6 Essential Student Mindsets to Work On This Year

There’s something deeply satisfying about mapping out a year’s lesson plans—bringing all of the sprawl into a tidy, clearly sequenced plan of action to optimize learning. 

But well-organized content accounts for only half of the necessary transaction. If students don’t or won’t do their part, for whatever reason—a lack of discipline, an unwillingness to ask for help, or just a failure of academic confidence—then learning stalls, despite your best-laid plans. 

Preparing for a successful year of learning means getting your curriculum shipshape and setting up the right expectations and dispositions in students as you start the year. Here are six student mindsets that you can work on from day one through summer dismissal, with activities and practices drawn from teachers and schools featured across Edutopia’s archives.

1. An understanding that belonging is a two-way street. Classroom belonging is typically thought of as the domain of teachers. They are expected to get to know their students better, hang posters and incorporate curricular materials that reflect student interests, and maintain their composure under stressful classroom conditions. But belonging is ultimately a two-way street, and students need to lean in and accept responsibility as productive citizens of their learning communities. 

Shift some of the work to the kids: Instead of writing classroom rules on the whiteboard, for example, cocreate and document them with students, then regularly cross-examine classroom behavior for fidelity to the contract. Consider tactics like “ask three before me” to encourage kids to find their own answers, and gently redirect students who look to you for all the answers by responding with open-ended questions that require them to think more deeply. 

Try not to flex too much. Be a “warm demander,” mixing a healthy dose of kindness with high academic and behavioral standards—and adopt and deploy “we” language frequently to frame the classroom as a working unit and to underscore the importance of shared values and objectives. 

2. A willingness to ask questions. Academic peer pressure creeps into the classroom early: Children as young as 7 years old “begin to connect asking for help with looking incompetent in front of others,” researchers concluded in a 2021 study. But fear of looking stupid, while a powerful disincentive to seek help, is just half of a reticent student’s calculation. Just as often, kids simply aren’t aware that they’re lost. “Students must first recognize that they’re struggling,” writes educator Jennifer Sullivan. “This requires honesty and self-awareness.”  

There are some simple steps you can take to change the odds. Try saying “Give me three questions” instead of “Are there any questions?”—hundreds of teachers call it a simple but game-changing shift in language that helps the questions flow—and regularly incorporate KWL (know, want to know, learn) activities to get kids comfortable wondering about things out loud. Teach students to self-monitor by engaging in self-testing and asking themselves questions like “Do I need to ask for help?” and “Are there areas of this lesson that are unclear to me?” 

To solicit questions from even the shyest students, periodically offer forums that are less public—tech tools that allow students to be anonymous, for example, or shared Google Docs. Finally, when introducing new material, actively pose questions yourself, says teacher Emma Chiapetta, and provide hesitant students and English learners with question-starters like “I’m working hard, but I’m still not understanding. Can you help me?” and “I’m not sure what I need. Can you please talk with me?”

3. A tolerance for risk-taking and failure: It’s an understandable impulse: the desire to shield kids from failure—especially the public kind. Protective teachers may unconsciously resort to asking simple questions, or diplomatically reword poor answers to let struggling kids off the hook. But students of all ages should experience frustration and failure regularly—“much more than they currently do, because any kind of knowledge work, any kind of challenging problem, requires a certain level of frustration,” according to the learning scientist Manu Kapur.

Academic status plays a significant role in a student’s risk-avoidance, too. In an effort to maintain sky-high GPAs, kids seek out familiar academic challenges and then succeed without learning much.

What can teachers do? Start by going at one root of the problem and de-emphasizing grades: Consider dropping the lowest scores, grading fewer assignments, and using low-stakes or no-stakes quizzes when reviewing course material. At King Middle School, teachers withhold final scores on drafts of significant assignments, focusing students on written and verbal feedback instead. Research from 2021 reveals that withholding grades in this manner can improve student performance on future assignments by as much as two-thirds of a letter grade.

