Mindset Activities

With the right mindset, it may be possible to handle challenges better and pursue success without getting down on yourself.

Nurturing a growth mindset could help you tackle life’s difficulties much more efficiently, and that applies to adults as well as children. If you want to learn more about mindset theory and how you can achieve a growth mindset yourself, read on.

What Is Mindset Theory?

Most positive psychology readers will already be familiar with mindset theory, or the idea that our beliefs influence the way we behave in response to life’s situations.

“Mindsets—or implicit theories—are the beliefs people have about the nature of human characteristics” (Murphy & Dweck, 2016, p. 127).

Mindset theory suggests that the way we view ourselves – our capabilities, talents, and intelligence – impacts our lives and success. At the same time, mindset theory covers how we choose to pursue our goals: whether we give up when faced with failure or respond with more effort and dedication.

Fixed vs. growth mindsets

According to Carol Dweck’s (2012) mindset theory, we all fall somewhere along a spectrum when it comes to our implicit beliefs. At one end, it’s possible to have a fixed mindset or an entity theory:

A fixed mindset is when people believe their basic qualities, their intelligence, their talents, their abilities, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount, and that’s that.

If your implicit beliefs fall at the other end of the spectrum, you have a growth mindset – incremental theory:

[You] believe that even basic talents and abilities can be developed over time through experience, mentorship, and so on… and these are the people who go for it.

Dweck, 2012

A fixed mindset can often be associated with negative feelings when individuals encounter a setback. If we fail to meet goals (say an A+ on a test or a promotion at work), we may feel inadequate. That’s all we’re supposedly capable of after all, innately. Having a growth mindset, on the other hand, means we view our failures as “development points” and can work on them to succeed.

Perhaps for readily apparent reasons, mindset theory often gets applied in learning contexts, both in academia for students and in workplace coaching, leadership, and professional development.

Using Mindset Therapy: What Is a Mindset Intervention?

As the name suggests, a mindset intervention is a program designed to strengthen growth mindsets in an academic setting. Typically, the motivation for mindset interventions has been to boost students’ academic potential by encouraging their beliefs that intellectual capabilities can be developed (Yeager et al., 2019).

Here is an excellent example of a mindset intervention delivered to more than 12,000 US high-schoolers (Yeager et al., 2019):

At the start of the 9th grade, the researchers delivered a 25-minute online student session that gave an overview of the growth mindset concept: that pupils could improve their intellectual capacities through various means (e.g., enhancing their learning strategies).

Between one and four weeks later, students went through a second session in which they were invited to learn more about growth mindsets. They were given stories from adult role models and older students, as well as interactive reflection sessions on how they might help others learn about a growth mindset.

At the close of the academic year, researchers measured the students’ grades and chosen courses for the next year before analyzing the data on grade improvements and their academic gains.

The authors found this low-cost, easy-to-implement mindset intervention was potentially linked to a few outcomes from the study. The intervention had a positive impact on student’s academic performance, both for low- and high-achieving pupils, and also increased the chances of students taking advanced math courses the next year (by 3%).

Using Mindset With Kids

One study of preschool kids demonstrated how a child’s mindset can influence not only their self-image but also their learning behaviors and resilience (Pawlina & Stanford, 2011). It suggests that by helping kids develop a sense of self-efficacy and agency, educators can help them tackle challenges with a growth mindset.

Teachers can:

• Encourage feelings of confidence and excitement that help children bounce back from failure
• Help them view effort and hard work as a ‘normal’ part of problem-solving
• Give them greater confidence in their ideas
• Drive kids to seek out and engage with challenges rather than avoid them

All of this was related to observable improvements in the kids’ persistence, resilience, and openness to “potential outcomes of difficult situations” (Pawlina & Stanford, 2011, p. 31).

Strategies to help kids develop a growth mindset

So, how do we put this into practice?

The authors suggest that teachers and caregivers can help kids in two ways: providing rationales and offering strategies that children can use.

