Peters - Final Masters Thesis

TRANSFORMING MINDSETS
Transforming Mindsets:
Using Growth Mindset Practices to Become a Transformative Educator
Andy Peters
University of Michigan
A. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
My journey to teaching began with a question: What in the world are you going to do
with an English degree? For most of my undergraduate career at the University of Michigan, I
didnt know the answer to that question. When people assumed that I was going to become a
teacher, I rarely hid my frustration (Thats not the only thing you can do as an English major,
you know). Teaching had been in the back of my mind since the end of high schoola
possibility that was sparked, among other things, by a string of wonderful and inspiring English
teachers. But something about the assumption that I was going to teach pushed me to seek out
other possibilities; I suppose I wanted to be sure that I was forging my own career path rather
than adhering to others expectations of me.
In any case, I had been kicking around ideas like journalism and publishing for years, but
nothing had quite stuck. I devoted my last year of college to writing an Honors thesis as a way of
trying out what a graduate program in English or Linguistics (my minor) might be like; it was
a great experience, and I produced a thesis that I was incredibly proud ofan analysis of the
linguistic construction of masculinity in Breaking Badbut I was far from convinced that an
advanced degree of that sort was right for me.
Thankfully, by the time my thesis was finished, I had already made up my mind: I was
going to enroll in the MAC program and become a high school English teacher. I was about to
join the field that I had been denying any and all interest in for the past several years. How did
that happen? During the summer before my senior year, I took a long, hard look at my options. I
heard about the MAC program from an advisor at the Career Center, and despite the attitude that
had been instilled in me from countless inquiries regarding my plans for the future, I couldnt
deny the appeal of attaining a Masters degree and a teaching certificate in just twelve months.
Of course, this wasnt a decision I could make lightly. I began to ponder whether I could
see myself as a teacher, and I made a connection that I had somehow never made before: the
connection between teaching and my work as a peer writing consultant at UofMs Sweetland
Center for Writing. I held that job during much of my time as an undergrad, and I absolutely
loved it. I helped other students with their papers by having conversations with them (in person
or online) about a wide range of writing-related concerns, and I quickly became deeply invested
in the writing center field by presenting at NCPTW (National Conference on Peer Tutoring in
Writing) two years in a row. I found it enjoyable and satisfying to talk with my peers about their
written work, and I learned new things every day, both about writing and about the many
different topics students write about at the university.
In the end, my work as a tutor was vital in fueling my desire to go into teaching. For one
thing, it showed me that I enjoy helping others to improve their writing skills. In the many hours
I spent working as a tutor, I consistently enjoyed the rush of satisfaction I experienced whenever
I knew that I had helped a writer achieve successwhen they told me, I feel so much better
about this assignment now, or when they came back to work with me again because they found
our work together helpful and productive. Moreover, and just as importantly, it taught me the
value of communication and conversation skills in making learning happen. Peer writing
consultations are non-hierarchical conversations that rely on the assumption that constructivist,
inquiry-based conversation is the best way of guiding writers toward improving their papers and
their writing processeswhich, indeed, is what allows the tutor to learn from the process
simultaneously. While teaching is inherently different from peer tutoring in terms of context,
then, I began to see how the same principles might apply in the field of education.
My writing center experience also brought me closer to teaching in other, less direct
ways. It led me to take on a job as a course assistant for a writing course in Michigans Summer
Bridge Program, which gave me the opportunity to lead writing workshops and to assist with
instructing and assessing students who had been high schoolers just a few months before my
work with them began. On top of that, my job as a peer tutor got me connected with the writing
center at Skyline High School, since Sweetland had recently begun developing a collaborative
relationship with Skylines. This gave me a chance to work with high school tutors as both a peer
and as a mentor, and, as it turned out, it brought me to my placement as a student teacher: the
director of the Skyline Writing Center became my mentor teacher in the MAC program, so I
have had the privilege of continuing to work with Skylines tutors as a teacheran experience
that has ultimately fueled my strong desire to become a secondary writing center director as a
part of my teaching practice.
As I continued to consider teaching during my senior year of college, these kinds of
connections between teaching and tutoring provided me with an immensely satisfying sense of
vocational clarity. Over time, education began to make as much or more sense for me than any
other career path I might choose: the question I asked myself every time someone assumed I was
headed for education shifted from Why teaching? to Why not teaching? As I continued to
reflect on my undergraduate experiences, I realized that I now had many good answers to the
first question and very few good answers to the second, and I knew that the path I was choosing
by enrolling in the MAC program was the right one for me.
Moreover, as I will demonstrate in my Philosophy of Teaching and Learning and
throughout this thesis as a whole, my experiences and practices as a tutor have become a central
part of who I am as an educator. I carry my identity as a tutor with me in my teachingthrough
the meaningful connections I consistently strive to make with my students, through my focus on
writing instruction and individualized formative assessment and feedback, and through the
growth mindset practices I have enacted with Skylines peer tutors and with the students in my
own classroomand I am certain that my Sweetland roots will continue to inform my practice
long after my student teaching is complete.
B. DESCRIPTION OF YOUR PLACEMENT AND ITS CONTEXT
My yearlong placement has taken place at Skyline High School, a public school in the
northwest corner of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Skyline is a relatively new school; it joined Pioneer
and Huron as the third Ann Arbor high school when it opened in 2008. The two primary
academic floors (out of four floors total) consist of two wings each, and each wing is home to
one of the schools four Small Learning Communities (SLCs): Integrity, Diversity, Academic
Innovation, and Equality. The school runs on trimesters, and class periods are 72 minutes long.
Skyline is notable for its four magnet programs, which students generally enroll in during
their sophomore year. Once enrolled, students participate in their magnet until they graduate, and
they complete a capstone project in their final year. The magnet programs are Health and
Medicine (H&M), Design Technology/Environmental Planning (DTEP), Business, Marketing,
and Info Technology (BMIT), and Communication, Media, and Public Policy (CMPP).
The school enrolls approximately 1,500 students. The demographic breakdown in terms
of race and ethnicity is as follows: 60% white, 17% black, 11% Asian, 8% two or more races,
4% Hispanic, 0.5% American Indian/Alaskan Native (40% minority enrollment). Approximately
20% of the student population fall into the category of economically disadvantaged. Skyline has
previously been identified by the state of Michigan as a focus school because of the large
achievement gap between its top 30% and bottom 30% of studentsthough this designation has
recently been removedand there is an unacceptable level of absenteeism in addition to
disproportionate disciplinary data in terms of out-of-school suspension.
These issues are being addressed by a number of ongoing initiatives, including the
Writing Center (more on that below), a drop-in tutoring center for assistance with homework and
projects, a restorative justice program called Sky Squad, and the Teaching for Mastery policy.
This policy requires teachers to weigh Mastery assignments or summative assessments to
comprise 80% of students grades, with Process assignments making up the other 20%;
students who receive lower than 80% on Mastery assignments are allowed to revise or retake the
assessment (within certain guidelines and limitations) in order to achieve a maximum of 80%.
My mentor teacher, Jeff Austin, has been teaching at Skyline for five years. When he
arrived at the school, he founded the Skyline Writing Center, a student-led organization that
serves the student body by offering peer tutoring sessions for writing assignments during every
class period of the day (teachers are also able to invite tutors into their classrooms to provide
one-on-one assistance during instructional time, a service that I have frequently taken advantage
of over the course of my student teaching experience). Jeff serves as the director of the Writing
Center, which he operates in conjunction with three student co-presidents; this involves, among
many other things, promoting the Writing Center through social media, training new tutors, and
running staff meetings, which take place every Wednesday during the schoolwide advisory
period called Skytime. Jeff also started the schools literary magazine, Teen Spirit, the fourth
issue of whichtitled, In Exilewas published this school year.
Jeff is certified to teach both English and Social Studies courses, but he works solely as
an English teacher at Skyline. When he was hired, he was asked to design and teach a
Humanities course focused on literature, a two-trimester course that students take concurrently
with a Humanities Social Studies course that is taught by a different teacher. The course,
Humanities Literature AC (accelerated course), is a highly challenging English elective that asks
students to consider cultural and society through a number of critical lenses that they gradually
develop and hone through the reading of a variety of works of fiction (from authors like Thomas
Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, and Jean-Paul Sartre) as well as many non-fiction texts
(from cultural theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Mikhail
Bakhtin); units include Ideology, Subjectivity, Postmodernism, Music, Heroism, and
Existentialism.
