Lori Woodward: Reaching Students through a Growth Mindset

The mission of our be the change column is to feature community members from the North State who are actively making a difference in community life. If you would like  to nominate someone who is making a difference, please write to pn@northstateparent.com.

Lori Woodward

Reaching Students through a Growth Mindset

Throughout her 30-year career as a second grade teacher at Millville Elementary School, Lori Woodward has “always been an exceptional teacher,” says former principal Mindy Desantis. Lori creates strong connections with her students, finds fun ways to present information, supports her colleagues with enthusiasm and jumps into extracurricular efforts to support students. And yet, Mindy marvels, in the last few years Lori’s “skills have exploded” into a whole new level of teaching.

A growth mindset enriches students’ learning

In recent years, Lori’s leadership has helped Millville Elementary with student-centered initiatives like Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS), early literacy support and neurodivergent student learning support. Her passion and advocacy for students across grades, Mindy says, has “made a significant difference in our abilities to reach all students, including the nearly unreachable student.”

What caused this explosion? What could amplify the already excellent skills of a caring and experienced teacher? Lori’s answer: A growth mindset.

“Growth mindset” describes the idea that learners can continue to expand their intelligence, as opposed to a “fixed mindset” – the idea that learners have a ceiling to their understanding or intelligence.

Beginning in 2015, a two-year grant through the Shasta County Office of Education enabled Lori to join teachers from all over the country at a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) conference that promoted a growth mindset to develop more of an interactive, student-centered approach and helped Lori implement STEM ideas in the classroom.

Lori has always sought to enrich students’ learning with captivating lessons.

“Our motto is work hard, play hard,” she says. The STEM program gave her new tools to do both. As a lifelong learner, Lori’s adoption of a new approach deep into her career models the very principle she desires her students to live by: always look for opportunities to grow.

Inspiring internal motivation and educational growth

Lori’s renewed approach to teaching involves providing students with more open-ended assignments that feed on students’ own interests and foster internal motivation. Rather than telling students to make a prescribed project, for example, Lori presents her students with a problem and tasks them with inventing a solution.

They may receive a tangible challenge, like building a tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows or perhaps finding solutions to the predicament of a character in a novel she’s reading to the class. Either way, the need to solve the problem sparks creativity. “We need to inspire kids to want to learn,” Lori explains. “When they are interested, you can take it so much further.”

Lori also coaches her students to set their own educational goals. A student might set a goal to read for a certain number of minutes a week or to memorize a set of math facts. Lori challenges the students to think of obstacles to their goals and then what steps they will take to work around those obstacles.

Students regularly share their progress toward their goals with the class and they know to use any extra time in class toward their goals. “If they’re finished with their assignments, I just say, ‘goal,’ or ‘grow your mind,’ and they go right to it,” Lori says.

Every morning starts with a class walk around the track – a ritual Lori initiated after learning about the importance of morning sunlight for mental health. The walks let students connect with Lori and each other and by the time they return to class they are “settled and happy,” Lori says. “You would be amazed how quickly they can get their homework turned in and materials ready for the day knowing they get to head back out the door for a quick run or walk around the track.”

Becoming assets for development and flourishing

Lori loves connecting with every student and providing individualized learning for each of them, but she knows she can’t do it alone. “It takes a village working together to meet the needs of students,” she says.

Search Institute, a nonprofit research organization, has identified 40 assets that help kids thrive and grow into healthy, flourishing adults. The list includes family support, positive relationships with nonparent adults, a caring school climate and parent involvement in schooling. Lori encourages parents, friends and family members to intentionally become “developmental assets” in kids’ lives. She welcomes school volunteers to share their gardening skills with students, host afterschool clubs like chess or robotics or simply develop connections with the students.

Lori also encourages parents to connect with their children outside of school. Activities can be both simple and fun, such as “rainbow spelling” (writing words on a piece of paper and tracing them repeatedly in different colors) reading together, practicing spelling or math facts in the car or playing math games like rolling a pair of dice and adding or subtracting the numbers. In Lori’s experience with hundreds of second graders over the years, “Students learn through play. You just make it fun for the kids and that ends up being fun for you!”

Community and parent engagement is essential to the success of Lori’s innovative teaching strategies. All teachers need support to be most effective in their students’ lives and learning experiences.

If you would like to learn more ways you can support and retain quality teachers in local schools, read our article “Teacher Retention: Why Does it Matter?” on page 8.