Strategic Planning for Students

The Growth Mindset Coach: A Teacher’s Month-by-Month Handbook for Empowering Students to Achieve – Annie Brock and Heather Hundley (Ulysses Press)

Growing up, my Father regularly extolled the line “you get out what you put in,” stressing to me that hard work and effort paid off. While researching student perceptions and attitudes, Dr. Carol Dweck coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. Students with fixed mindsets had a tendency to self-limit their ability to succeed while student with a growth mindset, seemed to understand that their potential was limitless. Hence good old Dad and the virtues of effort.

Now, teachers; Annie Brock and Heather Hundley have developed a series of tools to help teachers cultivate and coach students to have a growth mindset. In The Growth Mindset Coach: A Teacher’s Month-by-Month Handbook for Empowering Students to Achieve, Brock and Hundley have collected practical tips, classroom anecdotes, executable lesson plans and strategies to help teachers guide students through the process and become higher achievers.

The theory is great, but this is much more of a rubber meets the road, actionable guide that teacher and even parents can put into play quickly and easily. With so much chatter and focus on education and improving results and an outcry for a more business-like approach to the education process, this really strikes me as a strategic plan for student.

While theories can sound great they can easily slip off into the weeds never to return. That is not the case with The Growth Mindset Coach, which has a much more plug and play feel to it and has a real bias towards action.