Humanities Literature AC is the sole course that I observed and taught for the first two
trimesters of the year (3 sections), while in the third trimester I taught English 12B (2 sections)
and Creative Writing (1 section). The students who take Humanities Literature AC (all 12th
graders) are generally among the highest achieving students in the school, and this year was no
exception: the vast majority had above average GPAs and SRI (scholastic reading inventory)
scores that substantially exceeded grade-level expectations (and the baseline SRI score of 1400
my mentor teacher has identified as the recommended score for students who want to take the
class exceeds those expectations, as well). Three of the students who took Humanities Literature
AC also took Creative Writing; this very small class, comprised of just twelve students (a mix of
10th, 11th, and 12th graders) and slightly more varied in terms of student achievement, guided
students through three units in which they wrote personal narratives, creative non-fiction, and
experimental poetryinformed, along the way, by model texts we read and discussed in class.
The demographics of English 12B, meanwhile, were substantially different from those of
Humanities and Creative Writing: this course, which focuses on active reading strategies and
analytical writing skills, is typically taken for the purpose of English credit recovery or as the
final English credit students need before graduation, and many of its students have substantial
motivation issues, low skill and achievement levels, and/or disabilities of various types.
Teaching this course afforded me many more opportunities to practice implementing supports
and scaffolds for differentiation, and to develop and hone my skills with regard to providing
students individualized, formative feedback and support (both in person and in written responses
to their work). Furthermore, it allowed me to try out numerous strategies for motivating students
and holding them accountable for engaging in class and participating in the learning process;
these motivational concerns were particularly salient in the final weeks of the year, as students
grew increasingly restless in anticipation of graduation. As you will see, English 12B ultimately
became my primary focus for the implementation of transformative, growth mindset-oriented
practices over the course of my student teaching experience.
C. PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
I believe that teaching is about making connections. Connections, here, go beyond
asking, How are you doing? or saying Hello, though both of those are good starting points. I
am talking about the kinds of connections that teachers must actively and consistently go out of
their way to seek out. The kinds of connections that students are going to remember long after
they leave my classroom at the end of the school year. The kinds of connections that might make
a students day, or even make their life better, in ways both big and small. Its easy to be the
teacher who sits behind a desk before class begins and after it ends, who fulfills their contractual
obligations and goes home at 2:45. Its hard to be the teacher who tries to play a supporting
(butmake no mistakeimportant) role in the lives of each and every student they teach. But
doing things the right way often means refusing to take the path of least resistance.
I spent a lot of my time as an undergrad at UofM working as a peer writing tutor at the
Sweetland Center for Writing. Being a peer tutor is all about helping other college students to
become better writers; students bring in whatever it is theyre working onfrom papers to grad
school applicationsand work with a tutor for anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes in order to hone
their writing skills and learn new strategies that they can apply in revising their work and in
taking on whatever writing task comes their way next.
The thing about writing center work, though, is that, for the tutor, its not about running a
tutorial. Its about running a conversation. The ideal writing center sessiona true conversation,
in which tutor and writer engage in a dialogue about ideas, feelings, concerns, and writing
practicesrelies heavily on building rapport, listening carefully, and demonstrating genuine
empathy and compassion. The best writing center sessions arent necessarily the ones in which
the writer makes the most improvement on their paper; theyre the ones in which the tutor and
the writer make a real connectionas students, as peers, as writers, and as peopleso that they
can really talk about the difficult task of writing.
As with teaching, though, making these connections takes work. If youve had a long
day, or youve just taken an exam that didnt go so well, or you have a lot of homework to do (or
all three), it can be difficult to show the caring compassion you need to show for a session to go
wellI know this from experience. In the end, I was always interested first and foremost in
doing the job well, and that required me to do it right: by resisting the temptation to simply go
through the motions, by allowing myself to focus my energy, for 30 to 60 minutes at a time, on
thoughts, feelings, and problems that were not my own.
Working as a writing tutor played a major part in my decision to go into education, and I
have come to realize that the parallels between the roles of writing tutor and English teacher go
far beyond writing instruction and pedagogythey also encompass the affective work of
connection-making and rapport-building that is now a core component of my practice. Earlier
this year, for instance, a student in my mentor teachers Humanities Literature AC class came up
to me a few days before February break and asked me about the feedback I had given her on a
recent paper about heroism. She had put a great deal of time and effort into it, she told me, but
she had missed the mark; her comparative analysis of Milkman Dead from Song of Solomon and
Odysseus from The Odyssey was largely plot summary, without much of an argument at all. I
offered to meet with her at lunch to talk about it, and we talked at length about the ways in which
she could re-organize her ideas and focus them around a central claim.
She asked if she could have a week or two to revise, confiding in me that she struggles
with ADHD and dyslexia and that she didnt think shed be able to rewrite her paper
immediately because she was already having a difficult time focusing on her other homework.
Of course, I said. Take some time to work on it over break, and e-mail me if you have any
more questions. As soon as school resumed, she submitted a vastly different paper: while there
was still room to improve, she had a clear claim that she supported with focus and nuance
throughout her 750-word response. Its clear that you worked hard on your revision, and it
really paid off, I told her, both in my written response and in person when I had a chance to talk
to her at the end of class. Now, lets talk about how you can improve even more. The fact that
she was willing and eager to take that next step says a lot about the potential power of these
kinds of connections.
In addition to this affective work of connection-making and relationship-building, my
writing center background has also influenced the ways in which I position myself as both a
teacher and a learner in my classroom. As a tutor, I learned from every session I ever facilitated:
reading and discussing my peers work consistently taught me new things about the wide variety
of topics that students at the university write about, and I was always developing my toolbox of
tutoring strategies and thinking about how I could serve my peers needs more effectivelyall
while continually becoming a stronger, more thoughtful and metacognitive writer because of my
engagement in helping others to do the same. In the same way, I learn every single day from my
experiences in the classroom: whether its from the insights my students share about the reading
and writing we practice and discuss, or from my deliberate reflections concerning how I can
improve my teaching practices to meet my students needs, teaching gives me countless
opportunities to model for my students what it means to be a lifelong learner.
Being a transformative educator will require me to strive each and every day to do the
things that made me an effective tutor: asking questions and really listening to the answers;
stepping outside of my own set of concerns and into someone elses; always being open to
learning as well as teaching; doing my part to foster a growth mindset in my students, as I strived
to do with the student who rewrote her heroism paper; and, ultimately, seeking meaningful
connections with each and every individual on each of my class rosters. Theres more at stake
than ever, though, because the people Im making these connections with are no longer my peers.
Theyre my students, and pretty soon, theyre going to be participants in the real world,
regardless of what their immediate post-graduation plans might be. As a teacher, then, its my
job to do more than just show up, teach the content, and leave when the last bell rings. Its my
job to do the job right, by treating my students as more than just studentsby forging
connections with them, from person to person.
D. PLANNING FOR TRANSFORMATION THROUGH PRACTICE
The way I see it, transformation occurs when a student experiences meaningful, positive
change in the way they approach life and learning. While there may be eureka moments along
the waysudden moments of insight in which students come to important realizations about
their lives or their minds or their potentialthis sort of change is generally very gradual, taking
place not over the course of a week or a month but over the course of a year or even an entire
middle or high school career. With that being said, this sort of transformation can occur at any
time, as long as the right conditions are present, and a single teacher can bring about
transformation in the short amount of time they have with each of their students.
Naturally, though, being a transformative educator is a challenging endeavor, most
notably because it takes persistence, consistency, and dedication on the part of the teacher.
Generally speaking, a teacher cant simply wake up and decide that they are going to try to bring
about meaningful change in their students lives that daywhile developing this attitude may be
an effective initial step, it needs to be maintained and cultivated until it is a part of everything the
teacher does in their interactions with their students over a long period of time.
With that being said, the only necessary condition for transformation is for a relationship
to exist between a student and an educator. Meaningful conversations and positive interactions
can bring about profound change, especially over a long period of time. But these connections
arent created in a vacuum. The context in which student-teacher relationships exist is extremely
important, and this includes every element of the school and classroom environment
particularly the procedures, routines, and instructional methods and practices the teacher uses in
their classroom. On top of that, access to resourcesbooks, supplies, and technology, not to
mention the financial and staffing resources required on the school- or district-level to keep class
sizes relatively smallcan go a long way in facilitating faster and more widespread
transformation across a body of students.
