St Mary's Super Seven
At St Mary’s we want to equip children to be the best learners they can be. Not just during their time here with us but throughout their life. To enable this we need to help them to foster all the attributes of a growth mind-set.
Growth mind-set is a theory centred around the belief that intelligence and learning can be developed and improved. If someone has a growth mind-set, they have a positive attitude towards learning and a belief in their ability to progress and achieve.
Pupils who possess a growth mind-set are able to rise to challenges and learn from the mistakes they make, rather than feeling distressed and defeated if they are unable to do or understand something.
In this very interesting video the power of a growth mind-set is explained further. Carol Dweck is a psychologist who has studied student attitudes for 30 years.
To help our pupils develop a healthy growth mind-set we promote our Super Seven. These are 7 attitudes for learning, they are:
- resilience
- perseverance
- personal goals
- creativity
- independence
- confidence
- problem solving
Through assemblies, class sessions, reward incentives and day to day lessons we promote these attitudes. We explain what each one means and give children clear examples of what these attitudes look like.
Perseverance
Perseverance is really important for living a life that can be enjoyed with a sense of pride. Life is full of challenges and struggles, perseverance is the drive that helps a person get past the hard stuff and get to what they really want. Perseverance is a combination of persistence and resilience. You can read more here.
Do you persevere?
Do you have – stickability?
Are you like the tortoise who stuck at it and won the race?
Remember the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise? Tortoise had his own slow speed. Hare was much faster but he didn’t stick at it. He stopped and rested and missed his end goal. Not Tortoise – he kept doing his best and that meant he won his race.
Resilience
Children can be incredibly good at bouncing back from the hard knocks they may face in life. Their youthful optimism and day-to-day approach can allow them to carry on in the face of scraped knees, broken toys, friendship issues and difficult school work.
Challenges can test their tenacity and how they deal with them is dependent on how much they’ve built up their resilience.
The good news is that all children can develop resilience. All it takes is the right influence and careful support from those around them. You can find out more about resilience here.
Independence
Independence is a crucial part of learning, and it goes hand-in-hand with perseverence and resilience. Children learn most effectively when they are independent – but it needs help from us adults too. From very early on in their development, children start to show independence – the temper when they want to walk rather than be pushed, that’s independence talking, but if we want to rush around the shops, or get out of the door quickly, then encouraging our independent learners to fasten their own coats or tie their own laces is a real challenge!
From cutting their own food, to getting dressed themselves, or choosing their own toys for outdoor play – these are the small steps that show our children that they can do things without help, and these small steps when they’re young, help our children to become independent learners, and this is an attitude that will accompany them throughout their life.
Confidence
Confidence is very important – we all benefit from being confident, and children who are confident and secure are more likely to succeed in school and to achieve personal goals. As they get older, confident children learn to confront problems, it also helps in resisting peer pressure. More importantly, having a positive self-image helps a child feel happy, and happy children are better at making and keeping good friends.
Are you confident?
Can you find the Superhero in you when faced with a challenge?
We all have times when we are faced with difficult challenges. We all have times where we have to step out of our zone of comfort in order to achieve something new. Find the Superhero in yourself and take that brave step!
Creativity
Creativity is using your imagination and skills to invent something or solve a problem. We are all creative in very different ways.
Resilience, Independence, Confidence and Perseverance all help us to be Creative. Perhaps you have a problem in your learning – your creativity will help you to find different ways to solve it.
Personal Goals
Personal Goals are the things you really want to do in your life. It is good to have them because they can help us to stay focussed and make good choices.
You may want to learn your 8x table, you may want to be able to do a cartwheel, you may want to be a doctor or an astronaut. Super Seven skills will help you to achieve your goals.
Problems faced by Others
Everyone has problems, problems can be large and small. Our Super Seven can help us to solve our own problems and the problems of others.
Jesus was a great problem solver because he helped His friends to use their talents to solve their problems. We can follow in his footsteps.