What are effective ways to foster a growth mindset for reading?

1 Encourage a positive reading identity

To foster a growth mindset for reading, it's important to help your students develop a positive reading identity. This is how they view themselves as readers and can increase their self-efficacy, motivation, and engagement with reading. You can do this by providing texts that match their interests, preferences, and goals, celebrating their reading achievements and progress, modeling your own reading habits and enthusiasm, and creating a supportive and collaborative reading community. By doing so, your students can share their opinions, questions, and recommendations with each other.

2 Teach reading strategies and skills

To foster a growth mindset for reading, you can teach your students reading strategies and skills that can help them overcome difficulties and enhance their comprehension. These tools and techniques, such as predicting, questioning, summarizing, inferring, and evaluating, can be explained to students in terms of their purpose and benefits when applied to different texts and situations. As a teacher, you can demonstrate how you use the strategy and skill yourself while thinking aloud your process and reasoning. Furthermore, you can provide scaffolded support and feedback as your students practice the strategy and skill. Finally, encourage them to reflect on their use of the strategy and skill in order to improve their reading.

3 Promote a learning-oriented feedback culture

Fostering a growth mindset for reading can have many benefits for your students, such as increasing their confidence, motivation, and achievement in reading. A learning-oriented feedback culture can help your students understand their strengths and areas for improvement, and how they can take action to achieve their reading goals. To promote this culture, set clear and specific learning objectives and success criteria for each reading task. Provide timely and constructive feedback that highlights what your students did well, what they need to work on, and how they can improve. Encourage your students to self-assess and peer-assess their reading work with rubrics, checklists, or portfolios. Invite your students to ask for and act on feedback, and to give feedback to others. With these effective ways, you can help your students develop a positive attitude and a lifelong passion for reading.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?