Ep 137 - Teaching Elementary Students About Growth Mindset with Victoria from The Mindful Apple
Inside This Week’s Episode: — Social Emotional Learning instruction isn’t just a job for school social workers! Classroom teachers are also tasked with helping our students master important social emotional skills like growth mindset. In this episode, school social worker, Victoria from The Mindful Apple is sharing how SEL instruction can fit into the every day elementary classroom!
Links & Resources Mentioned in the Episode
EPISODE 60: Easy Calming Strategies for Elementary Students
EPISODE 86: Making Social Emotional Learning MORE Than a Buzzword
RESOURCE: FREE Growth Mindset Sort
Victoria’s Social Emotional Learning Curriculum
Connect with Victoria:
Shop social emotional resources for the elementary classroom
Learn with Victoria at TheMindfulApple.com
Learn more about the LINKtivity® Learning membership.
Not So “NewS FLASH”: Teachers do More than Just Teach Academics…
Teachers wear a lot of hats, and if we’re being truly honest, our jobs come with so many more responsibilities than just teaching reading, writing, math, science, and so on.
We’re often asked to play many other roles like counselor, parent, comforter, and friend. Our students come to us with not just academic needs, but also emotional and social needs, too. And to ignore these needs would be a disservice to everyone!
Whether it is in our job description or not, supporting the whole child - academically, socially, and emotionally just comes with the territory.
That’s why, today I wanted to revisit an interview I did about a year ago with Victoria from The Mindful Apple. Victoria is a social worker at an elementary school and she’s been on the podcast several times as our resident expert for all things social emotional learning.
In our conversation, Victoria is going to talk to us, specifically, about growth mindset and the importance for classroom teachers to embrace social emotional learning instruction in their everyday teaching.
Because, as you already know - whether or not you are trained as a social worker or not (and likely, you are not) teachers are still being called on now more than ever to help students with their social emotional needs. Specifically in this interview, Victoria gives us a great foundation for helping our students develop a growth mindset over a fixed mindset.
In this conversation she’ll share practical ways for teachers to help their students in their classroom.
Here’s What We talk about:
Growth Mindset is a powerful mindset to have. It is the belief that you can learn new things. With hard work and study, your brain CAN grow and stretch. We need instill this same belief into kids at a young age so that they can grow deeper and deeper into this belief as they get older. Growth mindset sets the stage for learning all other social emotional skills.
Growth mindset teaches us perseverance to push through when things get hard. The more we try new things and the more we allow ourselves to take on new challenges, the stronger our brain grows to be able to continue to do so in the future.
Growth mindset is contagious! The more a student’s teachers and peers show growth mindset, the more they will develop their own growth mindset.
Embrace the power of “YET.” Growth mindset helps students to see that even though they might not be able to do something….YET… they can work toward that goal. This teaches students that they don’t have to accept that they can’t do something. They simple just can’t do it….yet!
We need to normalize the struggle. Students need to see that struggling is just part of the process and that struggle in and of itself is not failure.
Help students to understand the difference between fixed vs. growth mindset. When students begin to recognize the differences, they can get more practice choosing the growth mindset belief.
And at the time that this episode is going live, we are still fresh at the beginning of the school year and kicking off a new year by placing an importance on growth mindset is only going to help your students be more successful in all other aspects of their learning experience.
After I originally had this conversation with Victoria last year, I began reevaluating how *I* could also help support teachers with SEL instruction.
You likely know about our membership for teachers called LINKtivity Learning, which gives teachers access to our entire library of LINKtivities.
To help support teachers even more, we wanted to create a new category inside the library that not only provides high-quality, 21st century resources for teaching in the content areas, but also to provide these same types of resources for teaching social emotional learning skills, too!
We are excited to announce that we now have a category inside our membership library devoted just to SEL, including a LINKtivity on growth mindset.
We’re also working on filling that category with other SEL skills like mindfulness and kindness, and many more to come.
Learn more about the LINKtivity Learning membership for upper elementary teachers HERE!
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