Free Growth Mindset Virtual Lesson Plans
Growth Mindset is an important concept to teach our students given any school year—but in 2020, teaching students that their brains can grow, that a growth minded person experiences more success, or that we can lean on the “power of yet” may be some of the most valuable lessons we teach our students. If you’ve been trying to wrap your mind around how to lead virtual morning meeting lessons or looking for digital Growth Mindset activities, well you are in luck! And, you might not believe it, but these are COMPLETELY FREE! Let’s get on with downloading the Growth Mindset lesson plans and Google Slides and saving you some VALUABLE time!
If this is your first time visiting Tarheelstate Teacher, you may be less familiar with the theme-based morning meeting structure. I’ve created theme-based morning meeting units using common themes in literature and important social-emotional learning topics. Topics include things like belonging, kindness, compassion, conflict resolution, courage, managing our emotions, and growth mindset (as seen here!). Through these theme-based units, students are supported in developing social-emotional skills while building a stronger classroom community.
Theme-based morning meetings have similar goals as regular morning meetings—building community and focusing on students’ social and emotional development, but using themes in literature as the thread that ties morning meeting lessons together has the added benefit of complementing and helping me teach my literacy standards (read about ALL the benefits of using themes here).
To aid with remote learning and 1 to 1 classroom initiatives, I’ve begun creating Google Slides that are teacher-facing and student-facing for each morning meeting unit. These free Google Slides focus on helping students develop a growth mindset and learn more about how their brain works! Check out what I’ve created and be sure to get your free Growth Mindset Slides!
MORE ABOUT THE FRAMEWORK FOR THEME-BASED MORNING MEETINGS
In my theme-based morning meetings, I use many teaching strategies, like self-reflection and personal goal setting, read alouds, key vocabulary, videos and music, related quotations, discussion, and journal activities.
Structured in a path from the introductory launch to culmination and closure, I take my students through 5 main phases:
Exposure/Launching the Theme
Introducing the Theme, Self-Reflection, and Goal Setting
Student Discussion
Building the Theme
Consolidating Learning, Reflecting, and Creating Closure
You’ll see these phases play out as I share more about the Growth Mindset unit! If you read through this information and want to learn even more about the theme-based morning meeting approach, you’ll find this blog post (with lots of pictures!) helpful.
Let’s get to the GOOGLE SLIDES! I’ve created a “student-facing” set of Slides for the teacher to use to guide the lessons. You’ll find lots of space to record comments and thoughts from the student discussions. You’ll also find a morning meeting notebooks in Google Slides for each individual student—much like a paper-based morning meeting journal.
EDITABLE LESSON PLANS FOR MORNING MEETING IN GOOGLE SLIDES
To make it even easier to use these Google Slides and implement theme-based morning meetings, I’ve included 15 days of editable lesson plans for the teacher! (YAAAAAAAAAAAASS!) You’ll be able to easily customize your plans for morning meetings with these editable lessons!
GUIDED TEACHING SLIDES FOR MORNING MEETING WITH RECOMMENDED READ ALOUDS AND VIDEOS
In the launch phase, I either show students a short video, read aloud a picture book, or use an inspiring quotation related to the theme. I’ve included discussion Slides for the read aloud The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes by Mark Pett and Gary Rubinstein, and note-taking slides for videos on how the brain works.
KEY VOCABULARY SLIDES FOR INTRODUCING YOUR MORNING MEETING THEME
After launching the theme unit, I introduce key vocabulary related to the theme. For Growth Mindset, I include the following terms:
growth mindset
fixed mindset
neuroplasticity
effort
resilience
grit
These key vocabulary terms help myself and students talk more precisely about the Growth Mindset. These terms and definitions also help us name what we observe in our read alouds, videos, and quotations that we use during the theme unit. I’ve included a vocabulary slide in the teacher and student Google Slides.
STUDENT RATING SCALES, REFLECTION, AND GOAL SETTING
After introducing the vocabulary, students complete a self-reflection where they rate themselves on a few questions. Self-reflection and journaling are an important part of any morning meeting theme unit, but especially for the growth mindset unit. With these rating scales and reflection questions, students get to know themselves better, reflect on how well they apply a growth mindset already, and set goals for improving their mindset given specific ways to do so.
In the Growth Mindset reflection, students rate their thoughts on several Growth Mindset statements like
People are either born smart or not.
Setbacks or challenges motivate me to try harder.
A person can learn new things, but they can’t really do much to change their intelligence.
When I try harder, I feel good about myself.
People can change their intelligence.
In addition to a personal goal, you may also want to create a whole-class goal related to Growth Mindset. This creates group accountability and opportunities for students to encourage one another using the language you’ve used in your whole-group goal. At the end of the unit, students reflect on how they did with the goal they set at the beginning of the unit. They also think about how they might continue working to improve their mindset. You can see an example of a whole-class goal and students’ post-reflection slide in the image below.
GROWTH MINDSET WHOLE-GROUP DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
After I’ve launched my Growth Mindset unit with The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes, introduced our key vocabulary, and had students self-reflect, it’s time to move into the discussion phase of our unit. My role during this phase is to learn more about students’ growth mindsets and ability to allow themselves time to learn new things. I’ll work to elicit their ideas and understandings and to allow them to discuss those thoughts with one another.
Students have one slide of 3 key discussion questions. In the teacher slides, I’ve included one question per slide so that you can record students’ ideas collectively as you have a discussion about it. Students respond to:
What are some things that are challenging for you?
What advice would you give a friend who is giving up on themselves?
How can failure be an essential step to success?
BUILDING ON THE THEME
Within the Google Slides and editable lesson plans, I’ve included additional anchor charts and student activities to extend students’ learning and understanding of Growth Mindset. During the “Building” phase, we read more read alouds on the theme and complete other discussion activities to help students make connections and deepen their understanding of the topic.
We chart the differences between a Growth Mindset and Fixed Mindset, we “FLIP” negative mindsets into ones that are more growth minded, and we plan future goals thinking about the “power of yet.”
MAKING TEXT TO TEXT CONNECTIONS
Because reading aloud picture books and viewing videos related to the theme is such a huge part of my theme-based morning meeting units, I take the time to help students develop and deepen the text to text connections found across the literature I’ve shared with them. It’s in this part of our unit that students start coming up with “big ideas” and making generalizations about our theme! (WIN-WIN for the literacy standards!)
NOTE, I’ve included suggested picture book read alouds and a YouTube playlist to make it easier to plan the extension activities for your unit.
CULMINATION PHASE AND QUOTATION RESPONSES
I’ve included 5 related quotation Slides where students are prompted to analyze and respond to the quotation. Students can also connect the quotation to the theme you are studying and the read alouds and videos they’ve experienced. You can compile thoughts from a class discussion onto the teacher quotation Slides.
I weave quotation analysis throughout my theme-based morning meeting framework. Sometimes, I can use the perfect quotation to LAUNCH our unit. Other times, we analyze a quotation in a lesson when we are building the theme. I also like to have students respond to one quotation when we wrap up our unit. I can use this as a culminating activity that shows me what students have gained from studying the theme. You can choose a quotation for students or allow them to choose their own from the ones included.
GET THE FREE GOOGLE SLIDES FOR YOUR FIRST MORNING MEETING
If teaching students about Growth Mindset is a priority for you this year, you can get the teacher slides, student slides, and editable lesson plans that you’ve seen in this post sent to your inbox for FREE! This Growth Mindset theme unit is packed with lesson ideas, student journal pages, discussion prompts, self-reflection, and more! With a few clicks of your mouse, you’ll be all planned!
OTHER GOOGLE SLIDES FOR MORNING MEETINGS
I am currently working to add teacher and student Google Slides to all of my morning meeting theme sets. These will be added to the original resource listings on Teachers Pay Teachers or my Tarheelstate Teacher website store at no extra cost! Currently, Google Slides for Belonging, Kindness, Compassion, Perseverance, Conflict Resolution, and Growth Mindset are available.
THEMES TO GUIDE YOUR MORNING MEETINGS ALL YEAR
If you’d like more social emotional theme units with a focus on encouraging students’ social, emotional, and academic success, you may be interested in the Morning Meeting Mega Bundle of 17 theme units. With units focused on kindness, compassion, growth mindset, gratitude, perseverance, responsibility, managing emotions, and so much more, your engaging morning meeting plans are done for you and your students will love them! You can save 10% on the Mega Bundle of all 17 themes with the code MM10.
Be sure to grab your free Growth Mindset materials! I can’t wait for you to get a hold of them and try them out with your students! Stop back by and give me your feedback in the comments!
