Free Quote Posters / Growth Mindset Discussion

I hope you're not getting tired of these posts of posters I made because I'm nowhere near done with them. I may have overdone it a little this summer when it came to creating new room decorations... But, I spend 8+ hours a day in my classroom, so I think it's time well-spent. Plus, once school starts, all of my time will be spent on lesson planning and foldable making.

Awhile back, we had an informal discussion on interactive notebooks at the Global Math Department. Elizabeth shared how she incorporates the growth mindset into her interactive notebooks. Every week, she posts a new growth mindset quote on the board. She doesn't call them this; to her students, it is just a quote of the week. But, the quotes are specifically chosen to evoke a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. Since reading Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, this distinction makes a lot more sense to me. An individual with a fixed mindset sees failure as defining. Therefore, they will often avoid challenging situations to avoid appearing (and thus being) a failure. Someone with a growth mindset sees failing at something as a step on their journey towards mastering something new. Challenges are seen as fun and exciting. Elizabeth said that she has students record these on the inside cover of their notebooks for a few extra points on their homework grade. You can read more about how she handles this in the classroom here. She even shares a list of quotes she uses!

I want to take this idea and adapt it for my own classroom. Since reading Mindset this summer, I want to start out the school year talking about the different types of mindsets with my students. I want us to take a quiz and determine out mindsets. Then, I want to create a classroom culture where we (very kindly and politely) call out others for saying something from a fixed mindset. I know that I don't always approach life with a growth mindset, so I want my students to be watching me, too. And, I'll be watching them. And, they'll be watching each other. We will (hopefully) pause and talk about about how we could reword the statement to reflect a growth mindset.

Will it help? I have no clue. But, I'm pretty sure it can't hurt.

Last year, I posted a quote every week on my dry erase board. I printed and laminated these quotes at the beginning of the year, so all I had to do was switch out the quote on Mondays. You can see some of the posters I have created for this before here and here. I want to take this a step further this year and have my students start recording these quotes in their notebooks. I'm picturing some sort of booklet foldable at the front of their interactive notebooks with lots and lots of rectangular sections. In each section, students will record a quote AND illustrate it somehow. This will be graded when I grade notebooks each unit. Once I figure out exactly how I want the foldable to look, I'll be sure to post it here!

Anywho, I say all this to introduce my latest poster creations. As I've been reading through books this summer, I've been copying down quotes that I found thought-provoking and inspirational. I recently typed these quotes with lots of fun fonts, and I'm sharing them below. I'm looking forward to including some of these in the growth mindset quote of the week program I talked about above.

Here are image files of the individual quotes. I have embedded the file for these quotes below as both a PDF file and an editable Open Office file. If you have issues downloading the embedded files, please send me an e-mail at mathequalslove(at)gmail(dot)com. And, I'll happily attach the files and send them to you.