Grow your mindset!

Adopting a growth mindset is essential to success. Often, I have found that I get bogged down with perfection, which in turn increases my frustration when trying to accomplish something. This has truly been amplified during the process of this course. Creating an ePortfolio has provided me with many opportunities for self-reflection. Eduardo Briceno said something that really stuck out to me “people with a fixed mindset worry more about how they are judged, and people with a growth mindset focus the most on learning.” This hits home for me because while creating my ePortfolio I have been focused on perfection and how people will perceive my work. Instead, I should be working to evolve and grow my work into something that is meaningful and purposeful to my learning.

As I transition into adopting more growth mindset qualities, I will then be able to instill these same qualities into my students. The two most important qualities that I have found they lack the most are learning from criticism and finding inspiration in the success of their peers. Many of them see each other as competition and refuse to help each other because they would like to be the most correct, or the quickest to finish. Although had they worked together, they may have completed the task more efficiently. I have also seen this in my personal life, although with different reasoning. For the duration of my undergraduate program, I barely spoke to anyone and dreaded group assignments or simply studying with anyone; I completed that program completely alone. As I entered this grad program I had a similar mindset, but quickly realized that would be impossible. Now that I have made connections with others, and have weekly check-ins, I feel less alone and more driven to get my work completed.