Education - Growth Mindset and Computational Thinking

Week 5 - Developing a Growth Mindset and Computational Thinking

For homework this week we were asked to take a quiz about our mindset. I’ve come across Carol Dweck’s ideas about ‘Growth Mindset’ before and how much this kind of outlook and related beliefs can help us as learners. So I wondered how I might score at this point in my life? Well, turns out I’ve taken on board a lot or already had quite a growth mindset as I came out with 0 fixed and 8 growth.

However, I think that often despite logically believing these ideas, at times I don’t always naturally have this view of myself or others. I have habits of negative self talk like ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘I’m not good enough’ when things get tough. But I guess, the first step is being aware of this and then taking action to not ‘get sucked in’ and limited by this initial reaction. I also have often thought about this from a learner point of view and not really from a leadership point of view. If anything basically can be ‘learnt’ why do we sometimes get so fixated on particular people or personality traits making good leaders, which is a very 'fixed' outlook. Surely these skills can be learnt with the right supports and motivations in place?

Another task was to try out a citation app and I had a go at https://www.mendeley.com which is cloud based so I thought it would be quite flexible and seems to be going OK so far as I’ve managed to add references into the library without too much fuss and also use them.

The last item of homework was to watch a youtube clip entitled The Poetry of Programming. Linda Liukas has some great ideas and developed an awesome book called Hello Ruby which helps kids develop programming skills through story telling. It is very encouraging for girls to get into coding and breaks the stereotypes of coding not just being for nerdy boys. I love her ideas about disruption starting with a vision and that code is the next universal language.

I myself have been breaking stereotypes ever since I left school by working in the male dominated IT industry and not working with many other women. I then did the opposite when I started work as a teacher in all girls schools up until my current job I have now. My entire digital classes used to be full of girls, and now every time I get a new class list for the digital classes one of the first things I do is look down the list and count the girls. Sadly each time the number of boys always majorly out numbers the girls. So still the stereotypes exists, and I will continue to make it my mission to make coding and computer science fun and engaging for all students and I will continue to challenge beliefs and ideas around fixed mindsets.

DIGITAL - Computational Thinking

So I arrived at class excited about the weeks topics as these are right up my alley. I’ve been following the development of the new Digital Technologies curriculum which is currently in draft and will be available for use next year. You should totally check it out if you are not familiar with it. It is a great step in the right direction for key technology development skills such as computational thinking to be taught to children as soon as they arrive at school rather than later on. It makes sense for kids to be exposed to these ideas early on in life, to be creators rather than consumers. However, resourcing and up skilling of teachers etc will be a mission for most schools and is a whole other issue.

We started class this week by pairing up and doing a ‘guess the number between 1 and 100’ game by asking each other questions. It is basically common sense to ask questions like is it less than or greater than etc to narrow down the number. This can then be easily programmed so a computer can play the game and can be made even more effective by changing the strategy slightly which essentially is computational thinking and algorithms in use. Someone in class mentioned that maybe it’s just the fact that the technical terms put people off a bit. Basically algorithms and computational thinking is about problem solving but the terms can freak people out. I have found students have come across algorithms in math classes but basically a knitting pattern, a recipe or instructions to fold a paper plane are all algorithms and we all use computational thinking but just don’t realise it. I watched a really great documentary a while back, you should check it out too it's all about algorithms if you are interested it was called The Secret Rules of Modern Living - Algorithms.

We then were given the challenge of writing some instructions to program a person like a robot to move around the room without bumping into things. Since both of us had coding backgrounds we wrote some initial instructions that looked quite ‘codey’ with while loops, conditions and degrees etc. Then reflecting on this we thought we should rewrite the instructions so they would make sense to anyone as someone else in the class was going to carry them out. So here are our two versions of instructions below. Other groups made quite lengthy accounts which were a lot like a treasure hunt, so many steps left/forward etc. In comparison we just went to a slightly different version which which could be argued was a little more efficient with less instructions needed due to a loop and conditional check. Algorithm efficiency is a whole other lesson in itself. So I guess this was our experience of coding kicking in which helped or hindered initially as we were programming humans not computers. But either way we all found a solution to the challenge in our own ways and all learnt something along the journey.

Another great video about getting started with coding and is inspiring is from Mitch Resnick.

LEADERSHIP - Growth Mindset

We had a look at the backwards bike video, where a man learnt how to ride a bike where the handlebars worked in the opposite directions. Even though we might know this is the case our brain can’t adjust and doesn’t understand how to ride the bike initially. This in some ways proves that knowing things doesn’t necessarily mean we understand things. It’s hard to change rigid entrenched thinking. If we apply it to understanding a growth mindset we might logically understand this but how do we put it into action to demonstrate our understanding? It is not always that simple.

There were some statistics given Diehl, E. (2013) about managers that had a fixed or a growth mindset. Basically there might have been short term gains with managers that had fixed mindsets but that long term the organisations had greater success with a manager that had a growth mindset.

Diehl, E. (2013) also found that growth-minded leadership involves:

- Validating and addressing staff fears and barriers
- Communicating the vision explicitly
- Providing support to those who lack knowledge or skills
- Creating opportunities to share research and information
- Allowing everyone access to growth opportunities
- Sharing the workload among all staff

Basically we should be concerned with our own personal growth and how we can support others to do the same, which in turn then lifts the whole organisation.

We were challenged to work in groups to create a stop motion to bust a myth related to a ‘fixed’ mindset. We discussed the idea of the tortoise and the hare race story which originally was about the hare being cocky and thinking it would easily beat a tortoise but he fell asleep and the tortoise won by being slow and steady. We did a version where the tortoise had a ‘growth’ mindset and trained and lifted weights etc then when it came to race day the tortoise beat the hare, so changing the narrative. The moral this time being that with a growth mindset, hard work and effort we can achieve great things. We had fun making this stop motion video, which somehow ended up with some interesting shots from on top of a table.

Another great session at Mindlab!

References
Diehl, E. (2013). Leading Change with a Growth Mindset. Community.mindsetworks.com. Retrieved from http://community.mindsetworks.com/blog-page/home-blogs/entry/leading-change-with-a-growth-mindset