Growth Mindset Teaching Resources

Help students build a growth mindset with teaching resources designed specifically to help establish a growth mindset for kids in elementary and middle school.

Created by teachers, for teachers, each worksheet, motivational classroom poster and activity in this teaching resource collection has undergone rigorous review by the Teach Starter team to ensure it's ready for the classroom ... and your students!

Still learning about the growth mindset and wondering how it applies to kids in your classroom? Read on for some tips from our expert teachers!

What Is a Growth Mindset in the Classroom?

The growth mindset concept — and its counterpart, the fixed mindset — come from the research of Dr. Carol Dweck, a Stanford University professor known for her work on the implicit theories of intelligence. Dweck's research surmises that your mindset falls somewhere on a continuum according to your implicit views of where ability comes from.

Those who believe abilities are innate are said to have a fixed mindset, while those with a growth mindset see learning as a process and understand that we develop over time with learning, hard work, and persistence.

So how do you define a growth mindset for kids?

Broken down to be easily understood by your students, a growth mindset can be defined as the belief that you can develop your brain to be better and better at different skills through a mix of effort and different strategies.

Kids with a growth mindset can see failures as learning opportunities and push past them. This is often compared to a fixed mindset, which hampers kids who feel like their intelligence and abilities can't substantially be improved. A fixed mindset can frustrate students, while a growth mindset offers opportunities to grow.

Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset

Here's how Dweck herself described the fixed mindset vs. the growth mindset in one interview: "In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset, students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching, and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it." 

Dweck posits that over-praising kids for being intelligent ends up leading to a fixed mindset, with kids afraid to take risks lest they make mistakes. And there are very real impacts.

One study that looked at the student mindset and student performance looked at 10th graders in Chile: Those who held a growth mindset were three times more likely than their peers to score in the top 20 percent on national achievement tests. On the flip side, in that same study, students with a fixed mindset were four times more likely to score in the bottom 20 percent!