Rationale

Adults can help children realize that it’s normal to make mistakes. By purposefully reframing errors and slip-ups as part of life, young kids in this study became more accepting of the difficulty at hand.

Grown-ups can also try putting an optimistic spin on perceived failure, engaging kids in things that they find difficult. Use positive reinforcement, such as, “Now you can do it, and you couldn’t do before!” By making it exciting and presenting setbacks as a chance to improve, mistakes become part of the package.

Emphasize practice and progress. Teachers, parents, and caregivers can help kids focus on the learning process rather than the outcome by doing the same themselves.

Strategies

Role modeling is one way to help kids develop resilience. By highlighting your feelings when you make a mistake, then practicing positive self-talk and emphasizing the learning opportunity, children can learn to do the same. For instance: “Oops, I forgot to take my shoes off and left mud everywhere. I’m feeling annoyed at myself. Oh well, next time, I’ll leave myself a reminder.”

Avoid minimizing the difficulty of problem-solving. By trivializing situations and labeling them “easy” or “quick,” adults can discourage kids from persevering. Try to build enthusiasm without turning children off from trying hard and tackling challenges head-on.

Let children deal with reasonable challenges by themselves. There’s no need to shelter kids from problems that they are capable of solving. As long as a challenge is not beyond their capabilities, they will learn from the ability to develop their problem-solving skills and from their failures. Of course, success in itself is positive reinforcement, so tasks should not be overly complicated.

17 growth mindset activities for adults

We’ve structured these 17 activities into 5 categories:

Develop a growth mindset with new activities and ‘playful learning!

Trying new things and enjoying the experience is central to a growth mindset. Stepping forward to enjoy new activities will make it easier to embrace change in all its forms.

New experiences don’t have to be too serious, and they don’t always have to have a clear purpose. Just find opportunities to enjoy doing new things!

Here are some activities that you might want to explore:

1. Playful learning. Learn to draw, juggle, do Sudoku or anything else that intrigues you! If there’s one of these activities that you’ve never done before, give it a go! Learning a 3-ball juggle takes anywhere between 20-60 mins for most people (search for a YouTube video as your guide). Learning to draw cartoon faces is fun (plenty of YouTube videos on that topic too!), and sudoku for beginners is a satisfying challenge to embrace.

2. Refresh your routine. If you usually cook, try and cook something you’ve never tried before. Or if you have a regular walk around your neighborhood, try doing it in reverse, or exploring some new avenues. Or pick up a new newspaper. Anything that shakes up your day a little with new activities.

3. Try a 30-day challenge. Extend the fun into a 30-day challenge. This is a great way to establish a new habit as part of your commitment to a growth mindset.

4. Be inspired by the success of others. Learning about and celebrating the success of others is a great way to embrace your growth mindset. But it doesn’t have to be famous names. Look around you, who are the people in your network that inspire you? Spend more time with them.

Be willing to step forward into new challenges. It’s might seem daunting at first (you might want to start small), but the more you embrace new activities, the more you’ll grow!

5. Seek feedback. This gets straight to the heart of cultivating a growth mindset and is integral to your development, “feedback is constructive!”. Take the time to look at how to request feedback from your coworkers it provides a step-by-step guide to make seeking feedback part of your daily routine. Use the feedback to learn and grow!

6. Use positive language. Take a look at these positive language examples. The language we use reinforces our thinking, if you can get into the habit of using this positive language it will help you to cultivate a positive attitude (which is integral to a growth mindset!). It’s all about cultivating ‘learned optimism.

7. Be curious. Asking big, open questions is a really strong foundation for a growth mindset. It’s a great way to cultivate your curiosity, it encourages those around you to share their thoughts and gives you the opportunity to learn. Of course, you need to be able to listen to the answer too!

8. Practice listening. Show your interest in others by becoming a better listener. Take the time to explore these 8 tips to improve your listening skills, or take inspiration from the Chinese character for listening.

Learn more about growth mindset and develop related skills

In addition to your daily activities, take a little time to learn more about growth mindset and the skills that help to support this mindset.

