1. My own understanding of the notion of growth mindset is a pretty rudimentary one, largely gleaned from Lucy Crehan’s book, Cleverlands, which compared six national education systems that perform well in PISA with each other. Put simply, a ‘growth mindset’ is a major advantage to a student because it suggests that one’s intelligence can be developed and grown over time and failure is a springboard to learning, as opposed to a fatalistic ‘fixed mindset’ that says one’s intelligence is fixed and pre-determined and failure is failure and a damning indictment of one’s dimness.
The OECD have just published Sky’s the limit: Growth mindset, students, and schools in PISA https://issuu.com/oecd.publishing/docs/sky-s-the-limit-pisa-growth-mindset PDF below if you react badly to the issuu format, as I do!
And here’s a pretty good summary of Lucy’s book that I came across by chance earlier today: https://chrishildrew.wordpress.com/2017/05/16/slt-book-club-clever-lands-by-lucy-crehan/
2. If you missed the English Australia event with Judit Kormos on Inclusive practices for learning differences the other day, which many people said was excellent, here’s the recording https://youtu.be/fINkuIeVqbU and below, courtesy of my colleague Andrew Skinner, is her presentation. Plus, from the EL Gazette archives, a feature on Judit, The woman who wants EFL to include everyone https://www.elgazette.com/thought-leader/
3. Early notice of the next book adaptation in the Hardy’s Women series on BBC Radio 4, The Woodlanders, which starts next Monday, 3rd May https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s855 Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Hand of Ethelberta are already available.
4. And, finally, something altogether more sombre than usual: a very powerful ‘long read’ from Arundhati Roy about India’s ‘Covid catastrophe’ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/28/crime-against-humanity-arundhati-roy-india-covid-catastrophe
Roy Cross's Blog 