Check out this collection of amazing tools designed to help your students develop a growth mindset in physical education.
The Growth Mindset Resource Bundle features a collection of amazing tools that were designed to help your students develop a growth mindset in physical education.
These tools were curated to help you create a learning environment, facilitate discussions, and highlight strategies that all aligned to growth mindset thinking.
Here is more information on what you’ll find inside this bundle:
Being a Yeti is a commitment that we make to ourselves to accept the fact that some things are hard, that the struggle we experience when tackling difficult tasks is only temporary, and that there is always a way to overcome a challenge. In other words, being a Yeti is a commitment to the meaning system that defines a growth mindset.
Learning is meant to be challenging and growth can be uncomfortable. That being said, physical education can be especially intimidating since so much of the learning that occurs during our lessons is happening in public for everyone to see. I honestly believe that the public nature of learning in PE is part of what makes it so hard for some students to put themselves out there, take risks, and embrace the fact that failure is a part of learning.
Although I introduce the Yeti poster to my students at the start of the school year, we refer back to it frequently as the year goes on. When I know that I will be introducing something particularly challenging to my students, I make sure to prepare them for the struggles they may encounter by holding a class discussion on how a Yeti would approach difficult tasks. I also do this on the fly when I feel that the energy of the class is off, despite the challenge being within their reach (based on my professional experience).
A key understanding that I want my students to develop is that failure is not the opposite of learning. Success and failure are two sides of the learning coin. Nelson Mandela famously said “I never lose. I either win or learn.” That is the kind of spirit that I want to help instill in my students and it aligns perfectly to resilient attributions that I mentioned earlier.
The “Fail Then Sail” poster reminds students that FAIL is just an acronym for “First Attempt In Learning“. Those first attempts in learning may be a little uncomfortable, but they ultimately help us SAIL or experience a “Successful Attempt In Learning“.
In other words, failing does not make a person a failure. It’s just part of the uncomfortable ride that is personal development. So let’s embrace those fails, adopt positive effort beliefs, and keep sailing.
To make resilient attributions (which are part of the growth mindset meaning system), we not only have to accept the fact that some tasks are simply hard by nature, but also that encountering such tasks means that we get to go back to the drawing board to come up with new strategies.
Based on our own personal experiences, we each have our own set of habits or strategies that we adopt to overcome challenging situations. Sometimes when we find ourselves really struggling with a task, that struggle could be caused by the fact that – even though we’ve tried different things – we keep approaching the task from the same or similar angles.
One of the ways that I like to help expose my students to other possible strategies that they can add to their resilience toolbelt is through our Habits of Successful Learners Mural, an idea I originally got from the one and only Terri Drain.
The idea is simple: talk to your students about the strategies that they use to overcome challenges in their learning, take notes on what they share, and then create a mural that displays all of their answers on the wall of your gym.
Having the mural on display like this makes it incredibly easy to highlight and review different strategies that students can try when they are having a hard time trying to learn something new. Again, the goal here is to help them recognize that it is normal for hard things to be hard and that there are always different routes that you can explore when trying to overcome challenges.
I had orgininally created the Performance Zones poster for my Jump Rope Deli unit. The poster was based on the work performance psychologist Dr. Margaret Osborne, who views optimal performance as the intersection between three main components:
To support students’ psychological well-being when it comes to performance, Dr. Osborne suggests that teachers share the following key understandings:
By frontloading our students with information on what being challenged can feel like and how to navigate those emotions, I provided my students with tools that would help them develop their resilience in the face of adversity. The idea is that creating an environment in which students see their peers taking on challenges and remaining resilient, students give themselves permission to do the same.
Also in this bundle are a few brand-new resources that were designed to help you lead an evidence-based growth mindset intervention in your teaching.
These resources include the Growth Mindset Goal Planner (PDF + Google Slides Template), The Saying Is Believing Letter Template (PDF + Google Slides Template), and the Growth Mindset Learning Roadmap.
In total, the bundle includes seven premium resources:
To help you use these tools intentional, I’ve put together a MONSTER blog post in which I guide you through everything you need to know to confidently help your students develop a growth mindset in physical education. You can jump to that blog post by hitting the button below!
I hope these tools serve your students well! Thanks for your support and happy teaching!
The Breather Bench is a dedicated space within your gym that empowers students to self-regulate their emotions.
Create a visual class roster to help you learn your students' names, organize your classroom, and more with the Visual Class Roster template!
Help your students learn how to take responsibility for their well-being and behaviour with the TPSR Levels of Responsibility Posters!