The upshot here is that transformative educators need to do whatever their context allows
them to do to make potentially transformative connections with students, with the goal being to
make transformation both possible and likely for every student they teach. This goes back to my
Philosophy of Teaching and Learning (Part C) in many ways: while it is easy (relatively
speaking) to show up at school, teach bell-to-bell for four to six class periods, and leave as soon
as the dismissal bell sounds, it takes a great deal of deliberate thinking, planning, and interacting
to do things the right way by striving each and every day to change students lives, in ways both
big and small. Again, this cannot be done effectively using a haphazard approach: while
transformation may come about as a matter of course for some students who strive to develop
great relationships with their teachers, transformative educators must go out of their way to forge
connections on which to build potentially transformative learning experiences for all students.
After thinking extensively about what transformative education means to me as Ive
worked in my placement this year, it has become clear to me what my specific entry point for
becoming a transformative educator should be. My approach has been heavily influenced by my
mentor teacher, Jeff Austinand, more specifically, by the initiative he has started within the
Skyline Writing Center this year in order to foster a growth mindset in students throughout the
school community.
The difference between growth mindset and its counterpart, fixed mindset, is most easily
and quickly understood by the belief statements Dweck (2006) uses to frame their applications to
intelligence and personality in her most famous work on mindset. Of fixed mindset, she writes:
Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you cant change very much
You can learn new things, but you cant really change how intelligent you are You are
a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change that
You can do things, differently, but the important parts of who you are cant really be
changed. (pp. 12-13)
And of growth mindset:
No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit You
can always substantially change how intelligent you are No matter what kind of
person you are, you can always change substantially You can always change basic
things about the kind of person you are (pp. 12-13)
In essence, a fixed mindset reflects the belief that your qualities are carved in stone, which
forestalls learning by making people feel the need to consistently prove their intelligence to
others (Dweck, 2006, p. 6). Meanwhile, the growth mindset is based on the belief that your
basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts [that] everyone can change
and grow through application and experience (Dweck, 2006, p. 7). The distinction between the
two mindsets makes clear the central problem that arises from having a fixed mindset: if an
individual believes that their intelligence is inherently limited (and reflected by, say, an IQ
score), why would they try to get smarter? Lower-achieving students end up believing that
they cannot learn because they are dumb, while higher-achieving students refuse to take risks
for fear of failing or struggling and thereby being found out as less intelligent than others
perceive them to be. Those with a growth mindset, meanwhile, know that ability can be
improved by effort; they understand that learning is a process, and that failure and struggle are
inherent to that process.
The Skyline Writing Centers deliberate focus on growth mindset began in the fall, when
its tutors had a collaborative meeting with the peer tutors at the University of Michigans
Sweetland Center for Writing (where I used to be a peer tutor myself) that focused on what
growth mindset is and how writing center tutorials (particularly the feedback forms that students
receive at the end of them) can better reflect its ideals through an emphasis on improvement
through effort and engagement in the writing process. As the year progressed, the focus shifted
to the students actual tutoring techniques; at the Skyline-Sweetland meeting in April, for
instance, students developed a resource on growth mindset language (i.e. praising effort rather
than achievement or success) to distribute to teachers across the school, and they took part in
fishbowl-style simulated tutoring sessions to practice using this language in their tutoring.
These experiences got me thinking about growth mindset in several new ways. For one
thing, it struck me as an ingenious move to train writing tutors to foster a growth mindset in the
students they tutor from throughout the school community; in this way, the writing center
becomes a conduit of change for the entire school. This ignited a line of thinking about the
logical progression of this idea: if tutors can take advantage of their access to students from
across the student body to spread growth mindset, why shouldnt I do the same as a teacher?
While I dont have always have the same one-on-one exposure to students as the tutors do, I do
see my students more consistently, and I give them individualized feedback on their papers and
assignments in which I could do the same sort of workby, for instance, explicitly
deemphasizing grades and using formative feedback to encourage effortful revision and
thoughtful engagement in the writing process, all as a way of focusing students attention on
process rather than product. This sort of focus develops habits of mindsuch as metacognitive,
reflective thinking about the process of developing skills and knowledgethat can help students
see themselves as lifelong learners who can always grow and develop through effort.
It was also striking to me how this sort of transformationfrom a fixed to a growth
mindsetcan apply to and benefit all students, regardless of their performance in school.
Among struggling students, this means helping them to realize that they can improve through
effort; they arent stuck in fixed categories (i.e. dumb, bad writer) because they can always
improve, and Im here to help them through that process, even if we take it one tiny step at a
time. Meanwhile, fostering a growth mindset can be just as beneficial for high-achieving
students: it can help them realize that school isnt all about grades, and that while As may be
easy for them to achieve, this might actually be keeping them from taking risks that could help
them learn (because theyre afraid to fail and lose their perfect GPA), and it may be making them
think that they cant improvewhich, of course, is never true. With all students, the fact of the
matter is that, as an English teacher, its my job to help students become to best readers, writers,
and thinkers they can be, which makes it vital for me to emphasize the dedication and work ethic
that is going to get them to that point. On top of that, the idea that fostering growth mindset can
make my practices potentially transformative for all of the students in my classroom makes it
particularly resonant with the characteristics of transformative educators I discussed above.
Throughout my observations, interactions, and experiences in my placement classroom
this year, Ive been seeking out connections between various teaching practices and growth
mindset, and Ive started thinking purposefully about how to deliberately implement
transformative, growth-mindset fostering practices into my teaching. One arena I have focused
on has been one-on-one work with particular students who are struggling with writing and other
assignments. The anecdote I wrote about in Part Cwith the student who I assisted in re-writing
her comparative analysis of Odysseus and Milkman Dead from Song of Solomoncomes to
mind here; personalized, one-on-one teaching experiences like this one provide a powerful
opportunity to implement language that is rooted in growth mindset in order to help individual
students see the importance of effort and persistence in developing skills and knowledge.
A similar interaction that I have seen my mentor teacher engage in involved a historically
high- achieving student who came in after school to talk about his writing with my mentor
teacher. He had already written and submitted a final copy of the Odysseus-Milkman
comparative analysis, and he had received quite a high score, but he wanted to know how he
could further improve his writing. My mentor teacher talked with him about some ways in which
the student could improve upon his implementation of textual evidencein the past, he had
included too many quotes that were all making the same basic point, but now, with this paper, he
had gone a bit too far in trying to fix that issue: he didnt quite have enough evidence to support
his points as effectively as possible. My mentor teacher talked with him about the effectiveness
of his claim and the organization of his paper, and then they discussed the improvements he can
still make by implementing his evidence a little bit differently.
This interaction effectively reflects the ideals of growth mindset because it is clear that
this student was motivated to learn rather than motivated to receive an A. He already had his A,
but he wasnt satisfied because he knew that he could still do better by putting in a little more
effort. This brings me to the practice I observed my mentor teacher implementing that actually
made this possible: whenever he releases grades on PowerSchool, he reiterates to students again
and again: Look at the feedback. Your grade is important because it reflects your mastery of the
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material, but the feedback is more important because it will help you to improve your writing.
These instructional interactions show students that learningnot gradesis what matters most
in Mr. Austins classroom. While grading is useful as an assessment tool, it should not be seen as
more than that, as the objective; grades are a means to an end rather than the end itself. By
explicitly discussing the potentially harmful effects of grades on students motivation and work
ethicmore specifically, the ways in which grades can produce and maintain fixed mindsets
my mentor teacher brought the fixed vs. growth mindset issue to the forefront in a way that had
the potential to change students mindsets and to spark conversations like those discussed above.
Another set of experiences in my placement that has influenced my selection of foci is
the feedback I have given students throughout the year on both process work (homework and
classwork) and mastery work (summative assessments). Early on, with the help of some
conversations with my mentor teacher, I recognized written feedback as another opportunity to
promote growth mindset. With a little bit of deliberate consideration, individualized feedback on
students assignments (primarily on their papers, but also on quizzes and homework
assignments) can be used to push them further by acknowledging their strengths while noting
growth areas (even when significant improvement or high grades have already been achieved),
providing positive affirmation of their effort, emphasizing the writing process by promoting
revision (which ties back to the emphasis on process over product that I discussed earlier), and
asking questions they may not have considered to prompt further thinking and revising. This
avenue is extremely important because this is where I can set myself up to potentially have an
impact on all of my students attitudes toward learning on the sort of routine basis that isnt
always possible with one-on-one work with students.
