It looks like this, and yes I can!

Here are 175 questions, all designed to help you promote growth mindsets.

There are seven sections:

• Getting the Language Right
• Changing How Learners Perceive Mistakes
• Targeting learner Effort
• Giving Great Feedback
• Thinking About Thinking (Metacognition)
• Creating a Challenge Culture
• Focussing on Processes

Each is based on a different aspect of developing growth mindsets.

All the questions are indicative.

You can use them as they are or adapt them to suit your own teaching style and the students with whom you work.

Enjoy!

Getting the Language Right

1. What if you could do it?
2. What if you just can’t do it yet?
3. What do we need to do to be able to do it?
4. How could we work together to change it?
5. What advice would you give to someone who thought they couldn’t do it?
6. What makes a good mistake?
7. Can you show me a good mistake?
8. Can you tell me about the best mistake you’ve made today?
9. How much more have we learned by making mistakes?
10. How would you explain making mistakes to someone who came to our class for the first time?
11. Tell me what you can do. OK, now what do we need to do to go further?
12. What other techniques have you tried?
13. What advice would you give to someone who wanted to give up?
14. What proof do we have that anybody can change their ability?
15. Can you show me how to keep going?
16. If you get stuck, what different strategies can you try?
17. Can you tell me how you’d try to solve a problem you’d never seen before?
18. Can you tell me what makes a growth mindset?
19. What techniques can you use to keep yourself going when things get tough?
20. Why is challenge good?
21. How would you describe determination?
22. What does perseverance look like?
23. Where does effort come from? What does it look like?
24. Can you convince me that effort is a path to mastery?
25. How do you know you’re really learning? What does it feel like?

Changing How Learners Perceive Mistakes

1. What was the last good mistake you made?
2. How many good mistakes have we made so far this week?
3. What’s the difference between a good mistake and a really good mistake?
4. Why are mistakes the beginning, not the end?
5. How would you explain good mistakes to an alien?
6. Can you show me the different attempts you’ve been through?
7. What did you learn from each of your attempts?
8. What name do you prefer – trial and error or trial and improvement? Why?
9. How could you improve it on the next attempt?
10. What did your attempt show you? How could you use the information next time?
11. That’s an interesting mistake, isn’t it?
12. Can you show me the most interesting mistake you’ve made today?
13. Which of these mistakes do you think is the most interesting? Why?
14. When does a mistake become an interesting mistake? Why?
15. How could we test whether we’re likely to make the same mistake again?
16. How do mistakes link to challenge?
17. Is it true that if you’re making mistakes then you’re having your thinking challenged? Why?
18. What can you learn from failure?
19. Should you give up if you make a mistake? Why?
20. If you keep making the same mistakes, what can you do to improve things?
21. Can you go back through your book and pick out the best mistake you’ve made so far this year?
22. Are some mistakes better than others? Why?
23. How do mistakes help you to learn?
24. Can you show me how a mistake has helped you to improve your work?
25. What did you learn from each of your attempts?

Targeting Learner Effort

1. What does good effort look like?
2. What’s the difference between useful effort and useless effort?
3. How would you describe effort?
4. Can you show me what really good effort looks like?
5. When did you target your effort most effectively?
6. What strategies did you use to keep going?
7. How do you keep yourself focussed?
8. What advice would you give to someone who felt their effort was waning?
9. Why does effort matter?
10. What are the most important things about effort?
11. Can you give me three reasons why effort matters more than anything else?
12. How does effort help you to learn more?
13. What does it feel like when you’re really targeting your efforts?
14. Are there certain things you can do to keep yourself on track? What are they?
15. How can people keep their effort up if they start getting distracted?
16. Can you tell me about a piece of work you did where effort played a really big part?
17. What could we focus on next?
18. How could you use that information to target your effort?
19. If you had to pick one thing to focus your effort on, what would it be?
20. Where does effort come from?
21. What advice would you give to someone who didn’t feel like putting in any effort?
22. Can you show me what you’ve achieved through your own effort?
23. Is there such a thing as bad effort? Why?
24. How would you know if someone had put in a lot of effort?
25. Why is it important to focus your effort?

