One of the most important soft-skills in the 21st-century is the ability to collaborate. As problems become more complex and projects become more intertwined, it is important that students understand how to work effective with others. This makes it an important skill for educators to develop throughout their students’ school careers. Here are three ways that I am working on developing their collaborative abilities.

In Carol Dweck’s micro lecture for Stanford Alumni (2014), she defines a fixed mindset as believing that one only has a certain amount of “stuff” and that they cannot get any more. In contrast, a growth mindset sees the opportunity to grow and develop more “stuff” through effort and persistence. Dweck goes further to describe how these two mindsets influences typical goals, where fixed mindset students strive to never look “dumb,” whereas growth mindset…

Everyone is capable of mastering any competency when given the appropriate amount of time and support. This is a fact supported through a variety of research, including Ericsson and Pool’s book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.

In order to have an effective personalized learning environment, the students need to have agency. Learner agency refers to the ability for the learner to feel as if they have control over what is going on around them; more specifically, it is their ability to set lofty goals, forge a path towards the goals, reflect and revise the path or goals, and be ability to reach their goals (Poon, 2018). Below are a couple of strategies educators can utilize in their classrooms to promote both learner…

The development of our students’ executive function may be our most important task as modern educators. When we talk about executive functions, we are referring to the high-level cognitive skills that people use to manage their own behaviors (Weill Institute for Neurosciences, 2020); this includes ensuring that students have the ability to self-regulate their learning - especially over long periods, such as for a project. In the music classroom, our students are part of a perpetual…