The connections Ive identified have come in a wide variety of forms, which I believe
speaks to the effectiveness of growth mindset practices as a focus for transformative teaching.
While I may not have the same the unique opportunities Ive had this year in the future
particularly in terms of using the Writing Center as a conduit to spread growth mindset
throughout the school communitythe diverse range of contexts in which these ideas can be
implemented to create potentially transformative learning experiences for students suggests to
me that this is a worthwhile avenue to pursue, both in this thesis and in the future.
My deliberate plan for creating a transformative experience for my students will involve
deliberate work in each of the arenas I have already discussed: the Writing Center and the growth
mindset workshops Ive helped to facilitate throughout the year; the ways in which I frame
grades and feedback during instructional interactions; one-on-one conferencing work with
students to discuss their effort, progress, and growth areas; and individualized feedback I give to
students on the work they submit to me. In order to be successful in implementing this deliberate
work, though, there are a number of specific steps I will need to take in order to ensure that I am
adequately prepared to make transformation both possible and likely for all of my students.
For one thing, I will need to continue to develop knowledge of my students, including
their backgrounds and identities, their past academic performance, and evidence of their current
mindsets and attitudes toward school and learning. This is crucial on multiple levels: this
knowledge will help me to develop connections with my students in the first place, and then,
once those relationships are established, I can use the contextual knowledge I have of each
student to determine how best to interact with and appeal to them. After all, while I have argued
that students of all skill and achievement levels can be stuck in fixed mindsets, the approaches I
use to foster growth mindsets necessarily differ greatly across this spectrum; for a lowerachieving student, for instance, I might appeal primarily to ideas about improving through effort,
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while I might focus more on the dangers of relying too heavily on grades while working with a
high-achieving student. This contextual information could be collected using a variety of
methods, but I primarily plan to use informal conversations before, during, and after class in
addition to one-on-one conversations with students whenever possible. In certain cases
particularly among the large population of students I have with IEPsthis might also involve
gathering information from students parents, previous teachers, and caseload managers.
A natural complement to this component is the need to maintain and use records of
assessment data in order to inform instructional choices and to differentiate instruction in order
to meet my students needs as effectively as possible. Here, I will implement a wide variety of
assessment tasks in order to inform my understanding of students strengths and growth areas as
fully and effectively as possible. This will allow me to take assessment data into account in my
planning, with the added bonus of providing more opportunities for me to provide formative
feedback to students on these assessment tasks.
The matter of how, exactly, I will implement growth mindset into the feedback I provide
and into my conversations with students remains to be addressed. During conversations with the
whole class, I plan to follow in the footsteps of my mentor teacher by being frank about the
purposes of grading, expressing to students that grades primarily exist as a tool to represent their
mastery of the content, and that the feedback they receive and the conversations they have with
me matter much more in terms of the ongoing process of learning and developing reading and
writing skills. This will also involve explicitly pushing students to question their investment in
grades, which may subsequently lead to substantive conversations about systemic issues with
contemporary American education.
In terms of formative feedback, I plan to make several specific moves with growth
mindset in mind: referring to students work (i.e. essay responses) in the present rather than past
tense, as a way of expressing that they can still revise and improve upon their work; praising
achievement of curricular goals in connection with effort rather than inherent ability;
encouraging students effort and work ethic with phrases such as, Keep it up!; and, of course,
providing students with specific, formative feedback with regard to what they have done well
and where they can still improve or continue to improve, with an emphasis on helping students to
prioritize immediate next steps in order to make revision and growth feel more manageable.
On top of all of that, I also need to find ways of emphasizing the value of growth during
instructional time, both in terms of academic achievement beyond high school and in terms of
life and workplace skills. This might involve tying content to social-emotional learning and to
practical real-world contexts. The most notable manifestation of this for me will be in how I
frame the value of reading and writing skills, whether its in school, in the workplace, or in
everyday life. Since Im teaching my 12th grade English students about active reading strategies,
I should have plenty of opportunities to emphasize the importance of growth in these areas, even
if students are completely satisfied with their grades. The primary message I want to convey here
is the importance of becoming a lifelong learnerof having a mindset within which, no matter
how skilled you are, you know that your reading, writing, and thinking skills can always
improve, and that continually improving them will make you a more well-rounded person who is
better able to participate in and contribute to society.
Finally, I plan to continue to play a role in the school community through my
involvement with the Writing Center by helping to train our peer tutors to understand growth
mindset and to consider ways of implementing it into their tutoring practices so that it can reach
the widest percentage of the school population as possible. Of course, I also want to ensure that I
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facilitate a transformative experience for the tutors themselves; this will come from their
developing awareness of growth mindset, and from helping them understand how they can
continue to grow and develop in their practices as tutors (as well as in their lives as students and
as lifelong learners).
E. ENGAGEMENT IN TRANSFORMATION THROUGH PRACTICE
Throughout this section of my thesis, I will describe the implementation of the deliberate
plan outlined in the previous section, making connections to the Secondary MAC programs
competencies and indicators along the way and supporting my instructional and pedagogical
choices by citing relevant scholarship.
The first element of my deliberate plan is a natural starting point because it is a
prerequisite for all of the other elements: developing knowledge of my studentsincluding their
backgrounds and identities, their academic histories, and evidence of their mindsets and attitudes
toward school and learningso that I can teach them as effectively as possible while striving to
transform their mindsets. As Crawford and Hagedorn (2009) note, establishing the sorts of
relationships that lead to this level of knowledge undergirds and supports just about everything
teachers do in their interactions with students by building a climate of trust between the two
parties; without this trust, it becomes immensely more difficultif not, in some cases,
impossibleto teach, motivate, and manage students (p. 47).
Building this knowledge and trust begins, in my experience, with the sorts of brief
moments of connection that occur in the moments before class begins and in the hallways
between classes: as Ive gotten to know an increasingly large number of students throughout the
yearfrom Humanities Literature AC, the Writing Center, and, in the third trimester, my
English 12B and Creative Writing classesI have been able to begin the process of building
relationships and rapport with many students simply by saying hello to them in the hallway when
I am standing outside my classroom during passing time, or by asking them how their days are
going as they enter the room and get settled in for class.
These interactions have helped to make students feel more comfortable approaching and
talking to me in one-on-one contexts, which is where I develop some of the most in-depth and
meaningful knowledge I have about my studentswhether these conversations are academicsfocused or not. This has been particularly true with one student, Amir, who is in my English 12B
class. Throughout the first two trimesters of the year, I saw Amir periodically; he has a good
relationship with my mentor teacher already, and he always tended to swing by the classroom
from time to time to say hello to him and to some of the students in Humanities Literature AC.
When the third trimester began and Amir was actually in my class, I began to say hello to him in
the hallway (as I do with all of my students) as he walked in; he would say, Hello to me, and
Hello, Mr. Austin, a little bit more enthusiastically, to my mentor teacher.
As the first several weeks of the class progressed, though, Amir began to stick around
and talk to me after class, often through the entire lunch period. Sometimes he does this in order
to seek additional help on his assignments, or to express his concern that he will never be able to
write a thesis statement as well as I canthis latter concern has given me great opportunities to
try to foster a growth mindset within him by reinforcing the idea that I developed my writing
skills via deliberate effort, and that he can improve his skills in the same way. Often, though,
Amir is happy to simply talk about whatever he happens to feel like talking about. We have
chatted, for instance, about college, including his personal college plans and what it was like for
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me being an English major in college. Relationships like this one that I have developed with my
students exemplify Competency 1.2, Demonstrate Care and Respect: by taking the time out of
my day to listen and talk to them, I have demonstrated that I care about them, which helps to
build the climate of trust alluded to above while also allowing me to develop a deeper
understanding of their needs and attitudes that I can use to implement growth mindset practices.