Be wary of creating an atmosphere of shame around student errors: Prepare for, model, and even celebrate mistakes in your classroom. Seed your own lessons with mistakes and reward students who find them; acknowledge and make light fun of your own errors as they occur; and consider group activities like “my favorite mistake”—during which common student errors are anonymized, shared, and discussed as glimmers of real insight, as opposed to harbingers of failure.

4. A healthy relationship to stress. Schools are compulsory environments that place kids in unfamiliar and often uncomfortable circumstances. New and challenging academic work, call-and-response activities, pop quizzes, and homework assignments come fast and furious and play out against a confusing swirl of extracurricular challenges like making friends, joining clubs and sports teams, and attending school events. 

A certain amount of stress is both acceptable and necessary: Kids should feel the pressure of academic standards and deadlines and should experience the weight of social and behavioral expectations, too. But normalizing day-to-day stress and preparing kids with simple tools to manage stress in their school lives is indispensable.

If your school supports it, incorporate brain breaks or other calming techniques like deep breathing or meditation throughout the school day. Consider working with students to help them put their worries in perspective: At Lister Elementary School, kids learn how to “measure the size of a problem” and react proportionally, while older kids can benefit from simple frameworks that walk them through damage control, asking themselves questions like “What is the source of my frustration?” “Do I need to seek help or advice?” and “What can I control and what can’t I control?”

Keep an eye on major transitions like changing schools and testing season, which can be especially challenging. Middle school students who spent as little as 30 minutes reflecting on and writing about their arrival in their new school—focusing on tactics they might use to overcome common problems like making friends or mastering new academic work—saw dramatic improvements in attendance, behavior, and academic performance. Other research suggests that direct appeals work, too: When kids are coached to think about test stress as a temporary, “energizing force,” course failure rates plummet.

5. An understanding that everyone can learn. Myths about talent and intelligence abound—but among the most damaging is the notion that ability is fixed at birth, and no amount of effort can change the trajectory. The effects on learning show up early and then persist: Young girls quietly resolve that they are not scientists and adjust their hopes accordingly, while older students sort themselves into “math people” and “language people” and pursue career paths to match. 

The way we frame things matters: In your classroom, periodically refer to academic work as “practice” (as in “OK, time to practice!”) or as rough-draft thinking; try to avoid feedback that alludes to fixed intellectual abilities (“You’re so smart” or “You’re a natural”); regularly praise effort and growth in addition to excellence, using specific examples of improvement where you can; and avoid talking about novels, songs, movies, or even scientific insights as works of “genius” (which place them beyond the range of effort and make them feel unattainable). 

Finally, put students to work breaking the myths down themselves: Have them start the year by writing down what they know about a topic you’ll teach and then write again on the same topic a few months later (this is a sneaky way to get them to retrieve information, too!); ask them to discuss provocative questions like “If you can get better at basketball or track, why can’t you get smarter at math?”; or have them present group research on scientists and artists who struggled before they succeeded.  

6. A sense of empathy for classmates and teachers. Learning accelerates within the confines of welcoming social environments; education is both an individual and a team sport. Children “implicitly learn” from the postures, attitudes, and interests of their fellow learners, confirms researcher Patricia Kuhl, and teamwork and collaborative problem-solving emerge from a culture of acceptance, listening, and belonging.

To ensure that students develop an openness to the lives, values, and passions of their peers, try to incorporate get-to-know-you activities into the school day. Start the year with group discussions of favorite musical artists or sports figures, for example, and use morning meetings or friendly Fridays to facilitate ongoing, nonacademic discussions and sharing throughout the year. Older students in Shana White’s class create and then hang identity portraits to help them be “comfortable with who they are, and recognize and respect the identity markers of anybody.” Teacher Henry Seton, meanwhile, asks his high school students to engage in 30-second “daily dedications,” during which they identify an important person they’d like to dedicate the day to; it’s a brilliant exercise that humanizes students, models vulnerability, and improves classroom cohesion.