Changing The Growth Mindset at HTT

Nicholas Skelton April 5, 2020 2 min read

Liam, Hayden and William, the original 3 HTT Elite Athletes on the cover of Florida Hockey Life webzine

In reflection on the Growth Mindset Plan I wrote for HTT back in November, I am not too sure that I would change anything as of right now. While some might say, “That’s not using Growth Mindset!” if I’m not changing anything. Well, here is what I have to say about that. Right now, nothing is broken and everything is working great and progressing very well. We might not have had enough time to see anything change yet or witness any failures that we couldn’t come back from. We can always improve what we do and how we deliver the information, because people learn differently from each other. When it comes to the plan though, I find that if we follow what was written out in the plan, Dwecks “Determine Your Mindset” test first and support it with, “Change Your Mindset Model,” everything is working out. The students/athletes have been very open minded for the change and the outcomes of using it. Now only if we could utilize this type of mindset for the teachers moving onto online education during this time in our country. Lot’s of teachers having a hard time letting go of the pencil and paper.

One thing I have noticed is, when creating the Understanding by Design model, it is almost necessary to have a Growth Mindset attitude. Having this type of mindset and attitude will allow new things or new experiments and allow for mistakes to happen with a learning outcome. With allowing failure as an option, UbD and Growth Mindset can be utilized to the most productive learning tools. Society doesn’t agree with failure and that is because they don’t how to learn from failure. Sometimes the best ideas and best learning possibilities comes from failure. Using the UbD allows working out of the box while the Growth Mindset allows learning no matter what.

While I believe currently we don’t have anything needs adjusting in the plan, we will be implementing a specific UbD model that is learner center built up by tools and skill machines. When the machines and tools come in the plan will be implemented.