While I do my best to put my students at the center of communications about their
learning, it is also sometimes necessary to make contact with parents and caseload managers in
order to develop my knowledge of them and to ensure their success. Of the numerous students in
my English 12B classes with IEPs, there are three who have been particularly challenging to
motivate to complete their work and to engage productively and appropriately in class. These
challenges have arisen for reasons that are as distinct as the students themselves: one is
struggling with both autism and depression; another has reading comprehension difficulties
along with a slew of absences due to sickness among his family members, who he stays home to
take care of; the third is sometimes proactive and responsible about catching up on his
assignments, but at other times he deceives his caseload manager about his workload and
becomes absorbed in the games he plays on his phone rather than his schoolwork.
In working with each of these students, I have engaged in practices associated with
Competency 1.4, Connect to School, Home and Community as well as Competency 5.2,
Advocate for Students, by seeking out the resources and stakeholders necessary to develop
knowledge of them and, ultimately, to help them succeed. I communicate with each of their
caseload managers and academic support teachers on a regular basis to inform them of their
progress in my class, and to learn more about strategies I can use to teach them more effectively.
The student with autism and depression, for instance, was falling behind as we approached
spring break: despite incessant check-ins with him before, during, and after class, he had not
turned in a single assignment, including the mastery assignment we had just completed. At that
point, I reached out to his parents, his caseload manager, and the speech/language specialist who
works with him with a prioritized list of the assignments he had not yet turned in, along with a
summary of my observations about his behavior in class.
This sort of proactive transparency keeps other stakeholders well-informed of my
students progress as well as their struggles, and it also works in the other direction: I learned the
information about my students taking care of his family from his caseload manager when I
reached out to her in an effort to enhance my ability to meet his needs in my class. By seeking
information about this student, I was able to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges he
faces outside of school, which informed the ways in which I have differentiated the learning
process for himby, for instance, giving him extra time to complete his mastery assignments
and making appointments to meet with him outside of class time to discuss his work.
In the case of the third student I mentioned, I have begun to see some genuine progress in
his ability and willingness to take responsibility for his own learning: with our first mastery
assignment, I had to check in with him constantly to get him to work on it and to meet with me
outside of class, but by the time our third mastery assignment came around he was e-mailing me
to set up a meeting for extra help. This suggests to me that something transformative might have
occurred in terms of this students motivation and sense of autonomy and responsibility. On top
of that, meeting with all of these students outside of class has given me the opportunity to
deliberately strive to foster growth mindsets within them during out conversations, as I will
discuss further below.
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The next element of my deliberate plan to be addressed is the maintenance and use of
records of assessment data in order to inform instructional choices and to differentiate instruction
so as to meet my students diverse range of needs as effectively as possible while fostering
growth mindsets within them. Naturally, this will to some degree go hand-in-hand with my
discussion of the formative feedback I give my students and the ways in which I implement
growth mindset into it, but the other ways in which I analyze and use assessment data help to
demonstrate my thinking about my students growth on the whole, as represented by specific
focus students.
The following table is a portion of a trend tracker I created to analyze my English 12B
students work on a Source Page assignment that I created; essentially, students were asked to
apply a number of the active reading strategies we had been practicing to a single article of their
choice about poverty and social class. The Analytical Summary portion was one of several
components of the assignmentarguably the most important oneand this segment of the trend
tracker shows my generalizations about students strengths and growth areas as well as
instructional implications for me to consider in future lessons and in future iterations of the unit:
Component
Analytical
Summary
Strengths
Many students clearly usedand
benefitted fromapplying the basic
structure for the Analytical Summary
that we practiced throughout the unit:
a couple of sentences about the main
ideas (the what) followed by an
analytical discussion of a particular
detail or two from the text (the how
and why). Generally, students were
more successful with this when they
focused their analyses around one or
two specific details, though both
Student Samples 5 and 6 included
exemplary Analytical Summaries that
used numerous examples to focus
effectively on the how and why.
Growth Areas
Numerous studentsincluding Student
Samples 1, 3, and 4, focused almost
entirely on the main ideas of the text
rather than focusing on more local
details and using them as a lens
through which to discuss the main
ideas. Some students also wrote very
short responsesStudent Sample 2s,
for instance, falls far short of the word
count requirement and stops short of
explaining how and why the author
uses the detail she identified.
Instructional Implications
Students may have been more
successful in applying this strategy in
the context of the summative
assessment if I had provided more
explicit scaffolding as part of the
template, perhaps by separating the
task into Part One and Part Two
and providing some explicit
instructions. This would make this
version of the task more-or-less
identical to the task we practiced.
This assessment also suggests that I
need to implement additional
scaffolding in order to guide students
toward making their summaries more
analytical. One way of doing this might
be to have them write a typical
summary first, and then make it more
analytical by focusing on more local
details (as opposed to global ones)this
might help students to develop a
greater understanding of what sets
analytical summaries apart from
other types of summaries.
(Trend Tracker for English 12B Source Page: Analytical Summary, April 2016)
The sort of thinking and writing I have done here is vital to my ability to assess whether
my students have fulfilled the curricular goals and objectives I have identified for them, as well
as to the decisions I make about how to focus and subsequent instruction. The Student Samples
alluded to in the trend tracker refer to six different students I focused on in evaluating this
assignment who represent a wide range of skills and abilities (along with a wide range of scores
on the assessment). These focus students became the lens through which I reflected on several
key questions I identified about the assessment data I had gathered: in what ways did students
meet or transcend the learning objectives I identified? In what ways do they still need to grow
and develop their skills in order to meet those objectives? And what could I have done, and
even more importantlywhat could I still do to help students achieve the outcomes I identified?
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This thinking has obvious connections to the sort of growth mindset I want to instill in my
students, through its emphasis on growth (with the use of the phrase Growth Areas rather than
Weaknesses) and through the assumption it rests on that all students can and will meet my high
expectations with the right instruction and scaffolding (along with honest effort on their part).
This practice also has clear roots in Wiggins and McTighes (2005) backward design
model; they urge curriculum designers to think like assessors by identifying the desired results of
a lesson, unit, or course and then asking, What evidence can show that students have achieved
the desired results? in order to design and implement assessment tasks that align with these
objectives (p. 146). In this instance, I designed the Source Page and its accompanying rubric as
an assessment of the desired results I had in mind with regard to active reading and analytical
writing skills, and then I analyzed and reflected upon the student work that resulted in order to
identify gaps in skills and understanding along with the adjustments I could potentially make to
fill them. Indeed, I have taken action since the assessment I have discussed here to help students
write Analytical Summaries more effectivelyfor instance, I connected this activity with
another active reading strategy students learned, Seems X, Really Y, as a scaffold to help them
deepen their analysis of key ideas from the texts we engage with.
While macro assessment records like this one are useful in enacting differentiation on
the instructional level, the importance of also assessing and tracking students progress on an
individual level cannot be understated. In my practice, I incorporate a wide variety of assessment
tasks into my everyday instruction, including Do Nows, exit tickets, whole-class discussions,
paired- and group discussions (during which I circulate around the room to discuss students
understanding), and more formal formative and summative assessments such as reading and
writing homework tasks and longer assignments such as essays and projects. Here is an example
of my objectives and incorporated assessments and checks for understanding from a lesson I
taught in English 12B:
(English 12B Lesson Plan, March 2016)

As you can see, I have incorporated a wide variety of forms of assessment into this lesson,
including multiple discussion tasks, several formal formative assessments (the Analytical
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Summary, Paraphrase 3x, A/C/E/D [which are two additional active reading strategies], and
students annotations), and the summative assessment I have already discussed.
My approach here involves, as Tomlinson and Strickland (2005) write, [opening] the
widest possible window on [the students] learning; everything a student says and does, they
write, is a potential source of assessment data (p. 17). Collecting and maintaining records of
assessment like those I have discussed here widens my window onto students learning and
performance, and the wider that window is, the more effectively I can adjust and differentiate
instruction to meet their needs. By implementing a range of different types of assessment tasks to
assess the range of skills represented in my classroom, I have taken students diverse
preferences, strengths, and abilities into account in a way that reflects Competency 2.5, Consider
a Range of Student Abilities. Furthermore, because I share these records with my students and
with other stakeholders (including parents and caseload managers) by thoroughly and accurately
recording assessment data (including the formative feedback I will discuss below) in
PowerSchool, I have also demonstrated Competency 4.4, Maintain and Share Information.
