Personal, social and emotional development (PSED) supports children to learn about others and how to successfully interact and manage their own behaviour and feelings. Children learn to make friends, understand and talk about feelings, learn about 'right' and 'wrong', develop independence and be confident in their own abilities and self.
We can encourage children to become confident and competent learners through developing a growth mindset where mistakes are valued as learning experiences and children learn to value the process of learning opposed to the final outcome. Practising growth mindset with children is a great way to get them engaged with activities that they try to avoid through fear of getting things wrong or doubting their own ability. When children compare themselves to others they are often focusing on performance opposed to learning and therefor may give less effort at tasks they already feel that they are not good at.
Good ways to develop a growth mindset include:
Praise them for effort saying things like “you’ve worked so hard on this, well done!” or “you get better every time because of all the practise you’ve been doing” or “you have found a great way to do that, it worked out really well”.