LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Dave Paunesku on student self-reflection

One important way that teachers can, uh, enhance a growth mindset is to really help students self-reflect on their own learning. So, in the LearnStorm activities, we try to be really intentional about, uh, creating a lot of room for students to engage in self-reflection.

One of our goals in doing that was to really kind of help teachers create that really self-reflective environment and really get the school year started that way. Hopefully, that's something that can be then carried forward for the rest of the school year.

It can be really easy to learn a bunch of stuff and not realize that you're learning it in the absence of self-reflection. Self-reflection can really help us recognize what we're doing. It can help us connect it to why we're doing it. It can really help us internalize more deeply certain ideas.

When teachers help students reflect on their own learning, they can think about what the goals are for their learning. Then, as they're going through and accomplishing those goals, if students are self-reflecting on that and they're seeing those goals as a part of being on a growth trajectory, that'll help them get to whether it's a good grade or becoming a better writer or a better mathematician.

That's ultimately more motivating for students, and it really helps them see that they're making progress on that trajectory, which is a lot more motivating than just kind of, uh, taking off things that don't really seem to be that related to each other.

I think one particularly important kind of self-reflection is when students, um, hear teachers or hear themselves or hear their peers, uh, self-reflect on the ways that struggles help them improve. It could be a really good reminder that the struggles aren't kind of, uh, the endpoint of something.

Struggling doesn't mean that you should give up and that you're not cut out to do something, but to the contrary, if we use the right kinds of strategies and we persist, and maybe if we get help from others, um, we can overcome challenges and become better learners or better mathematicians or better at whatever—better skateboarders, better at whatever the tasks might be.