Mike Wesch

What does Mike Wesch believe about how students learn?  How does he act on those beliefs?

    Mike Wesch believes in forming meaningful and authentic relationships with his students. He also believes in his student's ability to learn and develops in his students a "growth mindset" in that he communicated to his students the benefits of "asking questions, taking chances, making connections which all involve risk-taking. Essentially, when a person has a fixed mindset, they believe that they can not succeed, thus the willingness to try and the effort needed to learn a new skill is not put in. I think many of us display this attribute in different areas of our lives. The fear of failure or getting hurt keeps us from trying new things. However, although many of us would be hesitant to go skydiving or bungee jumping, the fact that many of our emergent bilingual students do not have a growth mindset in regards to their academic performance and language acquisition skills can have an extremely detrimental effect on the outcome of their education. The key is that as educators we need to develop a student's growth mindset so that they are more willing to be risk-takers and engage in rigorous content. 

When a student has a growth mindset, the student knows that effort, grit, perseverance, and resilience can lead to successful outcomes. Educational researchers Dockterman and Blackwell relate that when students feel that they are not good enough in a certain subject they tend to fulfill a self-fulfilling prophecy as, when the struggles that they face manifest into reality and their predictions about how events would unfold come true, it confirms their beliefs. Students with a fixed mindset feel that it is better not to try and not give their full effort because they wonder why they should try so hard just to get a poor grade.

Wesch mentions student fixation on grades and what they need to "get through" or "get by" to pass. Many students, especially those who question their ability or do not have a secure support system, really do not focus on the journey or what learning they can gain. I fully related to Wesch in that the problem that I find, at the high school level, in terms of grades, is that students do not seem to want to learn for the sake of learning. Instead, they want to earn grades and not knowledge. Students with a fixed mindset will not even attempt to start the complex writing assignment, orally present their PowerPoint presentation, or do their math performance assessment as they'd rather just take the zero rather than putting a tremendous amount of time and effort into a project just to get, in their fixed mindset view, a failing grade. In schools, everything is about grades.  There are a few teachers who I work with, including myself, who will ask students to hand in a draft, provide the student with some actionable feedback, and will allow for revisions before the grade is final. These actions promote the development of a growth mindset. This aspect of learning was also mentioned by Wesch in his "not yet" approach to students who are struggling with their projects. I like how he made it a classwide, community effort to help the students who needed extra help and encouragement to meet eventual success.

My daughter attends Cumberland High School and I do feel that their grading system, which is a hybrid of traditional grades with performance-based assessment grades,  is the way to go. Students often get grades that are just basically behavior grades as if they do the work and hand things in on time, they will do well. Grading in this way can offset lower quiz and test grades, based on standards and content mastery, and the student can still pass.  At Cumberland High my daughter does earn A's and B's but I can see through the performance assessment standards-based learning how she is really doing as far as mastering content. As a parent I am interested in both forms of communication: Is my child doing the work? Is my child mastering taught skills and concepts? I do believe students should be allowed to submit drafts and allowed to make revisions because it promotes risk-taking and decreases the “error climate” in the classroom that researchers Dockertman and Blackwell describe. Grading students based on drafts and revisions promote student self-reflection, content mastery,  and in turn rewards students for more resilient behavior. Dockerman and Blackwell also note that we need to provide the “mechanisms for students to learn from any failures”. If we just grade student work and then move on to the next subject the students are not really learning or mastering content. 

Although we push the growth mindset philosophy in our schools, we really need to embed the strategies for students to develop a growth mindset into the curriculum; it should not be an SEL add-on. The most powerful aspect of Mike Wesch's talk was when he spoke of three questions driving students that were ignored int the classroom- Who am I? What am I going to do? Am I going to make it? I think that these questions are important to reflect upon as the goal should be to integrate activities within our programs to tap into these needs. By having students writing identity texts, teaching students how to make SMART goals, teaching students how to self-reflect about learning processes, and frequently checking in with students to provide encouragement are all ways to accomplish this.

  Zaretta Hammond in her book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain- Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, dedicates a whole chapter to discuss the importance of shifting the academic mindset towards a growth mindset in students to “ restore their natural confidence as learners”. The first step, Hammond notes is that students need to believe in themselves as learners and to encourage these students to realize that the effort that they put into academic and linguistic tasks is worth the time and energy that it takes them to do so. She notes that a student's academic mindset consists of many components.  Students need to believe that they can succeed,  that the efforts they put in are worth the outcome, they have to have a sense that they belong to the learning community,  and that the learning activities need to somehow connect to their lives.  Hammond cautions educators in interpreting students who lack motivation and engagement as a behavioral issue. She wants us to realize that it's more likely a growth mindset issue and that you need to try to shift the student's mindset in order to increase engagement. Hammond reflects that oftentimes the growth mindset is not instilled in our students because of the socio-political impact that schools,  as a system,  have on children there are many policies in schools that limit opportunities for our culturally diverse and linguistically diverse students. These students tend to get mixed messages, negative messages, and often are subjected to microaggressions on the part of the teacher in regards to their capabilities in contrast to those students who are more privileged. 

Strategies that   Zaretta Hammond suggests to promote a growth mindset in our students include helping them create a positive narrative about their identity as learners,  using positive images, motivational quotes, and poetry to ignite student imagination as to what is possible, giving students specific praise and feedback, and explicitly teaching students how to interrupt negative self-talk when they hear it by changing what they say into a positive statement.  It is imperative that students are able to connect with the content as much as possible and so that they value what they learn.  Telling students why skills are important for them to learn and the outcomes that they could have by learning the material, especially in math, can help the student engage with material that they feel is challenging or irrelevant. The ultimate goal is to help our students feel like they belong and that they can and will learn. We need to be champions for our students and help them every step of the way by providing them with the confidence and mindset that they will succeed.