9. Explore neuroplasticity, the biological foundation for growth mindset. If you’re not familiar with the basics of neuroplasticity, it’s worth taking a quick look. Our brain has the capacity to grow and strengthen itself based on how we think!

10. Learn to learn. With your understanding of neuroplasticity as a foundation, take the opportunity to develop your capabilities. Learning to learn is a great activity to strengthen your growth mindset, take a look at this online course from coursera.org: learn how to learn.

11. Improve your memory. Another great investment is to improve your memory. This makes it easier to acquire other skills and has a lot of other benefits too. Try this mindvalley masterclass.

12. Teach back these insights. A great way to consolidate your learning is to share it with others. You might start by sharing the growth mindset / fixed mindset model with your team! This creates the opportunity for you to reflect on what you have learnt, consolidate key insights and clarify the practical benefits of the learning.

You could start by sharing this video with your team:

Use reflective growth mindset activities to consolidate your learning

As you learn, consolidate your learning with structured self-reflection. Reflection is such an important part of learning (and is often forgotten or missed in our ‘always on’ world). And reflection is especially important when cultivating a mindset!

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action. Peter Drucker

13. Schedule daily or weekly reflection. Some people prefer to find 10-15 mins at the end of each day, some people prefer to schedule 30 mins each Friday morning. Consider what will work best for you, then stick with it (though if you miss one or two sessions, go easy on yourself too!).

Reflect on some simple questions:

• When did I have a closed mindset, and why?
• When did I have an open mindset, and why?
• What have I learnt about myself, as a result?
• What will I do differently next time?

14. Keep a diary. This is a natural extension of daily reflection. Keeping a diary will allow you to look back for connections, patterns, etc, to further develop your self-awareness and learning. The diary doesn’t have to be a daily activity, and it doesn’t have to be an onerous commitment, just take a little time to make some notes during your reflection.

15. Enjoy some quiet discussion. Who do you feel most comfortable sharing your thoughts with? It could be a trusted colleague, family member, or life partner. Finding the right person and enjoying some quiet sharing can be a useful tool that consolidates the value of all the above activities. Introduce the model, share your thoughts, ask them the reflective questions… learn through sharing and discussion!

Very few people stop and think about their purpose. We’re all too busy to stop and think about the bigger picture. However, clarifying the ‘why’ in your life can be a powerful motivation to grow.

16. Find purpose in your work. It might be that serving your team gives you purpose, or the role your company plays in society, or the personal tasks you have to complete. Whatever you do, you can choose to see it as ‘just work’, or you can choose to see it as having a bigger purpose.

17. Reflect on how you want to be remembered as a leader. Writing down your desired leadership legacy, in the form of a eulogy, is a powerful growth mindset activity. It will give you the inspiration to learn, grow and strive toward this goal.

How do I teach my child a growth mindset?

These people are amazing! And wouldn’t it be great if we could all thrive through our challenges? We can! Start with these hands-on growth mindset activities for your home or classroom…

1. Model Behavior

First, here’s the thing. If you don’t have a growth mindset in yourself, don’t expect it from your kids. They don’t listen, they imitate.

So, use the exercises below to show them what a growth mindset looks, sounds, and feels like.

Spend time building your own mindset, and you’ll have a MUCH better chance of teaching it. For that reason, most of the growth mindset activities in this post apply to adults as well as kids.

2. Read Fun Growth Mindset Books

The world is built on engaging stories. And there are so many enchanting books that explain the growth mindset better than a lecture ever will. So, put books in your library that get the key concepts of growth across in a fun way.

3. Ask Growth Mindset Questions for Kids (And Yourself)

Next, use these questions daily at meal times or bedtime to encourage a shift in thinking:

• What did you do today that was hard?

• What mistake did you make today? Did you learn from it?

• What would you like to get better at?

• What is something you have gotten better at recently?

• What’s something you’re curious about?

• How did your brain grow today?

• What question did you ask someone today?

