Gothic Literature Scheme Of Work

According to Dweck (2000), there are two types of views on ability and intelligence which are held by children: the entity view and the incremental view. The entity perspective views ability and intelligence as fixed. If a child with the entity perspective views themselves as unintelligent, it can be extremely detrimental to their academic achievement, as they believe that they will never be able to achieve the same as their more intelligent counterparts. This can ultimately lead pupils to a self-fulfilling prophecy of poor achievement. On the contrary, the incremental perspective views ability and intelligence as malleable, and something which can be improved with effort. Students with the incremental view tend to achieve higher academic outcomes, as they see failure as an opportunity to improve, and achievement as a result of endeavour (Macnamara and Rupani, 2017 Dweck, 2000). Interestingly, it has been found that interventions, strategies and even the type of language used by teachers can impart the incremental view on intelligence upon students, and that this can have a positive effect on academic achievement (Paunesku et al, 2015).

With this in mind, while constructing and delivering my Gothic Literature unit of work, I strove to use a variety of pedagogies in order to engage and motivate students. On all main activities, I differentiated tasks into smaller steps, so that those students who believe they would struggle could have a go at completing the simpler tasks before attempting the more challenging tasks. This enabled me, as a teacher, to praise these students after completing the first stage, and to then encourage them to attempt the challenging steps. This is in line with the idea that challenge should be set high for all students, but those with little confidence in their beliefs may need extra guidance and praise (Paunesku et al, 2015). In my class of 20 year seven students, I found that students felt far greater pride when they had attempted the more challenging tasks, rather than merely attempting the simpler tasks. From this, I could see that students were already beginning to feel a pride in their effort, rather than relying on the achievement of their outcome aligning with Dweck s (2000) growth mindset theory.