I’m coming to the realization that it’s not a lack of ability that holds most students back: their beliefs about their abilities hold them back. Carol Dweck calls their beliefs “mindsets.” She says that students have either a “fixed” mindset, which says they can’t get any better because they are … Read More
Month: April 2016
“I often watched the Southern Cross in the night sky, but it was not just a compass bearing I needed now, it was a judgment about what would be the moral path to choose.”
More than an account of her journey from a sheep-farm in Australia to graduate school at Harvard, this memoir explores the reasons for her decisions with frankness, even-handedness, and intellectual rigor. Jill Ker Conway left her country “. . . because I didn’t fit in, never had, and wasn’t … Read More
“Listening and questioning are the basis for positive classroom interactions that can in turn shape meaningful collaboration, which can then build a culture of thinking.”
To increase learning in the classroom, don’t focus on curriculum or using new “tips and tricks” for instruction. Instead, Ron Ritchhart, a researcher at Harvard’s graduate school of education, writes that we should change the “culture” of our classrooms by making “thinking valued, visible, and actively promoted in all … Read More
“We were motivated by our conviction that education, properly understood, is the process of cultivating creative and curious minds.”
Many textbooks for first-year college students take a “here’s how” approach to writing outlines, developing thesis statements, and citing sources. The authors of Habits of the Creative Mind begin with a much different premise. They believe that the focus should be on “nurturing curiosity, creativity, and the other allied habits … Read More