• What did you do today that made you think?
• What did you do today that you’re proud of?

4. Make An Action Plan for Failure

Failure is a key part of life.

It gives us critical feedback about what to improve on. So, when it happens, what’s your plan to bounce back? What strategies can you learn? How do you need to change course?

Write your plan on paper. Do this yourself as an adult, and do it with your child. Soon, you’ll both realize that failure is important.

5. Practice “How Can I Do That?”

This is mindset advice taught to adults, but applies to kids too. So often, we think to ourselves, “I can’t do that.”

But the person with a growth mindset instead asks, “HOW can I do that?”

See the difference?

The new question instantly gets you thinking outside of the box. And instead of giving up, you’re inviting in creativity and possibility.

So, the next time you or your kids use “can’t.” Ask how instead.

6. Sort Fixed and Growth Mindset Sayings

Write these sayings on a slip of paper (or just say them out loud)

Now, have kids tell you whether these are fixed or growth mindset phrases. (This activity reminds adults of what we want to encourage in our own thinking as well.)

7. Turn Negative Into Positive

We all have a small voice in our heads that tells us negative things. So, spend a few minutes brainstorming the kind of negative thoughts that you experience. Then, have everyone practice flipping those thoughts around.

8. Research Famous Failures

Remember those failures from above? Introduce those facts to your family!

Point out that the world’s most successful people had ridiculously hard obstacles to overcome

9. Share Good and Grit: Growth Mindset Dinner Activities

One variation on “high and low” at dinnertime is to express something good that happened that day and something “gritty.” In other words, share something that made you show up with determination.

Was it…

• a tough math test?
• a difficult client at work?
• trying something for the first time?
• a classmate who said something unkind?

10. Praise for Failure

One of my favorite stories is of a young female entrepreneur that came home from school every day to one question.

Her father asked her if she failed today. If the answer was yes, he gave her a hi-5. If not, he acted disappointed.

Now, because her childhood home life reinforced the value of getting out of her comfort zone, she has a much easier time doing so as an adult.

11. Create Growth Mindset Affirmations

Affirmations have the power to change your thinking over time. So, use them to change your mindset. Try one of these affirmations:

• I give my best effort.
• I can do hard things.
• I stay with a problem, even when it’s hard.
• Challenges make me stronger than before.
• If I can’t do something, it’s only because I haven’t learned it or figured it out yet.
• I can learn new strategies and ways of doing things.

12. Journal for a Growth Mindset

Next, use a journal to guide your thoughts. Write a record of new experiences, things you’ve learned, and skills or habits to improve.

13. Inspire With Quotes

This article with beautiful growth mindset quotes will motivate your entire family. Put up the free wall art, and you’ll be constantly reminded of the growth mindset you’re trying to build.

14. Practice Adding Yet

As soon as someone says, “I can’t,” add “yet” to the end of the sentence.

I can’t do that math. Yet.

I can’t drive a car. Yet.

Now, make it a game. Who can say it first? If your kids can beat you to saying “yet,” give them a fun reward coupon.

15. Try Role Playing: Growth Mindset Activities for Kids

*Great for elementary students and middle school

Next, use different scenarios to show kids when they’ll need to employ their growth mindset. Ideas include:

• If you struggle with something at school (or work)
• When your sibling or friend can do something you can’t (yet)
• If it takes you a long time to learn something.

16. Reward a Growth Mindset

Did you watch your child work her butt off even when it was hard? Did YOU decide to keep learning instead of giving up?

Reinforce these growth mindset activities by rewarding your kids or yourself in a healthy way! Check out

17. Try New Things

Next, try new things as a family often.

Courage takes practice. It’s like a muscle. The more you use it, the easier it becomes to do uncomfortable things.

18. Learn About the Brain

Modern research reveals that the brain is more “plastic” than we originally thought. That’s great news because it puts our learning, progress, and success in our own hands.

19. Talk About Goal Setting

*Great for teens and college students!

Does your child hope to accomplish something specific? Do you have a big goal in mind?

