Pedagogy for Total Fitness
Academic Fitness
Mindset | Autonomy | Mastery | Perseverance
GROWTH MINDSET
Students respond to challenges in different ways – whereas some seem to ‘bounce back’ and persist, others struggle to try again. One way of fostering resilience in our students is to encourage them to have a growth mindset.
A growth mindset is the belief that intelligence and talents can improve with intentional effort, help-seeking and persistence to learn new strategies (Dweck, 2008). People with a growth mindset believe that the brain is like a muscle that can be developed; they believe that their abilities can be improved with hard work, persistence, strategies and support from others.
Whereas students with a fixed mindset might say “I didn’t do well on my science test because I’m just not good at science”, those with a growth mindset would say “if I keep practicing, I will get better”. Students with different mindsets also tend to be motivated by different things - while students with a fixed mindset are more likely to be driven by a desire to receive positive judgement or avoid negative judgement (Haimovitz, Wormington & Corpus, 2011), those with a growth mindset are motivated by the desire to learn and master a new skill (Ng, 2018).
Importantly, people with a growth mindset are more likely to try new things, ask for help when needed, develop critical thinking skills and embrace challenge as an opportunity to learn and grow (Ricci, 2013). All of this can contribute to enhanced wellbeing, and greater academic behaviours and performance (Farrington et al., 2012).
Activities to encourage growth mindset in the classroom include
Explicitly teach students about growth mindset
Share with students what it means to have a growth mindset and the idea of neuroplasticity (i.e., the brain's ability to form and reform synaptic connections in response to learning and experiences). Talk about how their abilities can be developed in response to intentional effort, embracing challenges, trialling learning strategies and asking for appropriate support (Yeager et al., 2019).
Positive self-talk
Notice when your students use negative self-talk (e.g., "I can't do this, it's too hard"; "I'm so stupid") and help them to instead practice positive self-talk (e.g., rather than "I can't do this", consider "what am I missing?").
Normalise mistakes and reframe disappointment
Normalise that everyone makes mistakes and it's how we respond to them that matters. Help your student to reframe their disappointment, for example "let's talk about what you've tried, and what you can try next" (Robinson, 2017).
Overcoming adversity
Emphasise examples of overcoming adversity that are subject-relevant. E.g., a character in a novel, a famous scientist or sports player.
Encourage self-reflection
Encourage students to reflect on their own learning and how adopting a growth mindset might be helpful (Yeager et al., 2019).
Autonomy and Mastery
Mastery refers to the feeling of competence and control over one’s abilities, skills and/or environment (Guay, 2022). A sense of mastery occurs when we practice an activity and improve our skill in this area, and contributes to the development of purpose and fulfilment.
Autonomy refers to the ability to make one's own decisions consistent with self-beliefs – that is, having choice about a decision or activity (Deci & Ryan, 2017). For our students, this often involves having the freedom and independence to explore new activities and experiences.
Autonomy and mastery are important for motivation. When students feel that they have control over their environment and can pursue activities that they are passionate about, they are more likely to experience a sense of satisfaction and engagement (Guay, 2022).
Closely aligned to motivational theories such as theory of planned behaviour, is self-determination theory that distinguishes three basic psychological needs; autonomy, competency and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Congruently, autonomy-supportive classroom instruction has been found to significantly boost perceived behavioural control, student engagement, motivation and prosocial behaviours (Jang et al., 2016; Cheon et al.,2018). Moreover, this has been found reciprocal with student agentic engagement predicting long term increases in perceive autonomy-supportive instruction (Matos et al., 2018).
Activities to encourage autonomy and mastery in the classroom include:
Creating a psychologically safe environment
Create a classroom environment where your students feel comfortable taking risks and making mistakes.
Goal setting
Help your students to set specific and challenging goals that are aligned with their interests and strengths.
