Language Teacher Attributes Reflecting a Growth Mindset Pedagogy

• In Event: Teacher Education and Equitable Approaches

Proposal

Amid the rapid changes in education driven by AI, hyperconnectivity, and the post-pandemic world, it's crucial for educators to reexamine the skills they need. According to Kemmis and colleagues (2014), new educational practices should include fresh understandings, actions, and relationships, bundled together in new projects to transform education for a world “worth living in”. This involves fostering human connections, seeking continuous growth, and prioritizing social well-being in the educational experience (UNESCO, 2022).
As educators, we guide future generations by designing learning environments that facilitate these possibilities. By including Dweck's concepts of mindset and Brock & Hundley’s (2018) teacher attributes in our teaching practices with pre-service and in-service teachers for the past 5 years, we realized the crucial impact of our mindsets on instruction and how teaching explicitly about it could positively influence teachers and students' perceptions of learning and teaching, leading to changes in discourse and attitudes in the classroom. A teacher's Growth Mindset can significantly influence the classroom's dynamics and contribute to a more just, inclusive, peaceful and harmonious learning environment. By fostering resilience, promoting inclusivity, encouraging collaboration, and modeling lifelong learning, teachers can play a crucial role in cultivating a culture of peace within the educational setting.
In this presentation, we will share the findings of a case study with public school language teachers who enrolled in a professional development course (PDC) on Growth Mindset in Bogotá, Colombia. We pursued three objectives: to identify the teacher attributes that reflect a GM perspective after a PDC on GM; to describe the ways the GM teacher attributes are reflected within practice architectures (Kemmis et al. 2014), and to propose considerations for a GM pedagogy framework.
We examined the teachers’ experiences throughout and after the PDC, their contexts, and reflections on pedagogical practices that led them to reexamine and reshape their beliefs, attitudes, and actions. We thoroughly analyzed teachers’ practice architectures and their ecological configuration by classifying the sayings, doings and relatings in line with (Kemmis et al., 2014), and Brock and Hundley's (2018) attributes of GM.

Our findings support the Kemmis et al’s claim that practices can be consistent, inconsistent, or contradictory with the arrangements they are enacted within. These concur with Risanen et al.’s (2019) work as they show that teachers can hold a mix of characteristics related to their mindsets. Such findings justify the in-depth scrutiny we conducted by using Kemmis et al.’s framework to provide ‘finely nuanced’ qualitative accounts on what developing and embodying a situated GM pedagogy can actually look like. Overall, the most salient attributes emerging from the data in this scenario were process-oriented, valuing mistakes and communication. The process-oriented attribute was evident in how teachers modeled, used student-centered strategies, and adjusted instructions for better comprehension. Valuing mistakes was reflected in how teachers handled errors and created a safe learning environment for students to learn from their own mistakes. The communication attribute showed some inconsistency between dimensions and instances in the data. Not all observations reflected a growth approach. Nevertheless, teachers demonstrated a willingness to improve and learn new ways to communicate assertively.
From these findings and our experience as GM educators, we convey a proposal for a GM pedagogy that encompasses three processes: the recognition and awareness of beliefs and attitudes that teachers and students have about learning and teaching, the embodiment of those beliefs/attitudes in their practice, and the continuous reflections and transformations that derive from these. Furthermore, it requires individuals' willingness for continuous cultivation and transformation through dynamic, flexible, cyclic, and systemic processes. By fostering a culture of continuous cultivation and transformation, educators can empower individuals to challenge the status quo, making education a force for positive change in a rapidly evolving world. In today's educational landscape, it is even more essential for educators to embrace self-observation, self-reflection, and actions that prioritize human connections and social well-being in the pursuit of an education that envisions a better world for all.

Authors

• Isabel Tejada-Sanchez, Universidad de los Andes

• Paula García Cardona, Universidad de los Andes

• Martha Ramirez, Universidad de Los Andes