20. Make Your Mistakes Visual

Have everyone in the group (or family) write a mistake on a piece of paper. Now, crumple up the paper and put it in a drawer. After a day or two, get those papers out and review them.

Discuss how it felt when you wrote down your mistake, versus how it felt later. Then, talk about how you can learn from the mistakes on paper

21. Do a 30-Day Challenge

Are you in a rut, but not sure of how to get out? Check out this big list of 30-day challenge ideas, and pick one to jumpstart your life.

22. Ask for Feedback

Whether it’s work or parenting, it’s difficult to understand our blind spots on our own. So, critical feedback is how we grow.

Therefore, ask your children questions that help you parent them, and ask your boss, colleagues, or audience what they’d like to see from you.

23. Read Every Day

The single best thing I did for my mindset was to complete a year-long reading challenge. The amount I learned was mind-blowing (and my income tripled).

Plus, by prioritizing reading over other hobbies consistently, I realized that life truly is a game of learning.

24. Refresh Your Daily Routines

Sometimes, it helps to start small. In this case, evaluate your morning routine and make note of where you can switch it up or add learning to your everyday habits.

Remember, one tiny change will lead to stunning results over time. (1% growth today =38% growth in a year)

25. Keep Your Mind Sharp

Are you training your mind to learn? If your memory is poor, or you’d like to sharpen your toolbox slowly over time, try an app like Elevate.

26. Practice Self-Reflection

Create a daily practice of asking yourself what went well today and what can be improved.

This not only helps you focus on the good but also gives you insight into habits or experiences that aren’t aligning with your values.

You can also use these deep questions to ask yourself as a guide for gaining awareness of your strengths, weaknesses, and overall life alignment.

27. Keep Your Big Picture In Mind

And finally, for adults, it’s easy to get jaded by everything from the news, to our endlessly busy lives, and mundane daily routines.

Fight this by occasionally deep diving into your purpose and the legacy you’d like to leave behind.

3 Mindset Tests, Assessments, and Questionnaires

Interested in assessing your own or your kids’ mindsets? Here are some scientifically validated, online assessments you can do.

1. Growth Mindset Assessment

Here’s a very, very short quiz; it’s only three questions long. It is called the Growth Mindset Scale and looks at your beliefs about the nature of intelligence and effort.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this very brief test is that you can view sample results from surveyed pupils. At the time of writing, only 30% had a growth mindset, according to this questionnaire.

This assessment is made available by the Raikes and William and Flora Hewlett Foundations (Dweck 2006; Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007; Dweck, 2012).

2. Dweck Mindset Instrument

Here is a copy of Dweck’s original Mindset Instrument. It includes 16 items on a six-point Likert scale, such as:

• Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.
• No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
• You have a certain amount of talent, and you can’t do much to change it.
• No matter who you are, you can significantly improve your level of talent.

This test was designed to assess the degree to which individuals feel or think that intelligence is changeable or fixed (P’Pool, 2012).

3. The Mindset Survey

The Mindset Survey is our very own PositivePsychology.com tool, and it aims to quantify your beliefs about how variable your intelligence is. Use this survey on your clients or yourself to get a good idea of how you view effort, learning, and ideal performance, as well as how you view setbacks and failure.

With eight items in total, this survey is measured on a four-point Likert scale and includes questions such as:

• No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
• You can learn new things, but you can’t change how intelligent you are.
• You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can’t be changed.

Exercises and Activities to Help Achieve a Growth Mindset

Looking for some actionable ways to achieve a growth mindset? This excellent article includes some practical activities for students and adults: Growth Mindset vs. Fixed + Key Takeaways From Dweck’s Book.

Some of the activities include:

The Crumpled Reminder Activity – This brief exercise invites you or your client to write down a recent setback you’ve experienced then reassess your understanding of failure.

A Classroom Discussion Task – These prompts encourage a discussion of the opportunities that arise from failure.

The Mistake Game – This exercise is designed to help students talk about mistakes openly, helping them to embrace them and use them for learning.

