Grade 4 - Week 4 - Who We Are - Writing Notebooks - Fixed vs Growth Mindsets

To help our writing skills, 4th Grade students have a writing notebook to keep track of what they need to do to be better writers.  So far, we have been using a thesaurus to throw out the "Dead (boring and overused) Verbs" and find more interesting and descriptive verbs.  We've also thought about the different types of adjectives there are to describe different things.  We just started putting together "good sentences" with a descriptive subject and a vivid verb, and later will make them into the "best sentences" by adding different action modifiers.  

Also, during our inquiry into success, challenge and failure, we have been thinking more deeply about fixed vs. growth mindsets and will soon begin to do our psychological case study on it.  Today, the students were analyzing questions from a Stanford University survey on "Intellectual Achievement Responsibility".  That test was created and administered to determine how much a student's own responsibility for their learning affects how well they do.  We discussed how the different responses showed a growth mindset or a fixed mindset.  Later, we will continue to develop our own questions that will be used to determine the mindsets of the individuals in our case study.