Building a Growth Mindset, Together
Enabling students to realize their unique and full potential
As a community founded on lifelong learning, the WPS district has embarked on a journey that supports our students, faculty, and staff to leave behind the idea that you are born with a particular set of skills and to instead embrace our ability to shift to a Growth Mindset of continuous development.
Research has shown that adopting a growth mindset can lead to increased resilience in the face of challenges, greater willingness to embrace difficult tasks, improved learning outcomes, enhanced self-efficacy, ways to confront stress in healthy and performance-enhancing ways and a shift from focusing solely on grades to valuing the learning process.
Carol Dweck, the psychologist who pioneered the growth mindset concept, sums it up well. Her findings are that individuals who believe talents can be developed through hard work, good strategies and input from others tend to achieve more than those with a fixed mindset who believe their talents are innate gifts. According to Dweck, that's because they put more energy into learning instead of how they are perceived.
Our Approach
Led by co-chairs CJ Shamas, Physical Education Teacher at SHS, and Ashley Moran, Workshop/Math Interventionist at SES, our initiative aims to equip students, teachers, and parents with the tools to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, and view effort as the path to mastery.
A key component of the district's strategic plan, the growth mindset curriculum will be integrated across Westport schools this year with a focus on building the foundation for stimulating the growth mindset belief systems. Subsequent years will expand the curriculum opportunities for students and include ongoing auditing of policies and practices to ensure alignment with growth mindset tenets.
Our curriculum is built around five key situations (our tenets) where individual mindset has the greatest impact to provide practical strategies for shifting perspectives:
Effort: from something fruitless to the path to mastery
Challenges: from avoidance to learning opportunities
Obstacles: from giving up early to increasing resilience by failing forward
Criticism: from ignore feedback to re-assessing and honing skills
Success of others: from feeling threatened to finding inspiration and motivation
Learning Opportunities
For Students:
- A mandatory mindset course of study for high school students within the Health & Physical Education Curriculum
- Integration of growth mindset principles across all subjects
- Encouragement of positive self-talk and effort-based praise
For Teachers:
- Professional development workshops
- Resources for implementing growth mindset strategies in the classroom
- Support for providing effective feedback that promotes growth
For Parents:
- Community workshops
- Periodic newsletters with tips and insights
- Resources for fostering growth mindset at home
Join Us on This Journey
Growth mindset is not just about academic success—it's a life skill that can benefit
everyone. As Shamas notes,
When you develop a very real growth mindset, your biggest failures, when done right, you would not want to change. Those setbacks or obstacles become significant lessons that aid development.
We invite all members of our school community to embrace this powerful concept and join us in creating a culture where growth and learning are celebrated at every step. Stay tuned for upcoming events, workshops, and resources. Together, we can build a community that thrives on challenges and sees every experience as an opportunity for growth.
Want to learn more about growth mindset? Resources and insights:
National Library of Medicine: The Neuroscience of Growth Mindset and Intrinsic Motivation
Identifying Teaching Behaviors that Foster Growth Mindset Classroom Cultures
Decades of Scientific Research that Started a Growth Mindset Revolution
Students with Growth Mindset Learn More in School: Evidence from California's CORE School Districts
Carol Dweck on How Growth Mindsets Can Bear Fruit in the Classroom
Buy the Book -- Mindset: The New Psychology of Success