Mindset Questions You Should Be Asking

Changing your mindset means challenging your perspectives. Our thoughts, opinions, values, and beliefs are often so deeply ingrained that it’s difficult or even uncomfortable to start that process.

Imagine an iceberg.

The iceberg metaphor is very commonplace when we’re discussing our thoughts, behaviors, and their impact. If you bear with me, we can take this analogy and use it to understand how questioning helps us change our mindset.

At the tip of the iceberg – In the 10% floating above the surface, we have visible results. These might be successful results or failures. You might have landed the job of your dreams, or you might have failed an exam.

Below the surface – Then there’s the remaining 90% of the iceberg. This represents everything that the world doesn’t see. Here, we have everything that goes into that outcome. We have hard work, positive self-talk, and so forth. Or, we might have deeply set beliefs that unconsciously shape our behaviors. Think: “What’s the point in studying anymore? I can’t do any better.” Or think about hard work, repeated effort, and telling yourself: “I’ve got it in me. Let’s try again, but smarter.”

By confronting these hidden beliefs and schemas with questions, we stand a much better chance of developing a growth mindset.

Great mindset questions to ask yourself

Let’s consider some of the most common things we tell ourselves and look at some questions we can ask in their place to change our mindsets.

3 Useful Mindset Worksheets: Skills and Techniques to Apply to Your Mindset

At PositivePsychology.com, a whole comprehensive section of our toolkit is dedicated exclusively to mindset. Here are some of the worksheets we recommend if you’re trying to cultivate a growth mindset in yourself or a client. You can obtain access and over 400 other tools and assessments with an annual subscription.

1. Increasing a Growth Mindset Through Writing

Reflective writing can help you develop a growth mindset by inviting you to evaluate your experiences so that you learn and improve your approach. By recounting an experience in hindsight, you can consider how the approaches and skills you used were helpful or otherwise. The idea is to grow from your experience and continue on toward success.

Increasing a Growth Mindset Through Writing gives you or your client a framework for this writing, encouraging you to take a mindful and purposeful approach to your learning experiences. You’ll identify the shortcomings of a particular process and develop an idea of how to amend them in the future.

2. Adopting a Growth Mindset to Criticism

Sometimes, it’s hard to receive feedback without feeling hurt or discouraged. Nonetheless, some people are able to absorb criticism and use it adaptively to work for results that they want. People with a growth mindset don’t allow themselves to become overwhelmed or upset with negative feedback; instead, they see it as a way to improve.

In this worksheet, you’re invited to reflect on a particular incident or event that made you feel negative – for instance, being told that you didn’t speak clearly in a presentation.

You’ll analyze this to a reasonable extent, then reframe the situation and create some self-affirming statements that help you handle it better next time. Through this exercise, you can develop your strategies for handling criticism and using it as encouragement instead.

3. Doors Closed, Doors Open

Failure sometimes feels like a loss, especially if you’re used to thinking with a fixed mindset. You missed an opportunity, pushed someone away, or disappointed a friend, and things seem pretty dismal.

Having the right mindset means being optimistic, learning to recognize and focus on the opportunities that have arisen from that failure, rather than fixating on the ‘closed door.’

This is a very simple yet powerful exercise that asks you to recollect a time when you felt like you missed out on or lost something through failure. It gives you prompts to help you reappraise that situation and consider the positives, along with your potential opportunities for growth.

5 Ideas to Help Nurture a Growth Mindset

As we’ve seen, mindset is something that can be developed. So what can we do to cultivate a growth mindset? Here are some ideas.

1. Embrace more challenges

Failing can be tough when you have a fixed mindset. When we feel like our failures represent our limits, we avoid situations that could highlight those limitations. Develop your staying power and psychological flexibility by taking on new situations where failure is a definite possibility. If and when you fail, try again.

By changing your approach and learning from your setback, success will follow at some point. You’ll learn a valuable lesson about perseverance and your capabilities.

