This past school year we have learned about a ton of cool and useful things, things like different camera angles, advertising and advocacy, how to code, we’ve even had a mini exhibition! One of the most useful things that we have learned about (in my opinion anyway) is learning to have a growth mindset. We have been working on having a growth mindset all year and I think that I have improved since the beginning of the year.

What is a growth mindset?

having a growth mindset means that you are willing to push yourself out of your
comfort zone and maybe even fail at something. You think things like, what could I do better next time or, if I fail I can learn from my mistakes and improve for
next time. If you have a growth mindset you want people to congratulate you on how hard you worked not on how smart you are. You believe that you can learn anything and you can get better at anything. You know that your effort determines more than your current abilities.

What is a fixed mindset?

Having a fixed mindset means you would rather put less effort into an assignment and get a good mark than put a ton of effort into an assignment and get a great mark. If you fail, you get frustrated and give up. If you have a fixed mindset you want people to congratulate you on how smart you are, not how hard you worked, because let’s be honest, you know you didn’t work as hard as you could have. You believe that you’re either good at something or you’re not. You think that your abilities determine more than the effort that you put in.

Most people have a mix of a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. In some areas they know they can improve and they want to improve so they work really hard at that certain thing. In other areas however they don’t think they can get any better, so they don’t bother trying. Probably the most common thing to happen is for someone to know they can get better at something but they just don’t want to put in the time and effort it takes to get better at it.

My growth mindset experience

In my mini exhibition blog post I explain how I had to completely change the design of my house a few days before the exhibition and normally that would make me really annoyed and think “why me? What did I do to deserve this?” But for some reason I wasn’t even that annoyed.  If this happened at the beginning of the year however, before i knew about having a growth mindset versus having a fixed mindset I probably would’ve gotten really stressed. The final product would’ve probably reflected my mood at the time (meaning I would have done a poor job, just in case you couldn’t figure that one out). In the end I ended up loving my project and it was all thanks to my growth mindset.

In class we made long term goals that we were willing to work towards and maybe even fail at. We had to make it one (max 2) sentence long and put it on a selfie or just a picture of us. We submitted them to showbie, our teacher Petra Willemse would either tell us something she wanted us to change or she would say “print” which meant that we didn’t have to make any changes and she was going to print it and put it up on the wall. When I handed in my first draft Ms Willemse told me to put some shading behind the letters, so I went into photoshop fix and drew it in by hand. I submitted it again and I got a print! My goal is now hung up in the classroom on public display next to the goals of my other classmates.
Here are the links to all the apps that I used to make my long term goal: pages, photoshop fix, showbie and snapseed.