Huntington Beach City School District

July’s Mindfulness Monthly Memo focuses on resilience and bouncing back from challenges. A growth mindset fosters resilience by encouraging individuals to view challenges as opportunities for learning and growth, rather than as threats to their abilities. 

Five Key Practices to Support A Student’s Growth Mindset

1. Normalize the experience of mistakes and failure. Explicitly destigmatizing failure through personal examples and examples from others exposes students to the narrative of overcoming failures. This may help students adopt a growth mindset orientation and help them embrace educational challenges and risks.
2. Praise student effort and use of study strategies rather than intelligence. Praising effort helps students understand that intelligence is not fixed, but rather is something that can be developed through hard work and the use of effective strategies, according to researchers.
3. Teach students that feedback is an important part of the learning process. Feedback from teachers and other instructors reflects high standards and confidence that students can meet those standards, not a negative judgment of the student or of their potential.
4. Challenge the notion that learning should feel easy. Emphasize and normalize that learning should feel challenging. The re-organization of mental frameworks and accommodation for new understanding requires time and effort.
5. Communicate that abilities can grow over time. By communicating the process for increasing competence we are a providing an intervention for one’s mindset. Struggling and making mistakes is a natural part of the learning process. With deliberate practice and feedback, we build students’ capacity to move beyond their current ability level.

Appendix: Teaching + Learning Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (n.d.). Growth mindset. In Create an Inclusive Classroom. Retrieved June 25, 2025, from the Teaching and LEarning website.