You definitely want to one teach students about how our brains are working and why challenges and mistakes are important in the learning process and two you want to celebrate the effort that they’re putting in and the progress that they’re making and not just the final outcome.
~ Zeba from Ep.115 of The Kindergarten Cafe Podcast
Episode Summary
New year, new mindset! In this episode, we’re talking all about growth mindset. What it actually looks like in a kindergarten classroom and how you can start teaching it in simple, meaningful ways. Whether you’re heading back after winter break or saving this for later, you’ll walk away with clear ideas you can use right away.
In this episode I share:
- How to explain “persistence” to young learners
- A super relatable way to teach the “Goldilocks zone” of challenge
- Why praising effort (not just outcomes) builds real resilience
- The magic of the word “yet” and how to help kids use it
- Favorite books, videos, and activities that reinforce growth mindset
- Why your modeling of mistakes might be the most powerful lesson of all
Related Episodes:
Learn More:
Resources:
- New Year’s Classroom Pack
- Growth Mindset: Social Emotional Read Alouds
- Sesame Street: Power of Yet
- Class Dojo Growth Mindset Video Series
Connect with Zeba:
- Instagram – @kindergartencafe
- Facebook – @kindergartencafe
- Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
- Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe
Read the Transcript
[0:00] Hello, teacher friends, and happy new year. Today is January 1st, if you’re listening to it live. And I thought, what better time than now to talk about growth mindset. The new year is a great time to think about goals, and it’s a great time to think about setting goals for the new year. And so we are often having those conversations with our students when we go back to school. We’re thinking about them ourselves. So it’s a good time to talk about growth mindset. But even if you don’t plan on connecting growth mindset right away when you get back to school, this is a good episode to come back to when you are ready to teach your students a little bit about growth mindset, especially when you’re seeing kids struggle with making mistakes or with persevering through challenges. So let’s get into it.
[0:58] You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast, where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom-tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing your stress, all while using effective and purposeful lessons that students love? Let’s get started.
[1:47] Okay, so the first thing that we want to make sure our students understand is persistence. Persistence, we can actually use that fancy word with them and teach it to them. They love when they hear fancy words. But persistence means that we keep trying even when something is hard.
[2:05] And I have a whole episode on how to teach kids persistence. But we want to talk about how our brains need to have challenges in order to grow just like how our muscles grow when we are exercising right when we are faced with physical challenges it’s actually good for our bodies to be growing our muscles to grow and our brains are the same way and i like to talk about goldilocks and the three bears a little bit here because i talk about how challenges are actually really, really important. Problems that are hard to solve are really important for us to learn. Our brain is growing when we have challenges like this. And what that means is if we are working on something that is too easy for us, our brain is not going to grow. If we’re working on something that is way too hard that we are getting so frustrated and so upset and so angry, that is too hard. That is not going to help our brain to grow. And so we need to make sure we are constantly working on problems that are just right, that have a little bit of a challenge, not too hard that we’re getting frustrated and upset, but a little bit of a challenge so that we can grow. And so that’s my job as the teacher to make sure they have the problems that are just right. But it’s important for them to know that their job is to not give up when they get a problem because I’ve made sure it’s a problem that they can handle and that.
[3:32] It’s a problem that’s going to help their brain to grow. So they don’t need to give up. We need to keep trying, right? Because we don’t always want things that are too easy. And this is a great analogy to do with reading as well and talk about how if they’re reading books that are too easy, then their brain’s not going to grow. But if they’re reading books that are way too hard, that’s not going to help them learn to read. So it’s a good connection to that as well. but we can talk about this in terms of setting goals for the new year if it’s you know a nice connection to that if you’re if you’re talking about new year’s resolutions with your students because you want to talk about well what’s a goal of something that is not too too hard but something that is a little challenging that you want to get better at right i also think it’s important to recognize that we can support kids developing persistence in our classroom culture, by celebrating their effort and their perseverance, right? And so that means praising the effort and not the outcome. So if they hand you the math worksheet, you know, you don’t just say, oh, wow, look, you got all the problems right.
[4:39] Instead, you can celebrate like, wow, I saw you working so hard. Or I even see you made a mistake here and you erased it, but you checked your work and you thought, okay, I’m going to try this again. And this time you got it right. So your brain was really working hard to think like a mathematician. Like mathematicians make mistakes and then they learn from them. Instead of praising like, oh, you got all these things right. You’re talking about the effort it took to complete it, that they didn’t give up, that they use strategies, that they asked a friend or talk to a friend, that they made sure that they used manipulatives or they drew a picture to help them or they use numbers and words to solve their problem. I’m like, talking about the strategies that kids use and praising those is.
[5:25] Really puts the emphasis on perseverance and how we’re focusing on what can we do to help our brains grow instead of like, did we get it right or wrong? Same with reading. Okay, instead of saying, yeah, you read that whole book, great. You read the whole book perfectly. No, instead, praise the effort. Wow, I saw you really checking to make sure that the words you were saying match the words on the page. Or I saw you sounding out the words. You did not give up even if that word was tricky right that those are the wordings that we can use when we’re celebrating the effort and perseverance and that reinforces persistence and the value of a growth mindset another thing that we want to teach our kids in addition in addition to persistence is the concept of yet the magic of yet i love this phrase and it’s the idea that by simply adding the word yet to a phrase of i can’t do this, it’s going to help us have a growth mindset and get even better at what we want to do. Because it’s not that we can never do it with hard work, with perseverance.
[6:33] Even if we make mistakes and we don’t, but we don’t give up, we keep trying, we can learn to do this thing. Everyone can learn to do any of the things, right? I don’t know how to ride a bike yet. Add that yet, because you will learn how to ride a bike, but you need practice. You need time. You need help. You need someone to teach you. But if your brain, and I say this to the kids all the time, your brain is listening to the things you say. And just like you need to be bucket fillers, if you know the book How to Fill a Bucket, just like you need to be nice and kind to other people, you need to be nice and kind to yourself because your brain listens and hears what you’re saying.
[7:14] So if you’re saying, I can’t ride my bike, your brain is going to think, I can’t ride my bike ever. But if you say, I can’t ride my bike yet, your brain is thinking, okay, what do I need to do to be able to learn how to ride my bike? I’m going to have to work hard. I’m not going to be able to give up. it’s a really important phrase that we want kids to start adding. So if you hear a kid, after you’ve taught this, of course, if you hear a kid saying, I can’t draw that, say yet and have them say it. I can’t draw that yet. And you’ll start to hear them say it on their own. But adding that magic word yet is really helpful. And there’s some great books and resources. And my favorite is Sesame Street video song that will get stuck in your head for ever. “The Power of yet, yet, yet, yet”. If you know it, you know what I’m talking about. Now it’s stuck in your head too.
[8:08] A couple other things that you can do in your daily activities to incorporate growth mindset. One is read-alouds and focusing on like how characters are making mistakes or not giving up, things like that. But I also really like books that explicitly teach about growth mindset, the power of making mistakes. There’s one called the girl who never made a mistake that really highlights why mistakes are a good thing. I love your fantastic elastic brain to really explicitly teach kids about how our brain grows and learns and why mistakes are helpful. And I love the class dojo video series they have. They have one on growth mindset, but they also have one, they have several other series as well. And it really goes, the kids really learn from these little bite-sized videos about how mistakes are a good thing and how we can persevere and not give up and all of that. And I also think your modeling as well is a big part of teaching growth mindset. Oh, Miss McGibbon made a mistake. That’s okay. I’m going to learn from this. Or, you know, oh, oh, I made a mistake. That’s okay. Even teachers make mistakes. Yep, we all make mistakes, right? And I talk to parents, too, when I have kids that really struggle with this, of saying it’s important for them to hear when you make a mistake.
[9:31] Right. Like you don’t have to go and, you know, purposely make a mistake. But, you know, oh, whoops, I grabbed the wrong ingredient for dinner. I made a mistake, but that’s OK. I’m going to learn from it. I’ll put it back and we’ll do the right thing the next time. I don’t know. You know, oh, whoops, I made a mistake. It’s I got dressed in a T-shirt and it’s actually a lot colder than I thought. That’s OK. I’ll just go up and change. No big deal.
[9:54] Right. And just verbalizing what we kind of have as natural thoughts in our head. Like oh didn’t mean to do that oh well right no big deal just verbalize that oops i made a mistake i wrote the word and when i was trying to write the word the whoops i’ll just fix that real quick right it’s just a modeling of mistakes are normal and they’re not a big deal and this is really important for those kids that like cry when they make a mistake or that are too afraid to make a mistake that they don’t like so they don’t challenge themselves to do harder work you’ll see that a lot in some kids where they just don’t want they don’t want to try harder or they don’t want to try things that are hard because they’re afraid of making a mistake and so this will help those students in particular but I do think having goals is another great way to help kids with teaching growth mindset and persistence and what better time to set a goal than the new year so if you are thinking of that when I come back with my students I like to do a I have a little new year’s pack and I like to have them set three new year’s resolutions and we talk about things that they can actually do in school that they want to get better at and they’re often completely adorable.
[11:12] Get better at reading. Sometimes it’s like get better at soccer or gymnastics, but like at least one of them should be school related. I try to have them focus on. And then we keep that to the end of the year and they can look back on it, which is really cute.
[11:25] So yeah, definitely great time to think about growth mindset. It’s a great time to think about teaching growth mindset and persistence with your students because of the new year. But no matter when you do it, you definitely want to, one, teach students about how our brains are working and why challenges and mistakes are important in the learning process. And two, you want to celebrate the effort that they’re putting in and the progress that they’re making and not just the final outcome. You want to make sure that you’re noticing the strategies that they’re using when they’re working hard. And three, have a classroom culture where you are modeling your own mistakes and or the persistence that you’re seeing. And like I said, celebrating those. So if you want other recommendations for teaching persistence, definitely check out the older episode I have. It goes into more depth on specifically persistence.
[12:22] And I highly recommend you checking out those resources like the Class Dojo video series. And if you are looking for even more social emotional support, check out my website, kindergartencafe.org slash social dash emotional dash learning. It has every single blog post podcast out there, as well as a free challenge that you can join that has five days of common social emotional challenges that classrooms face and how to support students with those challenges. So all that can be found on my website. Thanks so much for listening. And if you have a goal for the new year, a teaching goal, let me know. I would love to hear it. Maybe I can even help send some resources your way.
[13:05] And I hope you have a very happy new year. Thanks so much for listening to The Kindergarten Cafe Podcast be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies if you’ve liked this episode the best ways to show your support are to subscribe leave a review or send it to a friend i’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips see you then.