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"The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice." - Brian Herbert
"The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice." - Brian Herbert
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Professional Learning Communities
In excellent schools, educators are scholars and continuous learners. We strive to meet students at their highest potential and then “nudge” them to take risks and press on into new realms of learning and skillsets. A report released by Harvard on engagement, mindset and student agency skills provides insights for us on student behaviors that result in increased student agency (a term for the “capacity and propensity to take purposeful initiative”) (1). The report classifies agency as a group of behaviors that, though small, are powerful:
Punctuality—The student tries hard to arrive to class on time.
Good Conduct—The student is cooperative, respectful, and on task.
Effort—The student pushes him/herself to do their best quality work.
Help Seeking—The student is not shy about asking for help when needed.
Conscientiousness—The student is developing a commitment to produce quality work (4).
In addition to supporting these behaviors in our everyday classroom routines and habits of scholarship, our committed team of teachers and academic team members also work hard to “catch students” before disengagement behaviors become habits. The researchers at Harvard help us to understand what these behaviors look like:
Faking Effort--The student pretends to be trying hard when they actually are not.
Generally Not Trying—The student is generally disengaged, exerting little effort.
Giving Up if Work is Hard—The student fails to persist in the face of difficulty.
Avoiding Help—The student does not ask for help even when they know they need it (4).
Our commitment to training and implementation of growth mindset and the theories of Carol Dweck is directly related to decreasing these disengagement behaviors and increasing persistence and belief in “taking on the impossible problem” for our students.