Establishing A Growth Mindset: How School Culture Can Unlock Student Achievement
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It’s easy for us to forget how important schools are in forming character. We tend to ascribe this quality to family, to friendships, to certain “more strategic” life choices. In many countries, one simply attends the school conveniently nearby. Rare are the few who get to choose, and rarer especially are the ones who recognise the importance of culture when assessing what’s actually “good” about the place at which children spend the majority of their day.
I’ve been giving school tours for about ten years now and the questions parents ask generally run the usual gamut: school logistics, curriculum, teaching qualifications, extra curricular programming and recently, university acceptances. A few years ago, I was asked a question that was refreshingly thoughtful and in answering it, I realised how much more important it was compared to schedules, lunches, handwriting and buses: “What’s the most important thing I need to know about your school culture?” I paused for a moment then because there’s so much really that I could have said, but I distilled it to a response like this: “We view success broadly and we want students to understand that about themselves too. We don’t believe that success should be simply tied to one narrow dimension, because that’s not how the world works. The worst thing a school can possibly do is have children feeling like failures. So we emphasise quality in various realms, not just in academic pursuits.”
When students relax, when they feel accepted for who they are, they perform better and seek more challenges.
A balance must be struck between the academic objectives we provide for our students and the cultural objectives which inspire their dispositions. The argument might be made that if the culture raises them adequately, students might develop a more solid vision of who they are as a person and who they want to be, as well as being better equipped to envision even the post-secondary path that suits them best. And so we began by distilling our school ethos into words students could understand and concepts teachers could teach. We figured this most effectively empowered our school community to move purposefully within the culture we wanted to perpetuate. We understood that the future required students to create a vision for themselves, and we recognised that certain attributes or prerequisites needed to be identified so they could be acknowledged and taught more explicitly.
In 2013, The Harbour School revisited the basic principles which formed the foundation for the school’s ethos and distilled them into actual learner outcomes that would be measured and taught alongside the academic or content goals. The thinking was, if we could map our cultural markers, then we could plan for, teach and assess them. Better yet, we could plan for the students to appreciate and assess their own progress in embodying them.
