Exemplar Questions
Once you have started communicating with parents about growth mindsets, the next step is to give parents growth mindsets parenting tools they can use at home with their children.
Here is a set of twenty-five exemplar questions designed for parents.
You can share these as they are or amend them to fit your context.
Either way, they provide a fantastic starting point for discussions and conversations that have a growth mindset focus.
Growth Mindset Parent Questions
- Can you show me what great effort looks like?
- How does effort help you to learn?
- When you’re putting in effort, how do you keep yourself on track?
- Why does effort help you to change what you can do?
- Is it good to keep going, even if things get tough? Why?
- Can you tell me about the best mistake you made at school today?
- What makes a good mistake?
- What did you learn from your mistakes this week?
- Are some mistakes better than others, why?
- That’s an interesting mistake; what do you think about it?
- What an interesting picture – what made you choose those colours?
- I like what you’ve done here – can you tell me more about it?
- What made you decide to do it that way?
- This is interesting – what were you thinking about when you did it?
- How could I get better at learning? What would you suggest to me?
- What’s the best way to keep going when things get tough?
- If you’re learning something difficult, what can you do to keep going?
- Can you tell me about the different thinking you’ve done at school today?
- What makes good thinking?
- What was the best challenge you faced today?
- What do you like about having your thinking challenged?
- What makes a problem really interesting?
- Can you tell me how you improved this before you finished it?
- Is it good to keep trying different strategies when you get stuck? Why?
- Can you change your intelligence? How?
When you share these questions – or your own ones – it’s useful to include a couple of examples of the kind of conversations to which they might give rise.
This provides a model parents can use to get started.
The exemplification points them in the right direction and can reassure them if they feel uncertain about whether what they are doing is right or not.
Exemplar Language Changes
Another technique you can show parents is how to modify their language to avoid fixed mindset messages and encourage growth mindset ones.
This is all about reframing our language.
The idea is to give parents a set of exemplar language changes they can implement in their own speech – rather than asking them to reframe the language their children use.
This latter idea may be suitable for them further down the line, but is probably a little too demanding initially, while they are still getting to grips with growth mindset ideas.
Here is a set of exemplar language changes we could give to parents as a starting point.
Growth Mindset Parent Reframing Examples
- ‘That’s brilliant,’ becomes ‘That’s interesting, what made you think in that way?’
- ‘You’re a genius,’ becomes ‘Tell me about it – how did you decide what to do?’
- ‘Don’t worry, I couldn’t do it either,’ becomes ‘I’m sure if we look at it together, we can work out a solution.’
- ‘That’s too hard,’ becomes ‘Challenges are good because you know your brain’s having to work hard.’
- ‘We’re not that type of family,’ becomes‘If you keep trying, I think you’ll be able to do it.’
You can use this set of reframing examples or come up with your own.
Either way, the aim is the same.
To provide parents with a starting point for changing some of the things they say.
Another option is to give parents a set of exemplar changes that reflect the linguistic currency you are developing in school.
This means sharing how certain terms have been rebranded, with the intention that parents will buy into this and echo the changes when talking with their child.
For example:
- ‘Mistakes,’ become ‘Good mistakes.’
- ‘Trial and error,’ becomes ‘Trial and improvement.’
- ‘Difficult,’ becomes ‘Our next challenge.’
- ‘I can’t,’ becomes ‘I can’t yet.’
- ‘I can’t do it,’ becomes ‘What strategy could I try next?’
Whichever option you go for, it can be helpful to provide parents with a print-out or sticker they can place somewhere prominent in their home (such as on the fridge door) to act as cue.
You can distribute this in person, via email, or send it home with learners.
Three Parenting Tools
To conclude, let’s look at six parenting tools adapted from ideas used by teachers.
All have been simplified.
All can be taught to or shared with parents at information evenings, via newsletters, or through videos.
- Mental Contrasting
If … then …
If I want to improve my science project, then I will need to edit my work and check my data.
Showing parents the technique of mental contrasting means giving them a simple tool to which they can turn when they want to help their child achieve a goal.
