I like a bargain.  So when I can create a unit that serves more than one purpose, I feel like I am getting a good deal. My opening plans for this school year are great two-fers! Not only will this beginning work set the stage for student growth, but it will also be grounded in developing skills that will help them achieve success this year.

Last year, due in part to the Papal Visit, I planned a unit to be completed in the first few weeks of school before we had almost a week off to allow people to participate in the event. My coach suggested that I open the year with a lesson on growth mindset, and that is exactly what I plan to do this year as well.

We will be starting school with full length days, so not only will this unit provide a framework for the year, but it will hopefully provide an engaging transition from summer for my students.

The following activities represent what I hope to accomplish in the first week of school. I am still developing the day to day lessons, but this overview is what  I consider to be the first part of the unit; it starts with the students discovering their own ideas about struggling while learning and ends with them writing a summary of an article about growth mindset.

After some community building activities, I plan to have my students complete a headline prediction activity with an article that I used in a workshop with teachers this summer. The article, “An Inspirational True Story of Resilience and the American Dream”, highlights the experience of Ping Fu, a Chinese immigrant.  The article is written by MeiMei Fox, who wrote Ping Fu’s memoir, entitled Bend, Not Break.  I will provide most of the article in a handout for the students to read, and I will ask them to work in pairs to create a headline for the article.  After sampling some answers, I will reveal the actual title, and we will spend some time discussing and defining resilience.  

Hopefully, the discussion will bring into focus the idea of grit, which we will also define and discuss before completing Angela Duckworth’s Grit Scale.  I will ask the students to write about their results from the survey and share them with a partner.  This step is critical because it will give my students a starting point to see what their relationship is with the idea of how they handle learning things that are difficult.

From there, I plan to use some of the resources found at Khan Academy. Khan Academy partnered with PERTS, the Stanford University research center on learning mindsets, and they created an amazing lesson plan. I plan to show the Khan Academy video “Growing Your Mind”.  Students will Think-Pair-Share to deepen their understanding of how they can grow their intellect.

Following that, I will initiate a discussion on failure, retelling my experience with earning Google certification.  Here I will remind students about John Collins’ Type 1 writing and ask them to write about a time when they struggled with learning something, even failing in the process. And I will again ask students to think-pair-share, and I will sample the class for responses.

To understand Carol Dweck’s ideas about growth mindset, students will read and annotate a section of an article from Brain Pickings entitled “Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives”.  Brain Pickings is an amazing blog that features rather dense articles on interesting topics.  It definitely characterizes challenging prose.  However, what I plan to accomplish with this is for students to reap the benefit of close reading.  This “push” not only provides them with background information on growth mindset and introduces or reviews reading strategies, but it models the kind of growth mindset I will encourage them to develop this year.  

From there, we will work on completing a template for Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week. We will start that in class together, and students will continue to work on it in pairs. Completing it will become their first homework assignment.

So, to recap, in one week my students will have begun to develop a sense of community, worked in pairs and small groups, read an inspiring account of resilience, summarized that in a headline, discovered their level of “grittiness”, considered the message of a video that describes how the struggle in learning helps us grow our brains, reviewed Collins Type 1 writing,  listened to my story of failure as learning, read and annotated a difficult piece of writing, and completed a written summary of that piece–all centered in growth mindset.

This beginning one week plan is chock full of skills practice that support the standards and helps to create a classroom atmosphere conducive to encouraging hard work and accepting failure as a natural part of learning. Not only will we get to work right away, but we will start off the year the right way–with a Growth Mindset.