Engage autonomy-supportive instructional behaviour
Autonomy supportive teaching involves creating an environment that encourages learners to take ownership of their learning process, via the following steps:
1.Take the students’ perspective: When planning a lesson, by mindful of the students' perspective by asking self-reflection questions such as: 'Will students find this lesson interesting?'; 'Could the lesson be made more interesting, more attractive, or more relevant?' ; 'If so, how?'. You might consider historical student responses to this lesson , and/or letting the class know the lesson plan upfront and asking for suggestions.
2.Help the student to tap into their own inner drive or passion. Where possible, encourage engagement by making the content enjoyable, meaningful, goal-relevant, curiosity-piquing, interesting, or providing choice/autonomy.
3.Explicitly state why you are asking students to learn a topic or do a task. If students are able to understand a rationale, they are more likely to be motivated to action.
4.In situations where a student shows resistance or disengagement from a lesson/topic, acknowledge the problem and work with the student to see if there is a solution or alternative way of learning (e.g., 'I sense you're not interested in this topic, and we have practiced this skill many times...Would it help to learn about this in a different way?
5.Try to give student feedback in a non-judgemental and objective way, that fosters a student's ability to regulate their behaviour and solve their own problem.
6.Where possible, provide students with the time and space needed to work at their own pace.
- (Reeve, 2016)
Socio-Emotional Fitness
Emotional Intelligence | Self-Concept | Positive Affect | Optimism | Relationships
Character Strengths
At Knox, supporting students to recognise and play to their strengths is an important part of helping them to be their best self. Character strengths are the positive parts of your personality that make you feel authentic, engaged, and energised (VIA, 2022; Waters, 2017).
A large body of research indicates that ‘playing to your strengths’ can enhance wellbeing:
- In general, people who frequently use their strengths experience greater wellbeing (Govindji & Linley, 2007) and less stress (Wood et al., 2022).
- Results from a systematic review indicate that character strengths-based school interventions support wellbeing and positive emotions (Kumar & Mohideen, 2019)
- A strengths-spotting study of teachers and their classrooms found that the strengths intervention was associated with improved student outcomes. Changes in teacher strengths-spotting explained the outcomes of classroom engagement, positive affect, and needs satisfaction (Quinlan et al., 2018).
- A systematic review of the key factors that enable a positive transition to secondary school found character strengths to be among the most significant aspects in the transition literature (Bharara, 2019).
One of the most well-known lists of character strengths was developed by psychologists and social scientists at Values in Action (VIA). According to VIA, each individual possess all 24 character strengths to differing degrees, which gives each person their own unique character. The character strengths can be broadly categorised into six ‘virtues’: Wisdom, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, Transcendence (VIA, 2020). For more information on Character Strengths, visit:
https://www.viacharacter.org/survey/account/register?registerPageType=popup
In addition to the suggestions below, further strategies for engaging in a strengths based approach to teaching can be found here:
Strength Based Approaches to Teaching
A link to the Term 3 Senior Staff Professional Development Presentation on Strengths-Based Teaching can be found here:
Activities to encourage strengths in the classroom include
Personalised Feedback
Personalised feedback and discussion after student completion of the VIA survey, followed by the task of using their strengths over the next week.
Strength Spotting
Notice and verbalise a student’s strength and encourage students to spot this in their peers and/or (where relevant) characters studied in class.
Using Signature Strengths in New Ways
Task students to use strengths in new and different ways (with a new person or new situation) every day over the next week.
Secret Strength Spotting
Assign each student a ‘secret partner’ to observe secretly for 1 week. The student can record the strengths their partner uses, including positive outcomes. At the end of the week, invite each student to reveal their findings to their partner.
Strength-Based Praise
Highlighting the student’s action (what they did) and strength (the strengths that helped them) when giving praise. This helps students to build an internal knowledge bank of their skills that they can rely on when things get tough, helping them to build resilience and ‘bounce back’ from adversity.
