Tag: personal-development

By: Cara Mentzel, CCIRA 2026 Featured Speaker

This week was the first week of kindergarten. As a fun, low stakes activity and covert assessment, I played a How To Draw youtube video from Art for Kids Hub. If you’re not familiar with the channel, it features a young, perky dad, Rob, who step-by-step and side-by-side draws with one of his kids. I chose the ice cream cone video because the weather has been in the nineties all week–recess has been as invigorating as an hour in a frying pan. In times like these drawing and thoughts of ice cream are always welcome. 

The class was sitting on the rug with clean sheets of paper on clipboards, and fresh beginning of the year pencils. Rob had just begun. He’d drawn one stroke, the top arc of a scoop of ice cream. Immediately, students began to stir. Erase. Even harumph! I quickly realized that this wasn’t as low stakes as I thought it would be! I paused the video. I explained that everyone’s ice cream cone would look different, just like everyone in our class is different. Still, one student became audibly frustrated. He’d already flipped his paper over and tried on the other side. He continued to erase his work. He kept drawing the arc narrow, like a popsicle. I couldn’t actually see the tears welling up in his eyes, but I felt them. He shouted, “This doesn’t look like an ice cream cone!” and “This is wrong!” To which I unhelpfully replied, “Friend, there’s no wrong way to be an ice cream cone. Ice cream is always delicious.” He looked at me like a 16-year-old who was just told they can’t take the car. 

Perhaps Carol Dweck of Growth Mindset fame would have praised my struggling student’s perseverance, “I love how you keep trying,” she might have said, placing a focus on the behavior instead of the outcome. But for my part, I was worried about inadvertently praising perfectionism. A kindergartner becoming dysregulated over the first step of an ice cream cone drawing could be a red flag. There’s a lot of common ground between perseverance and perfectionism, and the distinction feels significant. While perseverance often looks like rallying with continued effort or remaining steadfast in the face of a challenge, striving for perfection is different. Striving for perfection can be futile, especially when perfection is so often ill-defined—what does a perfect ice cream cone actually look like anyway?! I agree with my husband when he says, “Perfection is the enemy of the good.” So while perfectionists may persevere, perseverance can be healthy in its own right. As author/activist Glennon Doyle might say, we need perseverance to do hard things. I’m finding that there is a need to draw more nuanced distinctions when applying growth mindset principles. Not only between perfectionism and perseverance, but between growth in general and applying a growth mindset. 

Growth vs. Growth Mindset

I first heard of the growth mindset early in my career during a professional development training. It was presented in opposition to a fixed mindset. The growth mindset emphasizes intelligence and talent as traits that can be developed, whereas the fixed mindset emphasizes inherent intelligence and talent–essentially, with the latter you get what you get and there’s little you can do about it. When compared to a fixed mindset, the growth mindset is the obvious winner, no arm-twisting needed. 

The part of this distinction that speaks to me the most is when Dweck describes how these perspectives impact our relationship to effort and challenge. If something is hard, people with a fixed mindset feel inadequate, while someone with a growth mindset sees that difficulty as an opportunity, something to overcome. The other element I appreciate about the growth mindset is the focus on process over outcome, what your favorite Hallmark card or motivational poster might call the value of the journey over the destination. What I find important about the value of the process is that we have more control over the process. Ask any author who put years of hard work into their project, for their book never to make it to a bestseller’s list—better yet, to a shelf in a bookstore. We don’t often have control over the outcome, but we can exercise control over many of the steps along the way. Not the least of which is simply showing up to do the work. In its best iteration, the growth mindset is an empowering perspective, one that develops agency, confidence, and work ethic. 

Nowadays, I don’t hear the growth mindset mentioned with its fixed counterpart. I see it on a screen looming large over a staff meeting. It’s mentioned in the context of DDI practices and assessment. Objectives, targets, goals. After all, every student gets to make at least a year’s worth of growth, and if there’s an achievement gap, then the struggling students need to make more than a year’s growth to catch up. But just because we are looking at growth in addition to proficiency (as measured by test scores), doesn’t mean we’re applying a growth mindset. While we are valuing growth, we are still focused on the outcome. We are still asking, is it enough? How can we do better? Do more? If teachers are feeling like they need to do more and do better all the time, is it any surprise that students feel the same. As long as we are always trying to get more out of our students, it doesn’t surprise me that those very students often come to school anxious and depressed. If we want what’s best for our students, how do educators “win”? When it comes to holding high expectations for growth, are we damned if we do, damned if we don’t? 

The Educator Perspective vs. The Perimenopausal Perspective

Before I attempt to answer the above question, let me back up and get personal. I’m 51 now and perimenopausal. Why is that important? Apart from the fact that I probably won’t remember the above question that I have just promised to address, it’s important because I’ve been reevaluating my relationship to growth. And frankly, I’m not as fond of it as I used to be! I’m questioning what feels like a fixation in our culture on improvement, on getting better and doing better. I’ve been asking myself how I came to value growth to the extent that I do? To put hard work on a pedestal and boast about being a lifelong learner. For years now I’ve just assumed this perspective was correct. I mean, duh, of course progress is important. But maybe I don’t want to be a lifelong learner every day. Maybe I want to be a mid-lifelong learner, or someone who guiltlessly indulges in naps and the latest new stream on Apple TV? I mean, as my favorite comedian Gary Gulman likes to say, “The thing they don’t tell you about life is…It’s Every. Single. Day.”

