Yet

The first day of the first six weeks of school is a crazy mix of setting up routines, establishing norms, getting to know each other, having fun, and planting seeds for the weeks ahead. The fifth graders do an amazing job of setting the tone in the classroom — when are we serious and when are we silly? They share traditions and expectations more effectively than I could ever do. The first day is one of the reasons I love teaching in a multi-age classroom. If our classrooms were only one grade, my voice would be alone in explaining how "we" do things. I would be the sole creator of a classroom culture – and, I'm sure, I would meet with little success. Instead, the fifth graders welcome the newcomers into our classroom and share by example what it means to be a Heron. It's so much more powerful.

There were a few key points today:

Your classmates matter. We depend on each other. We need to know each others' names. We need to greet each other genuinely. We must respect the learning others are doing. We must create a safe place to take risks in which people know they will never be laughed at for giving something a try.
As fourth and fifth graders, we have a responsibility to be leaders in the school. We help younger kids, we model expectations, we take initiative.
Habits of Mind. Being "smart" isn't about how easily things come. Being "smart" is a complex mix of how you operate in the world. The Habits of Mind give us ways to talk about thinking and learning that go beyond "good job."

Probably the most important conversation we had today was about a single word "yet." This summer, I took an on-line course that explored how kids engage (or disengage) with math. There is some compelling evidence that the kids who saw their math ability as fixed (as in "I'm not a math person" or even "I've always been good at math.") were not a successful in the longterm as those who had growth mindsets. When confronted with a math problem that they could not answer instantly, students with a fixed mindset would think, "I can't do this" those with the growth mindset would respond with, "I don't understand this yet."

That one word is so powerful when we think about learning. If kids are afraid to tackle things that are new, they stall. They must be willing to take risks and they must fully embrace that there are many, many things they cannot do yet. Today we joked that, of course there were a lot of things they didn't understand — THEY ARE FOURTH AND FIFTH GRADERS! If they understood everything and if everything made sense and if everything was easy — they'd had nothing to do. Our job is to find things that don't make sense yet and work to figure them out.

There was a lot of laughter during our conversation and there were a lot of head nods. The concept makes a lot of sense to kids. As the year progresses and we start to move into less familiar territory, we'll return to the idea that there are a lot of things that we can't do yet. We'll use the ideas of "fixed mindset" and "growth mindset" to assess our own approach to problems and we'll work to develop more tolerance (and even enjoyment) of not knowing.

I hope that you have a chance to talk about having a growth mindset with your child. Often, kids don't realize that adults are working to learn things too and that we don't consider ourselves finished. There are a lot of things that we can't do yet. Share some of your own learning stories — the frustration of not knowing and the struggle of figuring it out. The triumph of getting things and finding new things to learn. Keep your stories positive — your child will emulate you in every way he or she can including copying things you may have a fixed mindset about. Let them know you're excited about all the things that lie ahead for you both.

Oh, and we also started to collect data about our classmates which we'll graph in different ways, we shared some of our natural history objects and decided to start a collection of cicada shells, we planned how we could get all of the Herons on the playground's green tube, and we were the first class to play soccer in the Theater of Dreams (I think I'm supposed to link this so that every time you read "Theater of Dreams" some emotional anthem plays but I can't figure out how to do it.) Busy, busy day. (You can click on any image in a blog to make it bigger.)