Beliefs about Teaching and Learning
Self-Assess Your Beliefs about Teaching and Learning
Below are surveys for instructors to self-assess and learn more about their beliefs and practices related to teaching and learning. First, please complete this short, survey:
Here are other self-assessments specifically about teaching and learning:
Hopefully, completing one or more of these self-assessments will help you reflect on and evaluate your philosophy of teaching. Your teaching and learning beliefs can have a significant impact on your teaching practices and consequently how students perform in your courses. Similarly, student beliefs about teaching and learning have a significant impact on their own performance. Feel free to survey the mindset of your own students.
More about Mindset
This handout illustrates two predominant mindsets: growth mindset and fixed mindset.
Instructors with a fixed mindset are less likely to be persuaded by or to implement active learning practices in their classes (Aragón et al., 2018). Why does this matter? Because a large-scale meta-analysis showed that “students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning” (Freeman et al., 2014).
Watch this video for an explanation for how our mindset beliefs impact our performance in all kinds of contexts including teaching, learning, sports, work, and parenting.
The Power of belief — mindset and success | Eduardo Briceno | TEDxManhattanBeach
This Growth Mindset Feedback Tool handout has some examples of feedback you can give students in different contexts that may encourage rather than discourage them to utilize a more productive mindset.
See also these videos for other introductions to growth mindset:
Mistakes Happen: Confessions about Teaching by College Professors (Gini)
Big Idea #1: Anyone Can Learn Anything Under the Right Conditions, by Sandy Shugart
Further Reading & Resources
- A Growth Mindset: Essential for Student and Faculty Success
- Who Gets to Graduate?
- The Calculus Project: A Growth Mindset Success Story
- Allowing students multiple attempts to submit & revise an assignment or quiz “may serve as a powerful learning tool and…a catalyst for student growth mindset cultivation“
- Wise Interventions
- Growth Mindset Lesson Plan
- A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement
- Faculty Beliefs about Intelligence Are Related to the Adoption of Active-Learning Practices
- Do my peers have a fixed or growth mindset? Exploring the behaviors associated with undergraduate STEM students’ perceptions of their peers’ mindsets about intelligence
Feedback/Errata