2. View growth as a process

Our accomplishments or failures don’t define our experiences. When you can embrace the whole journey with all its obstacles and hitches, you’ll become more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Lots of us tend to be very focused on end results, which sometimes blinkers us to the baby steps that even pros take to get there.

3. Set your own pace

Try engaging with learning experiences and accepting them for what they are. Everyone learns, fails, and grows at their own pace, and you are your own person. Whether it’s mastering a new skill or conquering a long-standing fear, you’ll get there; remind yourself of that.

What works for one person won’t work for another. With hard work and dedication, you’ll find a pathway that works for you.

4. Everyone fails

Everyone makes mistakes. To nurture a growth mindset, you can start by acknowledging this, then accepting it. You’re not the first one to slip up, and it doesn’t define who you are; others have been there before you. Keep going, trust in yourself, and look within yourself for validation, not outside. Be realistic.

5. Develop resilience

This one is closely related to the above: to fail and keep trying requires resilience. To keep going in the face of adversity, it’s important to practice self-compassion, and mental toughness, and be your own best friend. When we take failure as a given, we grant ourselves the freedom and space to try again. This theory of resilience training is a useful way to develop your capacity to deal with difficulties.

Growth Mindset Professional Development Activities

• Language Tracking Worksheet  and Language Tracking Worksheet Instructions 
  *Can be modified to use with students.* Learning to identify fixed and growth mindset language is an important step in cultivating a growth mindset. This worksheet for tracking growth and fixed mindset language that you hear throughout the week provides an opportunity to actively practice identifying each and can expose points of confusion. It can be used with teachers working in professional learning teams or with middle and high school students.
• Fixed and Growth Mindset Language—Common Points of Confusion 
  This handout is paired with the Language Tracking Worksheet (see above). This sheet provides fixed/growth/neutral statements that educators have shared with us that are great examples of common points of confusion.
• Growth Mindset Scenarios Worksheet 
  This worksheet provides scenarios for educators to practice how to respond in situations when they hear students, parents, or other teachers speaking in fixed mindset ways.
• Reframing for a Growth Mindset 
  This worksheet provides opportunities to practice changing fixed or ambiguous statements into growth mindset statements.
• Mistakes Reflection Worksheet 
  *Can be modified to use with students.* Taking time to reflect on how we respond to our own mistakes can help us recognize opportunities for developing more growth mindset-oriented self-talk. This activity can help educators reflect on their own reactions to making mistakes and to rewrite any fixed mindset reactions they had. It could also be used with older students.
• Growth Mindset Familiarity Activity 
  If you are conducting a workshop or giving a presentation on growth mindset, this activity can give you a sense of where participants are at with regards to their prior knowledge about growth mindset. It will also let you know how convinced they are that mindsets are important and what areas of uncertainty they may have, which can help you pace your presentation.
• There’s No Limit: Mathematics Teaching for a Growth Mindset 
  A summary of dissertation work by Dr. Kathy Liu Sun. In this study, Sun examined the relationship between teachers’ classroom practices and students’ beliefs about math ability. She found that teachers’ mindsets were not predictive of students’ mindsets. Instead, teachers’ views of math and their classroom practices were found to predict mindset. This research highlights the importance of specific classroom strategies for supporting students in developing growth mindsets.
• Checklist of Growth Mindset Teaching Practices 
  This checklist of growth mindset teaching practices is based on Kathy Liu Sun’s Research (see above). This 1-page handout provides a way to more easily track which growth mindset-promoting practices you are incorporating in your classroom.
• Making Friends with Your Fixed Mindset 
  *Can be modified to use with students.* We are all susceptible to having fixed mindset reactions in certain situations. In this activity, participants are asked to identify what kinds of situations trigger them to respond in fixed mindset ways and to strategize ways to respond more adaptively in the future.
• Mindset Integration Activity—Facilitator Instructions 
  *Can be modified to use with students.* This activity asks participants to make connections between fixed/growth mindset beliefs and the behaviors that flow from each belief. It also provides an opportunity for participants to solidify their understanding of what kinds of teaching and/or parenting practices promote a fixed or growth mindset.
• Growth / Fixed Mindset Continuum Activity 
  *Can be modified to use with students.* This activity helps participants understand we all have both fixed and growth mindsets about different abilities/traits/skills. It encourages participants to explore their own beliefs and hear from others about why they believe what they do.
• Classroom Culture Brainstorming Activity Facilitator Guide 
  This activity is designed for teams of educators to use during a professional learning workshop. The goal is to provide participants with an opportunity to share their best practices and generate new ideas on how to create a strong learning mindset culture in their classrooms/schools.
• Implementation Planning Worksheet 
  This worksheet is designed to be used in conjunction with a Brainstorming Activity to give workshop participants an opportunity to plan out how they will implement a new practice. It can be used in any workshop where participants would benefit from planning time on implementing a new practice.
• Feedback for Growth Strategies 
  This handout provides suggestions for how to frame common feedback messages so that they focus students’ attention on the processes involved in mastering a learning goal and on normalizing mistakes and struggle as helpful during learning.
• Growth Mindset Brainstorming Activity Facilitator Guide 
  This activity is designed to help workshop or study group participants integrate what they have learned about growth mindset—either through attending a presentation or by going through the online growth mindset modules on the MindsetKit.org—into their classroom or school practices.
• Growth Mindset Notes Tracker 
  *Can be modified to use with students.* This notes tracker handout can be useful for participants attending a presentation on growth mindset or those independently going through the Mindset Kit modules.
• Writing Your Growth Mindset Story 
  *Can be modified to use with students.* Sharing a personal story with students about how having a growth mindset helped you accomplish something challenging can be a powerful way to model what having a growth mindset means. This reflective writing activity is designed to help you identify and refine a story from your own life that you could share with your students. This activity can be modified for use with students or mentors.

