Intentional Inclusion

Finding models and insight into the best and most effective strategies and programs to teach English language learners in respectful and equitable ways is a persistent topic in practitioner and educational research. This chapter shares the voices and work of Toronto educators whose embrace of multiculturalism and multilingualism has contributed to the academic success of English language learners and refugee children in the Toronto schools. Through a series of interviews and classroom observations, the author explored the practices and programs used to support and empower these young English language learners. The chapter presents three major themes that emerged from this study: teacher mindset, family engagement, and targeted refugee education. These themes shed light and provide a deeper understanding for educators of the why and the how of Toronto's success. Educator takeaways are shared.

“Doing” mindsets in the classroom: A coding scheme for teacher and student mindset-related verbalizations

There is a growing body of research showing the crucial role that students’ growth versus fixed ability-mindsets have in their school achievement, enjoyment, and resilience. The overwhelming majority of this research adopts a variable-oriented approach. As a result, little is known about how teachers and students co-regulate each other’s mindsets within classroom interactions. This manuscript addresses the need for more person-oriented research that examines how teachers and students do mindsets in naturalistic settings, i.e., their mindset-related verbalizations. In this manuscript, we provide a coding scheme to study the moment-to-moment dynamics of mindset-related verbalizations of both teachers and students within Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) contexts: The STEAM (Student-TEAcher-Mindset) coding scheme. We demonstrate the utility of the coding system through content and ecological validity, inter-rater reliability, and a case study of STEAM-generated time-series data. We show how these data can be used to chart moment-to-moment dynamics that occur between teacher and student. The coding scheme provides teachers and researchers with a practical tool for analyzing how person-specific mindset-related language can wax and wane in the context of peer and teacher interactions within STEM lessons.

Stereotype Threat in High School Classrooms: How It links to Teacher Mindset Climate, Mathematics Anxiety, and Achievement

As stereotype threat was initially examined in the tradition of experimental research, the effects of stereotype threat have often been tested by temporarily manipulating social identity threat mainly among college students. To extend the literature to adolescents’ naturalistic experience of stereotype threat, we examined 9th grade adolescents’ stereotype threat using National Study of Learning Mindsets data (n~= 6,040; 48.5% girls). Black and Latino boys experienced higher levels of stereotype threat in high school mathematics classrooms, as compared to black/Latino girls and white peers. When students perceived their teachers to create fixed mindset climate, students experienced greater stereotype threat. Stereotype threat, in turn, negatively predicted later achievement via heightened anxiety among black/Latino boys and white girls. The findings highlight the importance of forming mathematics classrooms that cultivate growth mindset and minimize the threat to students’ social identity.

False growth mindsets negatively impact student beliefs and performance

What does it mean to hold a “growth mindset?” Is it enough to simply think that anyonecan grow their abilities as long as they try, or is there more to it? Are using appropriate strategies and being willing to ask for help important, or irrelevant? And what does it matter if you’re wrong? Using a large nationally-representative sample of 9th graders in public high-school math classes and their teachers, we find, in a preregistered analysis, that a so-called “false growth mindset” - believing that anyone can succeed with hard work alone - is surprisingly common among teachers, and has real-world impacts on their students. In a multi-level non-parametric latent profile analysis, we find that 38% of teachers surveyed can be classified as having a false- growth mindset (characterized by an unreserved belief that everyone has the ability to succeed, but with a tendency towards praising success and imposing strategies on students instead of working with them to figure out what strategies would work best for them), and that students in these classrooms are more likely than students in the classrooms of teachers with a true growth mindset (~39% of teachers surveyed, characterized by a belief that most students can improve their abilities paired with strategy-supportive practices) to view their teachers as having fixed ability beliefs, are more likely to hold entity theories about their own abilities, and that students’ beliefs about their own ability significantly mediates a relationship between teacher mindset and lower end-of-year student grades.

The school of hard knocks: Pre-service teachers’ mindset and motivational changes during their practicum

The mindset and motivation that teachers demonstrate are likely to influence their students’ mindset and motivation. While mindset and motivation of in-service teachers have been investigated thoroughly, the same cannot be said of pre-service teachers. Pre-service teachers’ mindset and motivation are likely developed during in-class experiences or practicum, the latter seen as the defining experience of pre-service teachers’ preparation. Understanding the changes that pre-service teachers undergo during their practicum experiences in terms of theories of intelligence, teaching efficacy, resilience, and grit is therefore crucial. This study used these constructs as examples of mindsets, self-beliefs, capacities, and personality traits. A cross-sectional design compared American and Canadian pre-practicum versus post-practicum pre-service teachers’ growth mindset and motivation and illustrated that similar effects occur across national contexts through a primarily quantitative questionnaire with open-ended questions. Triangulated statistical and thematic analyses illustrated that post-practicum students were less idealistic about the incremental nature of intelligence and reported higher resilience and a more pragmatic approach to teaching than their pre-practicum peers. The study’s findings extended other studies’ findings illustrating that changes occur specifically in teacher mindset as well as their strategies. Teacher education programs informed by these specific changes can capitalize on the pragmatic shift of teachers’ strategy selection while also coaching them to retain an incremental view of intelligence for their students’ benefit.