“You showed great courage when you stayed at camp, even though you missed home”
“I can see you used your persistence to keep going with that assessment even though it was really tough”
“That was awesome how you worked together to do that presentation, great teamwork”
“I know that must have been so hard to speak up, you showed great honesty and bravery”
Spiritual Fitness
Acceptance and Awareness | Gratitude | Meaning and Purpose
Acceptance and Awareness
Experiencing the present moment (awareness) in a non-judgemental way (acceptance) are hallmarks of mindfulness (Dekeyser et al., 2008). The ability to be aware and accepting of one’s thoughts and emotions can promote wellbeing; that is, experiencing the present moment nonjudgmentally discourages rumination about the past and future-focused anxiety (Hofman et al., 2010). These constructs are essential for self-compassion, that is, the ability to treat oneself kindly when faced with disappointment – which in turn protects against psychological illbeing (Marsh et al., 2018).
Activities to promote mindful awareness include
Encourage your class to arrive mindfully
Encourage your students to arrive mindfully to their class. Ask them to clear their heads of any distracting thoughts, take a deep breath , and be present in the room.
5-4-3-2-1
If you notice that your students seem restless or lacking focus - ask them to stop and focus on:
- 5 things they can see
- 4 things they can hear
- 3 things they can smell
- 2 things they can touch/feel (e.g., the chair on their back, feet on the floor)
- 1 thing they can taste
Share the benefits of mindfulness
Talk to your students about the benefits of focusing on the present moment - how it can stop us worrying about what has happened in the past or what might happen in the future. Invite your students to explore this in their own time - for example, via the following resources:
Primary School:
- Peaceful Kids meditations - available at https://www.peacefulkids.com.au/meditations1.html
- The Black Dog Institute has POWER UP (mindfulness audio tracks) and SNAP THAT (mindfulness through photography) - available at https://www.biteback.org.au/powerup
Secondary School:
- The Black Dog Institute has POWER UP (mindfulness audio tracks) and SNAP THAT (mindfulness through photography) - available at https://www.biteback.org.au/powerup
- Smiling Mind mindfulness app - available at https://www.smilingmind.com.au/smiling-mind-app
- UCLA have guided meditations available in a number in a number of languages - https://www.uclahealth.org/programs/marc/free-guided-meditations/guided-meditations
Gratitude
Gratitude involves "feeling and expressing a deep sense of thankfulness in life, and more specifically, taking the time to genuinely express thankfulness to others" (VIA, 2022).
Research shows that regularly practicing gratitude has many benefits, including enhancing wellbeing, sleep, academic motivation and engagement, and relationships (Don et al., 2016; Jans-Beken et al., 2020). The act of being grateful also changes our brain, making us more sensitive to being thankful in the future, and more likely to find things to be grateful for (Wong et al., 2015).
Activities to promote gratitude include:
Make a classroom "Gratitude Graffiti Whiteboard"
Invite students to contribute to a Gratitude Graffiti Whiteboard weekly and share with the class.
Take a gratitude minute
Start your class by asking students to 'think, pair, share' three things they are grateful for today.
Physical Fitness
Habits and Goals | Sleep | Nutrition | Exercise
Habits and Goals
Habit formation depends on motivation, self-directed learning and habitual processes (Kwasnicka et al., 2017).
Habits are not only related to nutrition, exercise and sleep; behaviours such as managing digital distractions, positive classroom behaviours and preventing cognitive fatigue are healthy behaviours that can be nurtured in most classrooms.
A student's attitude toward the behaviour, their perceived acceptance of the behaviour, and their perceived ability to control the behaviour reflects their motivation (Gerani et al., 2020). We therefore target these factors when looking to motivate students.
Self-directed learning such as setting outcome specific goals, self-monitoring and planning is also required to develop positive habits. Moreover, context-specific prompts and cues are necessary to move behaviours from intentional and conscious to automatic (aka habitual).
