By engaging in this unit, students will increase their understanding of the significance of a growth mindset, explore the malleability of the brain, brainstorm ways to nurture a growth mindset, and practice responding to both feedback and failure.

• Lesson 1: Understanding Mindset, Grit, & Resilience
• Lesson 2: Understanding the Difference Between a Fixed & a Growth Mindset
• Lesson 3: Embracing Failure as Part of Learning
• Lesson 4: Understanding Brain Malleability and Growth Mindset
• Lesson 5: Overcoming Adversity as part of Growth Mindset
• Project: Learning to be an ‘‘Overcomer’’

Lesson 1: Understanding Mindset, Grit, & Resilience
This lesson is designed to help students not only gain general knowledge about the importance of mindset, grit,
and resilience, but it also provides a quick means to personally assess their current mindset and offers activities to
nurture a growth mindset.

Lesson 2: Understanding the Difference Between a Fixed & a Growth Mindset
This lesson helps students understand and explain the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset.

Lesson 3: Embracing Failure as Part of Learning
This lesson is designed to illustrate how very successful people have experienced failure on their way to achieving
their goals and to equip students with a framework to dream and embrace new opportunities for learning while
understanding that challenges and failures are part of that learning process.

Lesson 4: Understanding Brain Malleability and Growth Mindset
This lesson is designed to help students understand that the brain can change and adapt as a result of experience,
and that intellectual ability is not static.

Lesson 5: Overcoming Adversity as part of Growth Mindset
This lesson is about helping students recognize that adversity, struggle, and failure can often be part of our story and
life journey and that it is how we respond that produces progress, change, and growth.

Project: Learning to be an ‘‘Overcomer’
This project is designed to not only encourage students to find a biography or story of an inspiring individual who has overcome significant challenges, but to capture one of their own current struggles in an effort to both identify growth mindset attributes and tangibly describe what the process of overcoming adversity might look like for them personally.