Again, this data is important not only as a transparent record of student progress, but also as a
detailed record of strengths and growth areas that I can use to inform my implementation of
growth mindset practices with my students. Finally, the clear and deliberate ways in which I
have ensured that my assessment tasks align with the goals and objectivesboth in this
particular lesson and in the unit (which was called Critical Engagement with Texts) and course
as a wholereflect Competency 2.4, Plan Sequenced Lessons and Activities within Units; this
artifact makes clear the connections between my objectives and Common Core State Standards,
and between my objectives and my formative and summative assessments (which include most
of the activities I had students do during the lesson).
This brings me to my implementation of these practices in the formative feedback I give
to students, which is arguably the most important element of my deliberate plan to transform
students mindsets. Throughout this year, and in my English 12B course in particular, I have
used the feedback I give studentson both formative and summative assessmentsas an
opportunity to use deliberate growth mindset language in order to motivate students and, over
time, to have a transformative effect. The examples that follow, as well as my discussions of
them, also demonstrate Competency 4.5, Give Specific and Timely Feedback; as you will see,
the feedback is highly specific and individualized to each students particular needs, strengths,
and growth areas, and I always strive to return papers within a few days of their submission.
Below is the feedback I provided to Amir, the student I wrote about earlier in this section,
on a Scene Analysis assignment for English 12B. This assignment asked students to analyze a
short clip from the film Boyz N The Hood. We worked through much of this process step-bystep, and for that reason this assignment largely served as a scaffold that prepared students to
write a longer Scene Analysis on an additional scene, but students wrote the majority of these
responses independently. Here is the feedback:
[Amir], I think that this essay is a testament to the power of effort, like we've been talking
about--you put a lot of time, thought, and effort into this, and it paid off! You have a clear
claim that is well-supported by the evidence in your body paragraphs which, for the most
part, you explain well. A couple of points to look out for for Scene Analysis #2. First, I
think you could make your claim a little stronger by ensuring that the "specific noun" at
the beginning of the claim is the noun you want to emphasize. Your claim here begins
with "the businessman," but what if it began with "the urban poor," i.e. "The urban poor
need to work together to counteract their victimization by gentrification enacted by white
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businessmen," or something like that? Do you see how it's a bit more cogent and
convincing with the "main" noun coming first? Also, I think you could potentially
explain your evidence in body paragraph two more clearly and specifically: ask yourself
"so what?" about the binary opposition between black and white. How might this
opposition motivate the black community to unite and take action? That connection is
currently, I think, a little too implicit. Just some things to think about as you revise this
paper and as you prepare to write Scene Analysis #2--thank you again for your thoughtful
and effortful work, and keep it up!
In this feedback, I made several of the growth mindset-related moves that I alluded to in the
previous section. First, I referred to Amirs work in the present rather than past tense, which
expresses the idea that he can still work on and improve itthe paper, along with his writing
skills are not set in stone; they can be improved with effort. In contrast, imagine a set of feedback
that primarily uses the past tense. Here is a brief example, translated from above:
I think you could have made your claim a little stronger by ensuring that the specific
noun at the beginning of the claim was the noun you wanted to emphasize. Your claim
here began with the businessman, but what if it had begun with the urban poor?
This alternative feedback, with its subtle changes in wording, might not have been as effective in
motivating Amir to revise his paper (in accordance with the schools Teaching for Mastery
policy) and to develop his skills further, as it communicates that his work is closed off and
finished rather than a work-in-progress that he can continue to develop as a way of refining his
skills. The feedback I gave further emphasizes this through the inclusion of multiple probing,
open-ended questions (such as How might this opposition motivate the black community to
unite and take action?) intended to prompt Amir to rethink and revise particular elements of his
paper. According to McGarrell and Verbeem (2007), these sorts of questions are consistent with
a stance that acknowledges the developing writers expertise in the content, and they [lead]
writers to focus on the deeper meaning of their text (p. 232).
In addition, the above feedback reflects my attempts to praise effort rather than ability.
Dweck (2006) summarizes her research on the importance of this shift in language:
Both groups [effort- and ability-praised] were exactly equal to begin with. But right after
the praise, they began to differ. As we feared, the ability praise pushed students right into
the fixed mindset, and they showed all the signs of it, too: When we gave them a choice,
they rejected a challenging new task that they could learn from. They didnt want to do
anything that could expose their flaws and call into question their talent. (p. 72)
Here, Dweck (2006) suggests that praising ability is unproductive and even harmful because it
takes the locus of control away from the individual receiving the praise; it creates a need (or a
craving) for external validation. Praising effort, on the other hand, demonstrates to students that
they have the power to improve their skills and understandings through their own effort to
improvethey are being encouraged to look inward for their metrics of success rather than
outward. The phrase, Keep it up! at the end of my feedbacka phrase that I frequently
implement into my feedback, on both summative assessments like this one and on lower-stakes
assignmentshammers this point home: the message I tried to leave Amir with was that his
effort has led to a positive outcome and that, in order to continue to improve, the most important
thing he can do is to keep that effort going. Based on his increased engagement in the course (as
illustrated, among other things, by his staying after class each day to talk about his work), along
with the greater effort I have seen some students putting into their Mastery work (by, for
instance, asking me questions about it and engaging in the pre-writing process more
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deliberately), my attempts to fulfill Competency 3.6, Motivate Students, have been fruitful and
transformative for at least some of my students.
Of course, this feedback is essentially meaningless if students do not read it, which is
why I have implemented the next element of my deliberate plan: having frank conversations with
my students about grades and the importance of feedback and building metacognitive thinking
about the learning and writing process into the assignments I give them. I have had these
conversations with some students one-on-one: when Amir asked me how I got so good at writing
claims and thesis statements, for instance, and told me that he will never be at that level, I told
him that it simply took a great deal of practice and sustained effort, and that it is completely
within his power to reach the same level of skill.
During instructional time, there are several other strategies I use to encourage growth
mindset-related attitudes. For one thing, I explicitly encourage students to read the feedback I
have given them when I return homework and when I release grades on a summative assessment.
In the latter case, I tell them something like, When you go on PowerSchool tonight, you will see
the grade you received on your essay and you will see a paragraph or so of feedback. While the
grade is important as a quick measure or indicator of your mastery, the feedback is more
important, because it gives you prioritized steps to follow to improve your writing. Please read
that feedback. This deemphasizes the obligatory external validation students receive all the time
in the form of grades and foregrounds instead the ways in which students can still apply effort in
order to improve, regardless of their initial score. Moreover, these conversations reflect
Competency 5.1, Honor Students, because of the ways in which I have attempted to counteract
their counterproductive negative attitudes and fixed mindsets that my students have
demonstrated. One student, for instance, got angry when he completed an assignment from when
he was absent, only to find that it was not something that needed to be turned in. That handout
was designed to help you learn, and to help you build toward completing this Mastery
assignment, I told him. There are more important things than Process points.
In order to build this sort of attitude into the work I ask my students to dosince
repeating this information over and over is probably not going to authentically transform their
mindsets, at least in the majority of casesI have also begun to incorporate Reflexive
Responses into each summative assessment I assign. Here is the prompt for this part of the
second Scene Analysis I assigned my English 12B students:
(Scene Analysis #2 Assignment Guidelines: Revision and Reflexive Component, April 2016)
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In this prompt, students are required to think about their learning process in addition to the level
of effort they put into it. For one thing, it encourages metacognition, which Ritchhart (2002)
supports as a healthy habit of mind for students to develop: Research on the thinking of experts
and effective learners has shown that these individuals tend to actively monitor, regulate,
evaluate, and direct their thinking (p. 28). In this context, this is accomplished from a number of
different angles: students must consider the shortcomings of their first Scene Analysis, along
with the feedback I gave them, and how they learned from them in writing their second Scene
Analysis; they need to explicitly reflect on how they engaged in the writing process and how
various pre-writing and revision strategies helped them, making reference to specific evidence
along the way; and it asks students to look to the future with the question about the Documented
Argument (the summative assessment that the Scene Analyses build up to). For obvious reasons,
this reflexive response prompt demonstrates Competency 4.6, Engage Students in SelfAssessment, and the following example of a reflexive response for the first Scene Analysis
assignment illustrates the genuine and honest ways in which many of my students have bought
into this part of my assignments.
