go down a rabbit-hole, but I swear it'll come full circle!
The stories that you tell yourself about yourself, your habits, your abilities are all an echo chamber and a self-fulfilling prophecy. These stories are running in the background of your mind each time you make an action or choice. When I make a silly error tell yourself the story that "I'm not good with technology.", whether you voice it aloud or you tell yourself the story silently in your head without voicing it, the stories are there whether you know they are or not. When you tell yourself these stories you are building your identity also telling yourself and others how you should be viewed and interact with the world.Carl Jung says it this way, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Some of these are stories of our own creation and others have been given to us by those that we surround ourselves with, as well as the more global voices such as ads on TV, etc.
This can be a negative thing like the example that I shared above OR you can choose to leverage this in a powerful way by changing the stories you've been telling yourself and how you've been interacting with the world. If we oppose the example that I gave previously where I tell myself "I'm not good with technology." for a mistake that I made with saying something positive instead, "It's good you are conscientious about your work." since I was careful enough to see that I made the error; it's a completely different situation. When we tell ourselves and others that we value the positive attributes, we build and model a growth mindset, we encourage a positive self-view of how we occur in the world. This also enrolls and informs others in the vision that you want them to have of you and the standard that you would like them to have of you. Cooley tells us that,
When we enroll others in our way of thinking by telling our new stories aloud we are reconfiguring the story that we tell ourselves of the way that other's view of us, therefore the way we view ourselves and the standard that we begin to perform to. As coaches, teachers, and facilitators of learning we aren't only restructuring our stories for ourselves, however, we are also modeling this kind of behavior and thinking for our learners. This is how we show our learners to have a growth mindset, gain grit when situations are tough, and be resilient.
This kind of thinking and way of rewriting and recreating our story of ourselves, others, and the world around us permeates every aspect of our life; edtech included. Blogs are a fantastic way to allow learners to reflect and tell their story to themselves and others through writing, audio, or video. Through the blog, they are enrolling themselves and others in their identity, their story, and investing in their future-self and own their current learning. In the post linked here, I outline how blogging and growth mindset go hand-in-hand. It is clear to me that we can then extend the thinking that blogging and reflecting on our learning through a blog will help us to develop the stories of how we want others to treat us, develop the stories of how we want to treat and view ourselves, and develop us as people.
As always I hope that this was helpful. Comment below with your thoughts surrounding this topic!
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