Growth Mindset

Fixed mindset and growth mindset are both two familiar terms to me, but I have never spent any time researching them or had the opportunity to learn more in depth about them. As far as the theory behind both go, I can position myself being on both sides of this theory at different points of my life. One of the questions that was posted is do you think your mindset differs on the situation you are in? My answer to this is yes I think it does. Every kid and every adult has their own likes and dislikes and everybody is into different things. For example, a young kid who is super into sports may have a growth mindset all the time at a sports practice, but that same kid who doesn't enjoy school may have more of a fixed mindset in a school atmosphere and only apply the growth mindset ever so often. I can relate to this a lot. Growing up I loved sports so I always kept a growth mindset because I was eager to learn new things. As for school, I never had a problem with it growing up but I definitely had certain classes that I enjoyed more than others. In this case, for example, history class was not as exciting and enjoyable for me as lets say EMT class I took here at LMC. I took EMT class because it is a part of what I want to do with my life, so I was interested and always had a growth mindset going into that class. So I definitely think the situation, adult or child, has a play into having either a growth or fixed mindset about something. I have been in school a majority of my life and I have learned a lot about myself over the years. Up until high school, school was always super easy for me and I was always pretty involved in my classes. When I started high school, the classes weren't overly hard but my attention wasn't as focused in some of them that didn't intrigue me. I often thought that some classes, such as pre-calculus, was too hard for me. However, my junior year I took pre-calc and was able to change my fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and ultimately I think that helped me a lot in the class. I ended both the semesters of that class with a B. It was way better than I thought I would ever do, but what I learned is if you have a growth mindset going into something, the outcome is much more likely to be positive than negative. My biggest challenge with learning new things is my interest level. There are many things that I would love to learn and know more about, but the things that I am not interested in make it harder for me to focus and learn. I used to go into something new thinking it was too hard to learn about, since I had no idea about whatever it is coming into it. However, I have changed and now keep an open mind about everything, and keep in mind that learning new things and making your brain work harder is only going to make you smarter. I think I am going to be interested in learning more about growth mindset this semester since it is something that has helped me already in my life. Learning new strategies and ways to use growth mindset to overcome a fixed mindset is also interesting to me. So overall, I think learning more about growth is going to be a good thing in this class. A personal learning goal for me this semester is to always keep a growth mindset and open mind, no matter what the topic or subject is that we are learning about. I think that this will help me become more knowledgeable about things I have not learned about in the past and I look forward to doing so.