We do not give our youth (or anyone, really) a larger context for understanding the journey that they are on. When we are a kid and working on a project, that vision for the completed project is all that we can see ahead of us. We can even put our hopes and project some of our self-worth onto that future completed project. So when the project isn’t as amazing as we had hoped, we feel diminished.

It would be better to give students a larger context in which they can understand their success or failure. One project is just a step in a staircase – it gets you to a higher level of skill and makes it easier to use the next step. And you can’t use a staircase with no steps. It takes a long time to build skills and learn.

With this in mind, the mindset topic for my 5th grade class is the ‘Timeline of a creator’ – here is our class whiteboard as we navigate this topic: