Any parent who homeschools their children knows that it can be both a joy and a challenge. Often, the most difficult parts come when your child is struggling with curriculum material. That can be a time in which kids experience strong negative emotions, and parents might feel stuck when it comes to encouraging kids to push through without damaging fragile self-esteem.
The good news is that offers a toolset to address this: the concept of the growth mindset. This framework helps us understand how we learn and how people can motivate themselves to do better without negative self-talk. If every instructional day you check off your dry erase calendar wall decal feels like a momentous struggle, try these tips for building a positive mindset.
What Is a Fixed Mindset?
First, let’s talk about the negative side. A fixed mindset is a paradigm that many children naturally pick up from the traditional attitudes about learning that pervade our society. It says that intelligence is an inherent quality that can’t meaningfully be changed.
The messages communicated by a fixed mindset will usually sound something like this:
- “If you don’t understand this, you’re probably just naturally not good at it.”
- “Everyone is going to judge you for having trouble with this concept.”
- “This material is too hard. You should probably just give up.”
- “If the first thing you try doesn’t work, you should either try again or quit.”
Not very nice, right? And while those probably aren’t the explicit messages that you communicate to your homeschool students, they’re lurking just beneath the surface of many experiences in everyday life. High-stakes testing, college admissions and class rankings can all create this fixed mindset and the feelings of inferiority that come with it.
It’s easy to see why a fixed mindset often does more harm than good when it comes to educating kids. Fortunately, as a homeschool parent, you have the opportunity to break this cycle of negativity and self-doubt.
What Is a Growth Mindset?
A growth mindset is the healthier flip side of a fixed mindset. This kind of mindset communicates messages such as:
- “Anybody can learn this. It just takes practice.”
- “You don’t have to be ashamed when you find something tough to understand.”
- “Making mistakes is how you learn and get better.”
- “When you have a hard time doing something, it’s OK to step back and try it a different way.”
These are the messages and techniques that help both children and adults allow themselves to learn and grow. A growth mindset says that while many people do have natural aptitudes for certain subjects over others, it’s still perfectly possible to master challenging material and even to increase your “intelligence” in certain areas. Even more importantly, it says that hard work and adaptability are the keys to doing so.
Homeschooling actually offers some outstanding opportunities for communicating a growth mindset. You’re in charge of the curriculum that your homeschool students receive and the messages that it communicates about learning, intelligence and hard work. But that also means you need to work with a high degree of intentionality and precision in how you communicate when working on tough material.
Growth Mindset and Social Skills
During the current Covid-19 pandemic kids and adults alike limit their social interactions. Due to long periods of distance learning parents have come to realise that some children tend to learn better from home. Therefore many are opting for homeschooling.
So what are the ways your child can improve their social skills while home schooling during this critical time? Here are a few examples of technology that can be used to reconnect with their friends.
Zoom – Setup a virtual buddy meet-up using Zoom. Zoom is a free video/chat platform that can be easily set up on your iPad, laptop, or mobile device. Parents can easily sign up for a free Zoom account that will allow up to 40 minutes of usage with a certain number of attendees.
FaceTime – Facetime is an amazing way for kids to connect with their buddies. You can set up a mutually convenient time to call. All you need is a mobile device or an iPad. Kids can set up a group call to chat with multiple friends at the same time
Skype – Skype is another free platform that can connect participants together. Skype can be downloaded on your mobile device, iPad, or laptop. It is easy to set up and use.
Source: People Image Studio/Shutterstock
How to Communicate a Growth Mindset
How you communicate with your kids when homeschooling them is massively important for communicating a growth mindset. Everything from the structure of assignments to the way you demonstrate concepts in class can affect whether kids take on a fixed or a growth mindset.
Think about questions like these when evaluating the communication processes that you use in your homeschool program:
- Consider whether your grading systems promote a healthy approach to failure. Some educators believe that harsh consequences for failure, especially when a student is trying their best, can be psychologically damaging and create a fixed mindset. Take advantage of the flexibility of homeschooling to offer kids the opportunity to work at their own pace and get extra help when they need it.
- If the way you’re explaining a concept clearly isn’t connecting with your homeschool students, do you adjust your strategies until you find something that works? A growth mindset doesn’t require a student to bang their head against the wall until they “try harder.” It means thinking realistically about failures and being flexible enough to come up with alternate solutions.
- When kids do experience success with challenging material, do you help them see how failure paved their way? The more clearly that homeschool students understand the intimate connection between failure and achievement, the less afraid they’ll be of the former and the more ready they’ll be for the latter. Try strategies such as writing out all of the steps that it took to solve a problem on a whiteboard wall sticker and talking to kids about how each mistake helped move them forward to a better technique.
Growth Mindset during Religious Group Studies
If you want to further promote a growth mindset in your children, consider having them join various religious study groups. Aside from letting your kids socialize with others, they will also be encouraged to learn about various new ideas and concepts, especially about religion. They will also hear others’ opinions on these concepts and learn to either challenge or accept them.
If your family is Christian, you could have your children attend a Bible study group every Sunday. During these meetings, you should equip your children with a Bible and an Armor of God Bible Study planner. Due to the pandemic, some Bible study sessions may be done through video classes, so you should prepare accordingly.
Modeling a Growth Mindset
One of the most powerful ways that you can foster a growth mindset in your kids is to model one yourself. Children look up to their parent-educators, and what they see you doing will create the attitudes through which they filter their own experiences with education and work.
Consider how you can use suggestions like these to demonstrate a growth mindset to your homeschool students:
- Discuss the unique challenges of your own professional or home life and talk about how failure helps you learn to solve them.
- Be candid about curriculum material that you struggle with yourself and frame the process as a collaborative learning experience.
- Let your children see you picking up new hobbies and skills, and openly discuss the process of learning and growing as you do so.
- Take on collaborative projects with your children and discuss your successes, failures and how you can overcome current obstacles.
- Make a growth mindset a tangible thing with a growth chart wall decal. This way, you and your child can physically measure their progress in a certain subject, skill, etc.
Source: Yuricazac/Shutterstock
Nobody likes to fail, but it’s crucial that kids learn how to “fail forward” and see success in terms of a growth mindset. After all, our failures shape who we are just as much as our successes, so homeschool educators need to ensure that those failures shape kids’ self-esteem positively rather than negatively.
Growth Mindset Quotes
Growth mindset quotes for kids can be used to empower kids to embrace their mistakes as learning opportunities. Check out Growth mindset Quotes for kids here.
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