Sometimes our students unwittingly get in their own way and need help adjusting their mindset. Below, Kathryn explains how she effectively used the “mean tutor” strategy with one of her test prep students.

Throughout our work together, my student lacked confidence in her math skills. During our sessions, she saw her accomplishments as insignificant and her struggles as a confirmation of her inability to succeed in math. Because of her anxiety about math and the SSAT exam, I saw this student as an ideal candidate for the mean tutor strategy.

I began by asking the student to start working on a practice test, saying aloud her negative thoughts as they popped into her head. Without even thinking she said, “I don’t think I did this right!” and “I don’t know how to do this problem.” Phrases like these are a great starting point for a “mean tutor” lesson.

I pointed out how these were negative comments and that, in fact, she was able to solve both of the problems in question. We wrote a list of negative thoughts and replaced each one with a positive phrase.

For many students, the biggest challenge when taking a test isn’t the actual content, it’s dealing with the type of anxiety that can wreak havoc on focus. These students often don’t know where to begin when trying to deal with that mindset, but the key to overcoming test anxiety is deceptively simple: rather than approach anxiety as an abstract idea, treat it as a concrete one.

Students can work on overcoming test anxiety in the same way they work on improving their math or reading skills. It’s not enough to tell students, “Stop thinking negative thoughts.” We have to help them practice the positive thoughts that lead to success. We do this in a variety of ways, from teaching them to free-write their worries to something we call the “mean tutor” strategy.

Since reading Mindset by Carol Dweck a couple of years ago, we talk often with our students and their parents about the importance of a growth mindset – the “belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.” In her book, Dweck talks about how students with a growth mindset are motivated by challenging tasks, will persist in their efforts to work through them, and will learn from that effort.

There are many ways we can help students develop a growth mindset. One way is to praise effort rather than ability. Instead of saying to a child, “You’re so smart!” we’d do better to say, “The time you put into making and reviewing that study guide really paid off!”

Recently, we read about new research at The University of Chicago that supports Dweck’s take on praise. “In the new study, scholars found that the percentage of process praise parents used when their children were one to three years old significantly predicted whether children welcomed challenges, had strategies for overcoming failure, and thought intelligence and personality were malleable five years later.” 

We’re excited about this additional research and to know that it’s never too early or late to help children love learning!

Do you want to help your child develop a growth mindset?  Learn more about our mindset curriculum. 

When preparing for standardized tests, some students reach a point when, although they have learned a lot about the test, they still haven’t reached their goal score. Heather talks about what it’s like to help one of these students pull it all together to achieve his goal:

Sometimes students just need a little “push” to show them that they can achieve their goals!  This is where I become a “coach” to help a student find out what is working well and what needs to be adjusted. For instance, maybe a student isn’t using strategies on the English section, so her score won’t budge. Or maybe a student is rushing through the reading section in order to finish, but is compromising accuracy while doing so. 

We like to say that Executive Functioning is everything that it takes to succeed in school, besides the actual content that is taught at school.  Students in our executive functioning program learn how to be organized, take notes, manage time, study effectively, and advocate for themselves.  These are skills that all parents want their children to master, but how can you help?

First, we’d love to share our problem solving process. We take a unique approach to executive functioning in that we combine it with positive discipline.  This means that we involve students very directly in the problem solving process.  For example, we actually don’t have one set way for students to take their notes or organize their materials.  We teach a variety of key strategies and techniques, but most importantly, we engage students in a process where they learn to come up with solutions and make the best choice.   

At Nurturing Wisdom, we love to get to know our students! In fact, before a tutor starts meeting with a student, a tutoring director spends over an hour interviewing the student and his or her parents in their home. This gives the director a chance to get to know the student’s personality, strengths, weaknesses, interests, and approach to school and learning. With this information, the director is able to make a strong tutor match and also help the tutor hit the ground running at the very first session. These intake meetings tend to be the directors’ favorite part of their job because they truly enjoy figuring out how best to support a student. Plus it’s fun getting to know a new family!

Pari Schacht explains: “I love to do intake meetings because I get excited to meet a new student and family and to be able to share my knowledge and expertise to help them reach their goals. I love being able to share resources with families and knowing that I can find a tutor who can help. Students and parents are often frustrated by the time they call us for help. It’s a great feeling that I can walk in and help them get the resources to go from frustration to success.”

At Nurturing Wisdom, we really look for tutors and staff who embrace growth and learning. A few months ago, we stumbled on a fascinating article titled “Coaching a Surgeon” and our tutors really embraced it! The idea in this article is that even the very best, most talented musicians and athletes regularly employ coaches to help them perform their very best…so why don’t the rest of us do that with our day to day jobs?

We have found that we are able to help students achieve even more with tutoring when we address their mindset, a concept we learned from Carol Dweck’s wonderful book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.Below, tutor Brandon Glover talks about his experience using our mindset curriculum with one of his students.

Carol Dweck’s book Mindset lays out some interesting ideas about the way we perceive success and failure. She says that we can have either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. In a fixed mindset, when we fail at something, it means that we ourselves are failures. Clearly this idea is not conducive to learning and performing at a high level. In a growth mindset, however, failure is simply an opportunity to learn, grow, and be better in the future.

I’m tutoring a ninth grader right now in executive functioning, incorporating Dweck’s mindset principles. Since beginning work on the mindset curriculum, my student has made great strides in preparing for tests, advocating for himself and asking for help from teachers and other students. He now knows that when he succeeds, he should celebrate his success and move on to the next challenge. When he fails, he knows now to dissociate himself from the failure so that he may objectively examine his mistakes and correct them in the future. After all, did Michael Jordan make every shot he took? Of course not! He had to fail in order to learn from his mistakes and correct them.

We encourage our tutors to be broken records with their students, especially when it comes to attitudes about homework. We want tutors to help their students define the right attitude and create a mantra to help their students believe in its purpose and significance. An effective homework mantra and resulting attitude adjustment can have real long-term benefits when it comes to homework completion.

We were fascinated by this New York Times article, written by Paul Tough. He profiles Dominic Randolph, the headmaster at The Riverdale School in New York City. The article discusses character and how it’s possible to teach it.

For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. “This push on tests,” he told me, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”

Read the rest of the article here!