Developing Growth Mindsets: Setting Learning Goals

When we began talking about growth mindset as a family last year, we quickly realized we wanted a concrete way to bring the concept of growth and fixed mindsets to life for the girls. We decided that we’d each set a goal of something we wanted to learn in 2020 and check in with and encourage each other throughout the year as we worked towards those goals. That set-up brought us lots of success, so we decided to revisit it this year (albeit a little more loosely, dropping the “learn” and just making this a goal).

We kicked off our January Family Focus of growth mindset this weekend. Read on to see what books we read to launch these discussions, as well as what our 2021 goals are!

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As usual, we attached this family meeting to dinner, ensuring that everyone was well-fed and happy. Much like our 2020 growth mindset kickoff, we also began the discussion by reading two books, Mindset Matters and The Magical Yet. You can see our full list of growth mindset books here, and read my full review of The Magical Yet here! Our girls are admittedly well-versed in talking about growth mindset (all of our growth mindset work from last year really stuck with them, and they LOVE reading growth mindset books!), so after reading those we were able to launch directly into a recap of our 2020 goals and setting 2021 goals.

So what do we hope to accomplish this year? Lots of physical and coordination growth!

Over the course of January, we are also going to continue to add to our chart of fixed vs. growth mindset self-talk. We made a similar chart last year that was deeply important to and helpful for our older daughter, so I thought recreating some of that magic would be beneficial this year as well. We read a new addition to our growth mindset books, Your Fantastic Elastic Brain: Stretch it, Shape It by JoAnn Deak. I had seen this title around over the years, but our local library didn’t carry it… I’m thrilled I finally took the plunge to buy it, as the girls found the science of the brain really interesting!