Giving Great Feedback

1. Why does feedback matter?
2. What makes feedback important?
3. How can you use feedback to improve your work?
4. What does good feedback sound like?
5. Can you give yourself feedback? Why?
6. What is the best way to use the feedback you get?
7. Is all feedback equally important? Why?
8. Can you show me an example of how you’ve used feedback to improve your work?
9. Can you tell me what feedback I should give you about this piece of work?
10. Where would feedback be most useful here?
11. Is feedback about you as a person, or about how to get better?
12. Why might it be more useful if I give you feedback on the strategies you’ve used?
13. Can you show me your best mistake and tell me what feedback it gave you?
14. How could you improve this bit of your work?
15. How could you have done this differently? What might have happened then?
16. If I’d written this, what feedback would you give me? Why?
17. Can you show me how you’ve improved your work, based on the feedback?
18. Can you talk me through the improvements you’ve made?
19. How did you decide to use the feedback?
20. How do you plan to use the feedback next time?
21. What could you do if you received feedback you didn’t like?
22. So, based on what I’ve suggested, what could you do next?
23. Who else could give you good feedback on this?
24. Who could you give some good feedback to?
25. Is trial and improvement a way to give yourself feedback? Why?

Thinking About Thinking (Metacognition)

1. Can you talk me through your thinking?
2. How has your thinking changed?
3. What changed your thinking?
4. How is your thinking different now, compared to the start of the lesson?
5. What are you thinking about while you’re doing this?
6. How did you try to solve the problem?
7. What worked? What didn’t? Why?
8. How did you think your way through the challenges?
9. What strategies did you use?
10. When you hit the problem, how did you try thinking about it?
11. If you were giving someone advice on how to tackle a problem like this, what would you tell them?
12. What does it feel like when the thinking gets difficult?
13. What if you had to think about it again?
14. How might your thinking change if we went back and tried again?
15. Are there different ways of thinking for different situations?
16. What techniques do you use to help yourself think? How do they work?
17. Is it possible for anybody to change their thinking? Why?
18. Where does thinking come from?
19. What made you change your mind?
20. Is there a better way to think about this? Why?
21. What advice would you give to someone who finds themselves thinking in circles about a problem?
22. How could changing your thinking help you to see the problem differently?
23. How else could we think about this?
24. What questions could someone ask themselves when they are thinking through a problem?
25. What are the best ways to keep your thinking on track? Or is it sometimes good to take it off track … on purpose?

Creating a Challenge Culture

1. Can you tell me more about that?
2. Can you tell me again, but this time with more detail?
3. How would you increase the level of challenge here?
4. What would make this task more challenging?
5. If I made this more challenging, how would you respond?
6. What makes something challenging?
7. Why is challenge good?
8. What does challenge look like? What does it feel like?
9. How does challenge help you to learn?
10. How do you know when you are being challenged?
11. What if you had to start again from scratch and do it differently? What then?
12. Why might there be other, better ways to do it?
13. Can you talk me through the bits you found most difficult?
14. What did you do to keep going when it got really tricky?
15. How would you convince someone that challenge is a good thing?
16. If things get tough, what are some of the different ways you can respond?
17. How much challenge is enough?
18. If something doesn’t make sense, what then?
19. How could you make this better, even though it looks finished?
20. When were you challenged the most during the lesson? Why?
21. What’s the most challenging thing you’ve done so far this week?
22. What can I do to make the work more challenging for you?
23. If you had to describe challenge as a shape, what would it be? Why?
24. What goes through your mind when you encounter a challenge?
25. What makes challenges good for you?

Focussing on Processes

1. What did you do? Can you talk me through it?
2. How are you thinking about the problem?
3. What ideas do you have for getting started? How might they work in practice?
4. What other strategies could you use? What might be the result?
5. Where did it go wrong? How could we use this information?
6. If you were going to do it again, how would you change your approach?
7. What else could you do to get a better end result?
8. Is there another strategy you could try?
9. How much better might it be after three more attempts?
10. What did you learn from each attempt? How did you use that to refine your thinking?
11. Why did it end up like this?
12. How could you get a different result through changing what you did?
13. How could you tweak your efforts next time, to get a different result?
14. If you were going to have another go, what changes would you make? Why?
15. Can you explain what someone else would need to go through to get the same result?
16. How does this attempt compare to the last one?
17. How does your thinking now compare to your thinking before?
18. What is the biggest difference between now and then?
19. How are you approaching things differently this time? Why?
20. What makes thinking more effective? Why?
21. How would you describe the thinking you’ve done?
22. Where did things start to change? What did you do that caused this?
23. If you were going to start again, what would you focus on first? Why?
24. Can you tell me what other options there are? How might these work?
25. What if you had to explain the process to an alien? What would you say?