Growth Mindset

Growth mindset is something that we really need to consider when it comes to teaching Theatre because I feel that students can have this mentality that they either can act good or they can't.  They do it for fun, but they either believe they can't do what is expected of them or they don't have the confidence to try and push themselves.  Each student and human being has it inside of them to perform and we need to help our students improve that growth mindset that things are not set in stone ever.

Observing the teacher that I am following for this semester is a real eye opener in what us as theatre teachers can really do for our students and what works and doesn't.  I observed one class where she was teaching the students about viewpoints and how to connect to everyone in the room to achieve an end goal.  The class was on stage moving around at a fairly fast pace and were told that they needed to feel the room and that collectively they needed to all stop at the same time without any type of signal or noise to stop them.  They just had to suddenly stop.  As you can probably see, this caused a lot of frustration with students that it is not possible to all stop without some type of signal.  So they would try and kept failing.  Students believed that it was not possible and started to try and force the stop.  Only that that caused more problems.  The students were forced to expand past their mindset that it was not possible and tried to feel the room as instructed.  Though it wasn't perfect, as everyone started to really try and feel the room, you could start to feel the room more and about 95% of the students actually stopped on their own.  It was really amazing to watch this happen in a high school setting because it showed a lot of maturity and patience for this kids.  It also helped them get past this mentality that they either could or could not do it (fixed mindset) and forced them to try a new approach and reached an even better outcome than expected.

I really like this process of growth mindset and that we have options as teachers to help students grow and expand that part of their brain.  It is so crucial to have this mindset because it creates a place for students to try new things and feel that they can accomplish stuff they wouldn't normally do.  I learned a lot for myself from the assessment and I didn't even do it!  Students learn best when they can get past their own expectations of themselves and continue to grow past what they believe they are worthy and capable of.

Here is a link to a PDF of the The Viewpoints Book by Anne Bogart & Tina Landau that explains a lot of different viewpoints to do and includes the viewpoint that I observed (PDF page 20, Page number 27, Exercise 6 title twelve/six/four)