Growth Mindset – Advice for Parents

To support your child to become the best they can be we recommend that you sit down with your child and review their class charts comments at least once a fortnight.

As a school we are focusing on developing a ‘growth mindset’ in our pupils to prepare them to succeed in school and beyond.  In this mindset you believe that the abilities and qualities you were born with can be developed and improved, with effort and time.

As a parent you can support the development of a growth mindset at home by following these three principles:

  1. Praise effort and persistence rather than natural ability or results.
  2. Think carefully about how you talk about your own experiences.  If you say you were “not very good at sport at school” you might influence how they feel about this subject and cause them to believe that they cannot improve in this subject.
  3. Avoid allowing your child to make comparisons with others, the only
    comparisons they should make are with their past self. Trying to be better than they were yesterday is a great place to start.

Below are some example questions you could use when reviewing class charts with your child. The positive and negative points may be a useful starting point, but a general discussion about school may be just as useful.

Talking about positive points

  • Which of your positive points this fortnight are you the most proud of?  Why?
  • You seem to have a lot more positive points in English this fortnight.  What have you done differently to make this improvement?
  • You have a lot of positive points for ‘leadership’ this week.  What have you done differently to make this improvement?
  • What improvements have you made this fortnight at school?

Talking about negative points

  • How could you have avoided this negative point this fortnight?
  • What will you do differently this fortnight?
  • Well done for avoiding any negative points this fortnight for homework.  What did you do differently?

Preparing for the next fortnight

  • How will you make an improvement in the next fortnight? Pick two things to improve on, make them specific and realistic.