Promising Practices

My time at Promising Practices was honestly better than expected. I wasn't sure what to expect signing up for this forum. At first I really didn't know what to choose for my workshops. The one's that caught my eye were "When you fail you're learning", gross mindsets in everyday Elementary school lessons, as well as Stress Management, technique's to building resiliency. These honestly were both extremely good choices.
I was able to really grasp some good thoughts and ideas from the keynote speaker Robert Brooks. Some quotes from him that really stood out to me were, "If people don't feel welcome in your heart, you really can't help them." Another quote that I heard him say that really resonated with me was, "I may not want to go to work today, but today might me the day that I say or do something to make a difference in someone's life". As a keynote speaker he kept me really engaged and I was not guided away from his words at all.
Going to two different workshops the one that mostly resonated with me was the growth mindset one. When I got there we were able to listen to two elementary teachers talk about how you can find the ideas of growth mindset in children's books. As groups we were then challenged to see if the books we were given were open mindset or closed mindset. We were also given a bag with pasta and marshmallow's and we were told to try and make a tower as high as we could. It was challenging and we didn't know that the whole time the teachers had been going around listening to some of the key words that we were saying as we did these projects and judged whether we were thinking with an open mindset or a closed mindset.
It did not take long for me to be able to relate this workshop to one of the authors that we had read for our blog articles, and that was Lisa Delbit. Her ideals have to do with teaching our students the rules and codes of power, and that is exactly what the teaching of open and closed growth mindset is. Delbit would have been extremely happy to sit in on that presentation. The thought of teaching open and closed mindset at young ages is exciting, because it can change the way children look at the work they do. Its like positive and negative thinking and working through and problem solving from there.

The following are links that were given as tools to understand and use as supportive resources..
http://imaginationsoup.net/2016/05/10/30-biographies-model-growth-mindset/
https://www.mindsetworks.com/Videos
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/learning-from-failure-ainissa-ramirez