(Student Sample, Reflexive Response for Scene Analysis #1, April 2016)
Metacognitive self-assessment of the sort that is going on here is important not just because it
forces them to reflect on their successes and mistakes, but also because it helps to develop a habit
of minda disposition, to return to Ritchharts (2002) languagethat students can apply across
a wide variety of contexts. Whether they are in my English 12B class or AP Physics, and
whether they are in college next fall or in the workplace, developing an awareness of the learning
process is a crucial skill, and the fact that I have taught it to my students (in conjunction with the
efforts to foster their growth mindsets) to enhance their learning reflects Competency 3.5, Use
High Leverage Practices. Moreover, my implementation of skills like this one reflect
Competency 1.7, Foster the Development of Social-Emotional Learning; Yoder (2014) lists as
one of the elements of self-management, for instance, The ability to monitor and reflect on
personal and academic goal-setting (p. 3).
These discussions have not been without appropriate context with regard to the
importance of growth in the content-specific skills and understandings that I center my lessons
and units around. As I have mentioned previously, English 12B has revolved around active
reading strategies, and I have consistently worked to help my students see the value of the kinds
of thinking that active reading and critical engagement entailslowing down to notice
seemingly insignificant details, elements, and rhetorical strategies; moving beyond like/dislike
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and agree/disagree toward more complex critical relationships with texts; making connections to
other texts and ideas. I began this process on the very first day of the class, when I talked with
my students about the following slide which discusses reasons for reading actively (which was
immediately preceded by a discussion of what it means to read actively):
(Google Slide: Active Reading Strategies: What They Are and Why They Matter, March 2016)
During this part of the discussion, I tried to connect the importance of active read to all of my
students lives, regardless of their post-secondary plans. Many, but not all, of these students are
college-bound, so it was important to me to apply the significance of the content to a wide
variety of contexts: college and university, the workplace, and practical, real life skills. I told
my student, for instance, that your teachers in college are not responsible for your learningyou
are solely responsible for it, and you may very well be handed a stack of articles or books to
read, understand, and synthesize. Conversations like these continued throughout the trimester: at
one point, for instance, a student told me that he doesnt get why he has to learn the Paraphrase
3x strategy when hell never have to use it again; in response, I had a conversation with him
about how the intent of these strategies is to develop habits of mind that make active reading and
critical engagement more automatic, which will be valuable to him in his upcoming years at Ohio
State. Talking with students about the connections between these skills and their interests and
plans in these kinds of waysalong with how I have deliberately considered these connections
in my lesson- and unit-planningdemonstrates Competency 2.6, Include Diverse Backgrounds,
Experiences, and Interests because of the various, intersecting factors of diversity at play here.
These connections were also reinforced through the reflective tasks I described earlier.
The reflexive response I asked my English 12B students to provide on their source page, for
instance, required them to comment on several essential questions: What did you find
rewarding, challenging, or surprising about this experience? Which method did you find most
useful in critically engaging with your chosen text, and why? How has practicing and mastering
these skills helped you to become a more active and engaged reader? In this way, students had
to reflect upon their personal growth and learning processes in a way that explicitly prompted
them to think about how the skills they were learning are practical and useful for them.
Of course, it is not enough to ask students a few questions on the summative assessment
and expect them to become thoughtful and reflective lifelong learners. This is why I also built in
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a number of instructional and managerial routines (which connects with Competency 3.1, Use
Daily Managerial Routines) in order to foster students development of these skills, as well as
academic discourse. One particularly relevant example is the Do Now routine I have
established in English 12B. These activities often scaffold toward or extend the reflexive
activities that go along with summative assessments; for instance, this one asked students to selfassess their homework:
(Google Slide: Do Now from English 12B, March 2016)

The Do Now is often also accompanied by pair-and-share activities, which also have a specific
routine. When I go around the room pairing the students up, I designate one of them as person
A and the other as person B. Person A is always expected to express their thoughts and
ideas firstI typically have some questions up on the board for students to discuss or a writing
prompt that they just completed, and students are expected to share all of their ideas on the topic.
Then, once I notice the room quieting down or conversations getting off topic, I indicate that it is
time for Person B to share. This routine has several affordances: it helps to enforce our
classroom norms around participating while also leaving space for others to share their ideas, and
it helps to increase student accountability for the reflexive, growth mindset-associated skills that
I am trying to teach them.
Finally, I would like to address the ways in which my work with the Skyline Writing
Center over the course of the year has helped me to implement transformative practices aimed at
fostering growth mindsets in students. Essentially, my mentor teacher and I have made it our
deliberate focus this year to teach the Writing Centers peer tutors to implement growth mindsetinformed practices into their tutoring so that the tutors can have a transformational effect on the
entire school community. Here is a sample of student work from a workshop we implemented
during Skytime (the schools weekly advisory period during which the tutors have their staff
meetings), along with a Facebook photo from the activity:
(Growth Mindset Planning Session Newsprint, March 2016)
(Facebook Post: Growth mindset workshop, February 2016)
22
23
Essentially, this workshop asked students to engage in a gallery walk in which they answered a
series of questions about how we can implement growth mindset into their work as peer tutors.
From there, they worked in small groups to analyze the answers that were written on each poster
and to devise an implementation plan for a specific, actionable idea they wanted to enact. This
lesson asked the student tutors to take ownership of the Writing Center to enact a schoolwide
initiativeone that, I should note, my mentor teacher explicitly conceived as a means of
addressing the schools status as a Focus school along with issues of diversity, equity, and
inclusion. This enhanced its already powerful transformative potential by also making it
potentially transformative for students; as Cardillo (2013) writes:
It is almost counter-intuitive that we often fail to engage the largest constituency of our
schools, our students, in the process of improving our school communities and our
broader communities Study after study has shown the powerful results that derive
from engaging students as action-researchers, utilizing service-learning as a tool to make
school more effective and more connected (pp. 2-3).
By engaging actual students in the sort of transformative work that I have been trying to
implement in my own classroom, I helped to empower students as agents of change within their
school community, and in the process they have enhanced their own understandings and
awareness of growth mindset and its importance for learning and life.
On top of that, my experiences with the writing center have also enabled me to foster the
development of social-emotional learning beyond the four walls of my classroomsince peer
tutoring strongly emphasizes SEL competencies outlined by Yoder (2014), including every
aspect of social awareness (identify social cues, listen carefully and accurately, understand
other points of view and perspectives, among others) and relationship management
(communicate effectively, provide help to those who need it, exhibit cooperative learning
and working toward group goals) (p. 4)and to fulfill Competency 5.5, Become a Member of
the School Community, by working with students outside the classroom and by helping to make
the school a more productive and fruitful learning environment.
Between June 2015 and May 2016, I have grown as a teacher in countless, complex ways
through the experiences I have had in the classroom and through my ongoing efforts to
implement the theory from my Masters coursework into my practice. Early on, I was primarily
an observer, taking careful notes on my mentor teachers practices and stepping in once in a
while to facilitate a discussion or an activity. Over time, I began teaching more consistently
teaching Humanities Literature AC once or twice per week and, once I was at the school five
days per week, taking over the Writing Center meetingsand I took on a greater number of
responsibilities behind the scenes, including grading many of the students papers. Throughout
this time, I was also learning developing my teaching philosophy by learning about educational
theory and about best practices for important components of the job such as literacy instruction
and differentiation. Frankly, though, I began to grow frustrated: I felt as though my ability to
conceive of myself as a teacher was being stymied by the fact that I did not yet have a sense of
ownership over any of the classes I was teaching; Humanities Literature AC was, first and
foremost, my mentor teachers course, and I was not able to join the Writing Center in its
meetings on a consistent basis until January.
As I expected, though, all of this changed when I had the opportunity to take on lead
teaching responsibility for English 12B from the very first day of the course. Here, everything I
learned throughout the yearmethods for getting to know students and managing the classroom
environment, the principles of backward design, engaging and productive instructional methods
24
for my content area, the design and implementation of effective and well-aligned assessment
tasksbegan to come together. At last, I was able to assess my students process and mastery
work on a regular basis so that I could inform my daily instructional choices as effectively as
possible. At last, I was able to set up procedures and routines of my own, and to experiment with
them in order to determine which were most conducive to my students learning. And at last, I
began to get a great deal of experience working with students one-on-one, guiding them through
the writing process on their Mastery assignments from pre-writing to drafting to revising.
Through these experiences, I grew in each of the Secondary MAC Program Competencies until I
reached the scores I needed to be considered a well-started beginning teacher, and then
(because it is always best to practice what you preach), I pushed myself to continue to hone my
practices in an ongoing effort to find the practices and structures that work me andmore
importantlyfor my students.
Now that I have been at the helm of what is for all intents and purposes my own
classroom for over two months, I have also begun to find my unique voice and style as a teacher.
I have begun to grow more comfortable being myself in front of my students, bringing humor
into the classroom in some way, shape, or form on a daily basis and going out of my way to
make meaningful connections with my students whenever I can, whether they are centered on
academic concerns or not. As I made clear in my Philosophy of Teaching and Learning, I believe
that these connections are what will help me the most as I continue to aim to transform my
students mindsets in the years to come.
F. REFLECTION ON TRANSFORMATION THROUGH PRACTICE
The practices I have enacted throughout my year as a student teacherincluding, but not
limited to, those discussed abovedemonstrate how I have become an ethical practitioner who
strives to fulfill the mission and vision for public education outlined in the Michigan Department
of Educations Professional Educators Code of Ethics. My deliberate plan to transform students
fixed mindsets into growth mindsets, along with the philosophical underpinnings that have
informed that plan, reflects the Codes five ethical standards (Service toward common good,
Mutual respect, Equity, Diversity, and Truth and honesty).
In terms of service toward the common good, my practices clearly support the growth
and development of all learners for the purpose of creating and sustaining an informed citizenry
in a democratic society (Michigan Department of Education, 2003) because of my explicit focus
on the use of growth mindset practices to teach all of my students to become lifelong learners
who can always grow and develop skill through effort. By striving to move my students beyond
their reliance on extrinsic sources of motivation such as grades and toward authentic, intrinsic
motivation, I have worked to develop mindsets within them that can potentially lead them to the
sort of sustained growth and development that they need to succeed in the rapidly changing
modern world, and to participate responsibly and productively in the society they will enter into
after they leave high school.
A natural complement to this first ethical standard is the principle of mutual respect. The
idea at the core of my practicethat every student can grow with effortis inherently respectful
of the inherent dignity and worth of each individual (Michigan Department of Education,
2003). By striving to individualize instruction as much as possible in order to transform students
fixed mindsets into growth mindsets and to ultimately show them that the possibilities for their
development of knowledge and skills are endless, my practices rely on a genuine belief in the
25
value of what each and every student can bring to the table. Furthermore, I strive to demonstrate
this belief every single day in the efforts I make to forge connections with as many students as I
can; by consistently showing my interest in students performance as well as their lives outside
of school, I make my commitment to their worth as individuals visible for them on a daily basis.
The ethical principle of equity is also intricately connected to the foundations of my
practices as a transformative educator. I strive to provide students equitable access to educational
opportunities by doing everything in my power to break down the barriers to academic success
posed by fixed mindsets (which are, I should note, in many ways reinforced over time by the
system itself) by, for instance, going out of my way to praise students effort and to demonstrate
to them that they can be successful through perseverance. Along with these explicit growth
mindset practices, I also implement differentiation and individualized scaffolding in order to
meet the diverse needs of my students and to ensure that they are given equitable access to the
knowledge, skills, and resources they need to succeed.
In connection with those diverse needs, I also strive to fulfill the ethical principle of
diversity. I do this in part by honoring individual differences and meeting students where they
are at in the ways outlined above, but also by incorporating content that reflects a diverse range
of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives and by offering choices to support students
individual interests and passions. For instance, I taught my English 12B students to take a critical
stance toward powerful institutional and ideological structures such as media representation by
guiding them in analyzing how poverty is represented in scenes from film and television, and the
final summative assessment of the coursethe Documented Argumentasked them to utilize
all of these (and other) skills to write about choice topics that they are genuinely passionate about
and interested in exploring. In effect, these aspects of my curriculum help students to leverage
their unique strengths and passions while learning to question the dominant values that construct
and define the multidimensional culture and society we inhabit.
The fifth and final ethical principle, truth and honesty, is crucial to my awareness of
myself as a role model for my students. By continually reflecting upon and striving to improve
my practice, I model for my students the growth mindset attitudes and dispositions that I want
each and every one of them to adopt. Furthermore, by consistently aligning my curricular goals
and objectives with the Common Core State Standards, I am able to ensure that my students
attain (and, whenever possible, transcend) the understandings and skills that are expected of
them by the time they graduate.
In terms of the philosophy of teaching and learning with which I began this thesis, I
believe that I have done an effective job of putting it into practice by forging meaningful
connections with my students over the course of the past year. The growth mindset practices I
have discussed rely on these connections as a foundation, and, as I discussed, establishing this
foundation requires a great deal of deliberate work: transformative educators cannot simply meet
the expectations of the job by showing up and teaching each daythey need to exceed those
expectations by going out of their way to get to know students, by assisting them outside of class
time when necessary and possible, by consistently reflecting upon and refining managerial and
instructional practices, and by carefully designing and implement meaningful learning goals and
aligned assessment tasks in order to track student progress along the way.
I would argue that I have been successful in all of these areas: I have gotten to know
students during my daily interactions with them (before, after, and during class, as well as during
the time I have spent down the hall from my classroom, hanging out with students in the Writing
Center). I have dedicated many hours of my time to providing students with extra help outside of
26
class during my planning hours, and to communicating with them and with other stakeholders in
the community about their progress. Finally, with the help of my coursework in the MAC
program, I have become a thoughtful and reflective educator who consistently strives to assess
students learning in authentic and multidimensional ways, who constantly provides students
with individualized and prioritized formative feedback to guide them in their next steps toward
success, and who continually adjusts instruction and scaffolding according to students everchanging needs. Ultimately, I am proud to say that I have succeeded in taking my effective
practices as an undergraduate peer tutor and dramatically expanding upon them to meet the
challenging needs of the public education context; my tutoring work planted the seeds for the
meaningful connections and the student-centered, growth mindset-focused practices that are at
the core of my identity as an educator today.
To be certain, these practices will continue to play a vital role in my teaching long after
my year as a student teaching intern is complete. Part of the immense power of growth mindset
practices is, as I have discussed, their applicability in any educational context, since students of
all backgrounds and levels of achievement can benefit from a shift in mindset away from
extrinsic motivation and toward intrinsic motivationaway from a need for external validation
and toward the habits of self-motivated, lifelong learners who know that they can always
improve through effort. Institutional factors such as GPAs, standardized testing, and competitive
college admissions will continue to foster fixed mindsets in students until the system
fundamentally changes. Until then, I will continue to do everything I can to guide students
toward seeing (and, better yet, genuinely believing) that yes, they canthey can understand
challenging concepts, they can develop reading, writing, and thinking skills, and they can always
improveas long as theyre willing to try.
27
References
Cardillo, R. (2013, Feb.). School climate and youth development. Retrieved from
http://www.schoolclimate.org/publications/documents/sc-brief-youth.pdf
Crawford, L. & Hagedorn, C. (2009). Classroom discipline: Guiding adolescents to responsible
independence. Minneapolis, MN: The Origins Program.
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine Books.
McGarrell, H. & Verbeem, J. (2007). Motivating revision of drafts through formative feedback.
ELT Journal, 61(3), 228-236.
Michigan Department of Education. (2003). Michigan professional educators code of ethics.
Retrieved from
https://www.michigan.gov/documents/Code_of_Ethics_Layout_128009_7.pdf
Ritchhart, R. (2002). Intellectual character: What it is, why it matters, and how to get it. San
Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Tomlinson, C. A., & Strickland, C. A. (2005). Differentiation in practice: A resource guide for
differentiating curriculum. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development.
Vatterott, C. (2009). Rethinking homework: Best practices that support diverse needs.
Alexandria, VA: Assocation for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA:
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Yoder, N. (2014, Jan.). Teaching the whole child: Instructional practices that support socialemotional learning in three teacher evaluation frameworks. Retrieved from
http://www.gtlcenter.org/sites/default/files/TeachingtheWholeChild.pdf

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TRANSFORMING MINDSETS

(English 12B Lesson Plan, March 2016)

(Google Slide: Do Now from English 12B, March 2016)

(Growth Mindset Planning Session Newsprint, March 2016)

(Facebook Post: Growth mindset workshop, February 2016)

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