Growth Mindset is Genius

After watching this video, I am just amazed at these ideas. I've always thought that the way education is viewed by some is not the way that it should be. Testing, testing, testing, and that's all it seems to be. Personally, I rarely run away from an educational challenge, but failure for me has always been a flaw. I've never seen failure as a learning experience because it's always been a defect or something that I cannot improve because I missed that 'A' and there is no going back to fix it. 

Learning in other aspects of my life has always been fun. I love to challenge myself with new things, be it running, hiking, or even new arts and crafts projects. It's fun to not know how to do something and then to learn how to do it. It feels like an accomplishment. But in educational settings, this has never been the case because I'm being graded on what I know, not my potential to know it. Being judged or graded on my own work has always made me extraordinarily nervous and it makes me terrified of failure because not only do I know I failed, but so does the person who judged or graded me. This video really spoke to me and gave me a new way to look at learning and I honestly wish I could have watched it sooner.

Being at OU has taught me that I over-prepare when it comes to studying. I'm so nervous that I'm going to fail, that I study far more than I should. In most cases, this is a good thing because I am learning a lot more and retaining it better, but I've been doing it for the wrong reasons. I think employing the thought process of "Growth Mindset" is going to help me immensely this semester, particularly in some of the classes I'm more worried about. It will help me think of things as more of an opportunity to receive feedback and grow and improve and learn, rather than as judgement and failure. 

I really enjoyed reading through some of the Growth Mindset challenges and am hoping to try some of them out over the semester, particularly the writing challenge one. Finally, to close out this blog post, I'm sharing my favorite meme from the Growth Mindset Memes blog. This made me laugh, but it also (it's going to get cheesy) made me want to try harder.

Meme created by Laura Gibbs

I mean, look at that cat. One way or another, it's going to get that food and it's going to learn something along the way.