Dear Dot Connector,

Dear Dot Connector,

Hi. It’s me, Candace. Well it’s you but in your more developed years. I wrote you a letter a about the Growth Mindset and some of the phenomenal benefits of adopting this thinking process. In the letter I mentioned that pop-ups would come. Well, here it is. POP UP! Major question alert: Are your students mimicking the environment you wish to create or mastering the creation of an environment you wish to share with them.

When you started this section of your life you posed a series of fundamental objectives to challenge yourself and set up a reward system as motivation. Thinking with your students in mind the challenge was getting them to talk to peers in class whom they were not friends with. You even wrote a blog about it called ‘Is it really A New Culture?’.

Making students wonder was an integral part of the gains here and you have done that. The various methods you used to compile data show you that they at minimum understood generating questions that frame the learning process themselves instead of you doing it for them was crucial. In your Growth Mindset initial reflections you looked at the four steps to developing the though process and now look at what you’ve been able to do.

Your students are going to feed off of your energy and they will need you to encourage through the frustration. This is an essential part of helping them develop the growth mindset you wrote about. Don’t forget.

You will also model this through transparency of your process in the master’s program at Lamar. Let them see that you do not have all of the answers. Let them see your struggle and how you work through the imperfections of learning. Be encouraged as you allow them to see that what you once though was true about a perfect environment does not exist. When you see a student looking off encourage them to put forth more effort, apply the strategies, and redirect their desire to cheat into the yet of learning. They will understand because you’ve exposed them to failing forward faster. Grow forward is the new name you gave it and I love it.

Exercise caution when trying to increase rigor. It is a tricky beast. The focus should always be on the learning. It is easy to get caught up in trying to increase the lexile levels and lose the foundation of student learning. How hard something is should not determine if your students have learned or not. Stand your ground kid.

To help you there is a 3-column table and UbD table that will force you to think outside of your normal comfort zone and really analyze what you are trying to do with your innovation plan. These components are critical because they impact the core design of revolutionizing change in your campus. The powers that be will need to see that an epidemic of learning culture can spread and be effective. Organic and student lead environments are what they are looking for anyway.

Your Learning Philosophy is going to grow. Don't be discouraged. Anything that isn't growing is dead. You know this already.

I am rooting for you!

Signed,

Candace - your future learning self