Friday, 8 July 2016

Zootopia, Differentiated Instruction and Growth Mindset

One thing that I took away from our group’s discussion about differentiated instruction is that everyone is looking for tangible methods of teaching open ended questions and growth mindset in our classrooms in the fall. 

Last night, we had “family movie night” and all watched Zootopia.  For those of you who have not yet seen it, Zootopia is a Disney computer animated film in which all animals live in harmony, at least on the surface.  The main character, Judy Hopps, is a rabbit who wants to be a police officer.  The first part of the movie is all about stereotypes and fixed vs. growth mindset.  None of the characters believe that a “dumb bunny” could ever become a police officer and all show fixed mindsets.  The exception is Judy herself, who has a growth mindset and believes that she can become Zootopia’s first rabbit police officer.  Judy unfortunately has some stereotypes of her own as seen when she meets Nick Wilde, the fox, who she assumes will be “as sly as a fox”.  Unfortunately for Judy (spoiler alert!), Nick turns out to actually be a wily, sarcastic con artist.   During Nick’s childhood, he was bullied and learned the hard way that others expect him to be sly, and so has grown up meeting their expectations.  Both Nick and Judy have a fixed mindset about foxes but as they become unlikely partners in solving a crime, both develop more of a growth mindset about Nick’s potential (I will leave it for you to guess Nick’s future career!).
  
This is definitely a movie to show, discuss and reflect on during class, especially in alt ed or elementary where you are able to link to a variety of subjects!  I would show the first part once the characters are introduced and then pause it to discuss growth vs fixed mindsets of the various individuals (Judy, Nick, Judy’s parents, the other police officers) and stereotypes. I would then return to this topic of discussion after the movie.   As well as teaching students about growth mindset and stereotypes, there are links to other topics as well.  There is the predator-prey discussion as the animals are all living in harmony as the movie’s title suggests but as the predators begin to revert to their “salvage ways”, we wonder who might be behind this (horrible or natural!?) transition to a feral state.  The predators are the minority group which can become a social justice conversation but also an ecological discussion as to why there are fewer predators than prey.  As they are solving this crime, Judy and Nick visit the various districts in Zootopia which are essentially different biomes (eg. Tundra, rainforest).  This can serve as a starting off point to ecology or geography.  There is also an original song by Shakira with the message “Try Everything” in which she sings about the importance of making mistakes!

To relate this to differentiating instruction using the ideas presented by Marion Small, I tried to develop some open ended questions based on the movie:

Tell me about the mindset of a character throughout the movie
Discuss how realistic this movie is
Which character do you relate to and why
Describe some similarities and differences between Judy and Nick

…and math links….
In the movie, Judy has 275 siblings, how many siblings would she have now (someone actually did the math based on the science of bunny reproduction – see link….yikes!)?
Create a sentence using the words: greater, population, rabbits, foxes

If you can think of other open ended questions or parallel tasks for this movie or other movies with similar themes, please add your ideas!!!!

 Despite analyzing the movie based on the topics that we have been discussing all week in class, I really did enjoy all the Disney “good being triumphant over evil” messages in Zootopia and would look forward to watching it again in class with my students!


4 comments:

  1. Hi Jennifer,

    I really enjoyed reading your post! I have not seen Zootopia but the connections that you made between the content of the movie, stereotypes ("fixed mindset"), and math were so interesting! I think you have convinced me to watch the movie.

    I do not yet have any good open-ended questions or parallel tasks to go along with yours, but reading your post reminded me of Fibonacci's Rabbit Problems. It's a picture book that revolves around rabbit's population growth in a year. There are many other books about Fibonacci's sequences and math patterns that are found in nature, and they are just so fascinating to read - not just for kids but for adults, too! Here are a couple of links that I would like to share with you:

    1. The Rabbit Problem - might not be accurate but still interesting to read
    http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibnat.html
    2. Some Fun Fibonacci Picture Books
    http://www.whatdowedoallday.com/2012/02/fibonacci-books-for-kids.html

    Thank you so much for sharing your ideas and I look forward to your future postings! :)

    Hannah

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hannah,
    Thanks so much for more science-math links! There are so many of them! Also, for reminding me what the Fibonacci sequence is....it was buried deep in my memory and needed some pulling back to the surface. I struggled to relate rabbit population growth with the Fibonacci sequence though as my biology mind thinks of exponential growth when it comes to rabbits!!
    Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hannah,
    Thanks so much for more science-math links! There are so many of them! Also, for reminding me what the Fibonacci sequence is....it was buried deep in my memory and needed some pulling back to the surface. I struggled to relate rabbit population growth with the Fibonacci sequence though as my biology mind thinks of exponential growth when it comes to rabbits!!
    Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Jennifer, great post on Zootopia, this would be a great movie to show in all elementary grades during the first week of class to teach the concept of fixed vs growth mindset, especially for the younger grades. Maybe you could even show it to the intermediate grades as well!
    And great demonstration how you can create math problems based on this movie. I'm sure the same could be applied to other movies, especially for movies that the intermediate grades might be more interested in.

    I think teaching the growth vs fixed mindset is just as important as teaching mathematical thinking, if not more important, and this concept needs to be introduced at the beginning of the year, and constantly reinforced throughout.

    So I like the connections you made from Zootopia to the curriculum, but I think they are a nice bonus in addition to connection made to growth mindset. And it's our role as teachers to point out these connections to our students.

    ReplyDelete