They simply need to rephrase what the child has said into the form of ‘If … then …’
They will also be able to use the technique at other times, for example, to pre-empt something their child might be getting ready to say.
Or, to change the focus of a conversation from negative to positive.
The aim of mental contrasting is to get children thinking about the process they will need to follow to achieve their goals.
That’s what the ‘if … then …’ structure of the sentence does.
- Storytelling
You can teach parents the importance of paying attention to the stories they and their children tell about themselves.
As part of this, demonstrate how certain stories can reinforce a perception of yourself as a learner whose intelligence, talent, and ability are fixed.
Highlight the fact that these stories can easily bubble up to the surface without us even realising – and that we need to be alive to them if we want to avoid them, rephrase them, or tell different stories altogether.
You might also want to give parents of younger children a list of growth-mindset-related fiction stories they can read with their kids.
These should echo the themes of growth mindset thinking, such as persistence, the importance of targeted effort, and seeing mistakes in a positive light.
- Talking in terms of effort
We know that targeted effort is the path to mastery.
And that targeted effort is the number one process we want all learners to engage in.
Share these ideas with parents, explain why effort matters so much, and then encourage them to talk to their children about effort.
You can exemplify this by giving parents a selection of key phrases to use, or by providing a set of exemplar language changes focussed exclusively on effort.
Either way, you will be making clear why effort matters and how parents can make the concept a focal point of the conversations they have with their children.
- Strategy Sharing
We use strategies to solve problems.
Encouraging parents to share strategies with their children has a couple of consequences.
First, it gives them access to different ways of thinking and different ways of attempting to solve problems.
Second, it demonstrates the efficacy of using strategies, switching strategies, and trying out new strategies to tackle problems.
The very act of discussing strategies implies the relevance of thinking about strategies when looking to achieve something.
You can encourage parents to share strategies with their children in relation to schoolwork.
You can also encourage them to share strategies they use when problem solving at work, or at home.
Finally, don’t forget you can give parents a set of exemplar questions they can use to start conversations with their children about the strategies they’ve been using at school.
- Rebranding Mistakes
We know that mistakes are a good thing, that they present us with opportunities to learn, and that when we make them it is usually a sign that the work we are doing is at a suitable level of difficulty.
But do parents know this?
And do they know the importance of changing children’s perception of mistakes, to decrease their fear of failure and encourage a more positive attitude toward intellectual risk-taking?
Showing parents how to rebrand mistakes means giving them a new way to talk and think about mistakes.
It may also mean challenging some of the assumptions parents have about mistakes and failure – assumptions that might have a long history and be deeply held.
Still, tackling this is important and, in some cases, can prove liberating for parents.
- Focussing on Processes
Our final parenting tool sees us helping parents to focus on the processes their children engage in to produce work.
This helps them switch the focus of discussion from final products to the things that lead to these final products being created.
The first step is to explain to parents why processes are important.
The second step is to give them a set of exemplar questions they can use to engage their children in discussions about processes.
Here are twenty-five questions as a starting point:
Questions About Processes
- What did you do? Can you talk me through it?
- How are you thinking about the problem?
- What ideas do you have for getting started? How might they work in practice?
- What other strategies could you use? What might be the result?
- Where did it go wrong? How could we use this information?
- If you were going to do it again, how would you change your approach?
- What else could you do to get a better end result?
- Is there another strategy you could try?
- How much better might it be after three more attempts?
- What did you learn from each attempt? How did you use that to refine your thinking?
- Why did it end up like this?
- How could you get a different result through changing what you did?
- How could you tweak your efforts next time, to get a different result?
- If you were going to have another go, what changes would you make? Why?
- Can you explain what someone else would need to go through to get the same result?
- How does this attempt compare to the last one?
- How does your thinking now compare to your thinking before?
- What is the biggest difference between now and then?
- How are you approaching things differently this time? Why?
- What makes thinking more effective? Why?
- How would you describe the thinking you’ve done?
- Where did things start to change? What did you do that caused this?
- If you were going to start again, what would you focus on first? Why?
- Can you tell me what other options there are? How might these work?
- What if you had to explain the process to an alien? What would you say?
Either share some of these with parents, or adapt them to fit your context.