I spent months entertaining the possibility that a focus on growth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. What if I just wake up in the morning telling myself “I’m good. I worked hard to get where I am. I have an effective skillset. I have built instincts I trust, and now, well, I’m good!” With this mindset learning can be more of an osmosis activity, organic, no longer driven by the motor that says improvements must be made, but by simple joy, curiosity, gentle observation. Instead, I realized that my relationship to growth was inextricably linked to a belief that I was lacking. Lacking! After all this time. All these family holidays. All this therapy. And all this professional development training! This is when I started to think about our students. 

Whether you’re learning to use the potty, a planner, or a 3-D printer, students are in school to learn. And let’s be honest, they have so much to learn! As educators, how do we acknowledge their room to grow, without also sending them the message that they are lacking. Furthermore, if the distinction is difficult for a grown-up like me to internalize, someone who could buy a cute condo with a rooftop deck for the money she’s spent on therapy, then how are we supposed to help our students internalize it?

Is the Glass Half Empty or Half…Empty?

Most students are inundated with what they don’t know and teachers are inundated with measuring it. Carol Dweck might say, but it’s not what they don’t know, it’s only what they don’t know yet. This is where the glass metaphor is helpful. I think we’d agree that it’s important to see the glass half full. As teachers we praise a student’s existing skillset. We understand their background knowledge anchors their future learning and provides the resources from which they will grow. Still, when it comes to the growth mindset, the empty part of the glass is also key. In a high stakes academic environment, our challenge is to authentically help students see the empty as “The Magical Yet?” (picture book by Angela DiTerlizzi). The empty as opportunity, not inadequacy. 

In terms of a solution, my mind draws parallels between our approaches to behavior modification and our approach to student growth. Perhaps because the growth mindset places a focus on behavior and character. For example, we were taught to deliberately distinguish between a child doing something “bad” (poor choices) and a child being bad. In the same way, maybe students need to distinguish between the skills they can cultivate, the information they can gain, and their identity or self-worth. Ultimately, the distinction between failing—a part of the learning process—and being a failure.

Similarly, PBIS taught us that for every one redirection of behavior, we needed eight positive reinforcements. I’ll never forget this professional development training when I tried to calculate how this 1:8 ratio would work in my class of 29 students! If I draw the parallel from this behavior modification approach to student growth, I notice that we need far more emphasis on student self-worth, than we place on their growth alone, not only when they are in kindergarten and social and emotional learning is primary, but all along their academic trajectories. There’s a sisyphean quality to this task, and ironically, perseverance is required of all stakeholders.

When my boys started high school anxiety was already at an all time high. I recommended they only take one AP or IB class a semester. I asked them to pick one class they sincerely cared about and were willing to go above and beyond to tackle. I saw high school as life training. While I still had proximity and influence in their lives I wanted to ensure their focus remained on our shared values: humor, gratitude, balance, grit, and creativity, to name a few. It is so easy to get swept up in the high stakes of college prep, in the competition, in the drive for college “acceptance” and a strong GPA. As a parent and educator, it wasn’t easy to keep my priorities straight and remember the behaviors I wanted the boys to practice in those years. But I tried. We tried. I think our efforts mattered. 

Maybe what needs to be explicitly taught is that when you value opportunities for growth you are valuing yourself. The minute an emphasis on growth eclipses a sense of self, take a minute to go back to the drawing board. Reset. Instead of trying to draw the ice cream cone like Rob, try and draw the worst ice cream cone you can imagine. Or, know when to stop drawing and treat yourself to an actual ice cream cone. I’ll admit, I ate a lot of ice cream in the time I spent writing this essay.

Today I’m of the belief that it’s possible to wake up and say, “I’m good,” but also to remain a learner. I’m aware of the impact of practicing what I preach, that is to say that I know modeling is a high leverage instructional strategy. In the kindergarten classroom it’s impossible not to be a learner. Yesterday, at recess I sat next to a four-year-old student. I asked her what she’s been wondering about lately. She said penguins. 

“What about penguins?” I asked.

“I want to know what their scales are made of.”

“Um…penguins have feathers, Honey,” I said, and added the term of endearment to soften the blow to her tiny ego.

“NOT penguins,” she corrected, “pang-wins!”

We went back and forth on the pronunciation more times than I’m comfortable admitting.

“Describe a penguin to me,” I finally said. She described what I pictured as an armadillo. And then something stirred in a deep, curvy crevice of my brain, a fact from long ago. Wait… I took out my phone. I searched “armadillo and p-” And voila! The search suggested pangolin. 

“Pang-uh-lun!” I shouted with proper annunciation.

“Yeah, penguin,” she replied. 

Eventually I read straight from Google that pangolin scales are made of keratin-

“Keratin!” she exclaimed with perfect pronunciation. “I know keratin!”

To redeem myself I added, “Yeah, the same stuff your nails are made of!”

She replied with the side eye.

Looks like someone’s still got a lot to learn.

Cara Mentzel has her master’s degree in elementary education with an emphasis on children’s literacy. She has spent over 15 years in elementary schools as a literacy specialist and a classroom teacher in Boulder, Colorado. While currently an empty nester, Cara raised a Brady Bunch of boys with the love of her life and now looks for every opportunity to surround herself with children. In this very moment she is probably sitting criss-cross applesauce in her kindergarten classroom, and poorly playing Down By the Bay on the ukulele. Her upcoming keynote presentation at CCIRA’s 2026 conference is titled, The Complete Idiom’s Guide to Being a Literacy Educator in 2026: Finding the Spring in Your Step. 

Cara’s debut memoir, Voice Lessons: A Sisters Story, was a Good Reads Choice Award nominee in 2017. She has since co-authored two picture books with her sister, Idina Menzel,  Loud Mouse and Proud Mouse. Her humorous personal essays are featured in The Empty Next, on Substack.