Peer Observation Tools

Just as students need feedback to grow their abilities and skills, so do teachers. When teachers can work together to provide each other feedback, they gain valuable insight on how to improve their practices. Below are several tools teacher teams can use to help with this process.

• Peer Observation Worksheet 
  This worksheet can be used to write notes during an observation.
• Peer Observation Debrief Worksheet 
  This worksheet provides a series of questions to guide the debriefing process after an observation. It can be completed by both the observed teacher and the observer. It can be helpful to have a discussion afterwards to share what was discovered.
• NSRF Observation Protocol Video Camera 
  If teachers have never worked together to do peer observations, it may be unnerving or even threatening. This protocol from NSRF provides a framework for working together in a way that will feel respectful and safe.
• Thinking Critically About Practice 
  This video by the Teaching Channel about the peer observation process can be helpful for introducing teaches to the idea of peer observation.

Creating a Safe Educator Team Environment

The value of professional learning communities comes from participants feeling safe to give and receive feedback, explore solutions to challenges, and test new ideas without fear of judgement. These two resources can help educator teams build trust by creating agreements on how to work together effectively and respectfully.

• Communication Skills for Effective Collaboration 
  This document provides some suggestions for communication practices that educator teams may want to adopt to help build effective collaborative relationships within their professional learning communities.
• NSRF Forming Ground Rules 
  Ground Rules, or Norms, are important for a group that intends to work together on difficult issues, or who will be working together over time. Starting with basic Ground Rules builds trust, clarifies group expectations of one another, and establishes points of “reflection” to see how the group is doing regarding process. This protocol can help groups identify what their ground rules and norms will be. Over time, they can be added to, or condensed, as the group progresses.

A Take-Home Message

So, can you develop a growth mindset? Have you tried one of the online assessments we’ve linked to? Or perhaps, you’re an educator interested in helping your students become more resilient when dealing with problems. Wherever your interest lies, Dweck’s mindset theory gives us a lot to think about.

Research suggests that with the right attitude, we can improve the way we deal with life’s difficulties. If you’ve found any of this material useful for yourself or your practice, let us know. Leave your comments below and share your thoughts with us!