SERRA BENSON*
I begin the school year with my third graders by spending time developing their growth mindset, creating a culture around math where mistakes are celebrated, and where struggle and hard work are valued over getting things ‘right’. Once this has been established, then I know we will go far with our math learning.
Oak Grove School math teachers did an online summer course with Jo Boaler, professor of mathematics at Stanford University. This course changed the way I approach math teaching and the results have been overwhelmingly positive. My students love Jo Boaler’s short videos available on her website, YouCubed, about how mistakes grow our brain, the importance of struggle, and how speed is not the most important thing in math. They learn to value deep thinking, brain plasticity, and believing in one’s ability to learn, among other topics. They especially love the YouCubian superheroes who fight math myths with science, such as the myth of the ‘math person’. I sometimes dress as a YouCubian superhero for Halloween and spread the message that anyone can be good at math if they work hard, are willing to make mistakes, and believe in themselves.
I like to start the day with math while students are fresh and rested. We begin with Number Talks, an enquiry based mental math routine created by Kathy Richardson and Ruth Parker in the early 1990s. In my Number Talks, I write a question on the board such as 99+51 and students solve it mentally. They are asked to ‘put a thumbs up quietly to their chest’ when they are ready with an answer which allows students who need more thinking time to keep going rather than rush. They can also signal with two or more fingers to show how many different strategies they thought of to arrive at their answer.
After giving them ample time to think, and when I see that most thumbs are up, I ask students to share all their answers. I write all of the class’s solutions on the board, and ask a few students to share their strategies as I show their thinking process on the board. Students become confident sharing both their mistakes as well as correct answers, and the focus is on the many ways in which they solved the problem, such as composing and decomposing numbers, using a friendly number, place value, making 10, and so on. My favourite part about Number Talks is when we have multiple wrong answers and I get to hear students say with confidence, ‘I see my mistake, I was thinking about it this way, but now I see that doesn’t work.’ When students can share their mistakes in front of their peers without shame or embarrassment, then I know that we have a safe class culture for learning.
Following our Number Talk we always do a ‘Stretch Math’ problem where I give students various questions and puzzles that require students to be comfortable about struggling with a task and trying multiple strategies or attempts to find a solution. I encourage them to draw pictures, visualize, write a number sentence, talk to each other, ‘Try, Check, Revise’, and other strategies. After giving them sufficient time to work on it, we share partial solutions and things that did not work as well as what did work; and often there are multiple solutions that work. We may even extend the conversation to prove why some strategies are the only ones that can work.
I have seen many powerful changes in students’ attitudes towards math based on my new teaching practices. Students have grown in confidence in the subject, and have developed a willingness to stick with hard problems and not give up. These changes have come from my shift towards developing students’ growth mindset and pivoting away from focusing on the ‘right answer’; instead, we celebrate the many ways in which students think about and approach a problem as well as the mistakes students make as they take risks and figure things out without fear of being ‘wrong’.
Of all the shifts in teaching approaches I’ve experienced in my career, this one has been transformative. I encourage math teachers everywhere to explore and experiment with the growth mindset concept in their own classrooms.
* Serra Benson is a third-grade teacher at Oak Grove School, Ojai, California. She can be reached at serrabenson@oakgroveschool.com