Education Week – Evie Blad
“Some researchers have suggested that few things spell success in the classroom like a student’s approach to learning and making mistakes. And I wonder if the same is true for winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Did co-champions Gokul Venkatachalam, 14, and Vanya Shivashankar, 13, win Thursday because they are inherently great spellers? Or because they learned how to move on when they heard that cursed bell after misspelling a word at previous bees?…I don’t know the co-champions, so I can only speculate about their approach to learning. But they won the bee only after repeated trips (five for Shivashankar, the sister of a past champion, and six for Venkatachalam) and years of hard studying, which would seem to suggest a willingness to stretch, struggle, and try new approaches…So what would a fixed mindset look like at a spelling bee? It might look like spelling out one year and quickly deciding you are “not a spelling person,” in the same way a friend of mine declares she’s “not a math person” every time she asks me to split the check at a restaurant.”(more)