Activities to promote positive habit formation in your classroom
Set a clear action
Setting clear action in the classroom can help students to develop positive habits. Try something like:"We have hall agreed that technology can distract us away from the task and derail us from achieving our goals . To help us all work towards our goals, we will individually choose and adhere to one distraction management strategy for this class, and we will do this every lesson. Every person who manages to stick to this rule for the duration of class, will be celebrated. You can choose which distraction management tool to use, but I ask you engage this, starting now.”
Engineer the environment
Start each lesson with the same verbal prompt every lesson. For example, “pleasemake a (conscious) decision as to who you should sit next to for maximal productivity today”. Allow time for seat change.
Facilitate student-led goal setting
Present opportunities for students to set goals relevant to your class, with scheduled reflection time built in.
Encourage student self-monitoring
Offer tangible and visible tasks or resources that present opportunities for students to self-monitor these goals and applied skills. A document or project management tool that students can use to visibly track their goals with self-reflection points along the way.
https://blog.alexanderfyoung.com/the-10-best-free-habit-trackers/
Provide prompts (artificial signals) and rewards
Create context-specific prompts for positive behaviours you are seeking to instil. These may be specific to your classroom or lean towards broader academic, social or social health related behaviours. Examples include;
- Class poster on the door
- First slide of every presentation
- Verbal reminders at the same time every lesson
- Scheduled 2 mins for reflection time at the same time every class.
- Teach content in 20-minute sections. End each section with a clear prompt such as meme to indicate the end of the section. This works as a cue the section has come to a close, but also a small dopamine hit for getting through the first half of the lesson.
Build in contingent rewards
Build in rewards throughout your lesson. Congratulate students who are on task and publicly recognise those that are demonstrating behaviours aligning to their goals.
School Climate
Teacher and Learning | Safety | Community | School Environment
School Belonging
School belonging is an important part of School Climate, and is typically defined as “the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school social environment” (Goodenow, 1993).
Encouraging school belonging in students is associated with a myriad of wellbeing outcomes, including increased: social, emotional and physical wellbeing, academic performance and achievement, optimism, self-efficacy, resilience, and positive classroom behaviour (Allen et al., 2017; Allen et al., 2018; Allen & Kern, 2020).
A recent meta-analysis looking at the predictors of school belonging in students found the largest effects for were for teacher support – that is, students who believe they have a positive relationship with their teacher, and that their teacher is caring, empathic and fair and help to resolve problems ,are more likely to experience a greater sense of belonging at school (Allen et al., 2018).
"We are biologically, cognitively, physically and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong" - Bene Brown
Activities to enhance school belonging:
Knowing Your Students
Cultivating belonging by getting to know your students - e.g., greeting them by name at the door, surveying them about their wants, motives and needs as a learner.
Ball of String
Start by holding the ball and sharing something about yourself (be lighthearted and creative!). Hold the end of the string and invite a student to share something funny or unusual about themselves. Throw to the next student and so on, until a web of string is formed and everyone is holding the string. At the end, comment that each student has their own unique story, but we are all interconnected and we need to look out for and support each other. You can also highlight the areas where there is lots of string forming a thick ‘web’ – where we are strongly connected and supported, we are more likely to withstand adversity as a group (Allen & Kern, 2020).
About Me Activity
Invite students to write a brief letter to their teacher (or mentor) about themselves. What would they like you to know? Include what they like in a class/learning style, don’t like and what they want to achieve from your class. This can be done in written or survey format (Allen & Kern, 2020).
Radio Host
Allow yourself to be interviewed by students. Allow time for brainstorming ideas, and be genuine and authentic (within professional boundaries; Allen & Kern, 2020).
Human Bingo
Write down a persons name in your class/year group for each box for example, 'someone who can be silly with me'. Teacher reads out all students names in no particular order of that class/ year group. First to match a row wines.
Mentoring
Mentoring with a focus on relationship building and built in choice of mentor or intentionally selected mentor to mentee/s
*Note these ‘getting to know you’ activities are particularly helpful with new classes/students