Growth Mindset and Mathematics

What does a student's past experience have to do with how they learn math today?  My past experiences certainly shaped me and changed my mindset several times.

My  Math Story

I was told from a young age that I was gifted in math.  I learned math easily and was always ahead of my peers.  I can not ever remember struggling with a math problem until I was in fifth grade.  When I was a fifth grader, my teacher allowed me and another student to work on our own, starting at the back of the textbook and working our way to the front.  As a teacher, this sounds like a terrible idea in retrospect but it did lead me to develop some perseverance that had seriously been lacking. After that, I continued into middle school and high school continuing to do well in math.  I had a great memory and was really good at remembering procedures, formulas and rules.  Now I know I was getting by on this and not on a deep conceptual understanding of math.  

I knew I wanted to teach elementary school from the time I was in tenth grade.  I went to college as an elementary education major.  We had to pick a second major and I randomly picked sociology.  Luckily, someone convinced me that having a background in math would be much more marketable so I switched my second major to math.  This led me to taking 2 math classes per semester.  When I got a class on non euclidean geometry, I hit a major wall.  The content was challenging and required so much more of my focus and attention then I was used to.  I worked harder during that one class than I had on all the other math classes I had taken combined.  It gave me the experience of working hard and still barely keeping my head above water.  I don't remember much of the content of that class now, but I do remember what it was like to struggle and to work really hard to learn math.  

Despite a major in math in college, I still lacked the conceptual understanding of math that I needed to teach.  I started teaching sixth grade and really struggled with how to help my students who didn't have a good foundation in mathematics.  I spent a lot of time repeating the steps of a procedure louder and slower until my students could do it.  After a few years of teaching sixth grade, my position was cut and I moved onto a new school in a new role as a math specialist.  I got the job because I could do a lot of math, not because I knew a lot about teaching it.  I was given a lot of free rein to use my role anyway I wanted.  I spent a lot of time the first year just figuring things out.  I started listening to my students more and helping them develop strategies rather than teaching them.

From there, I delved into some of the deeper research available on teaching math at that time.  I read a lot of books and got involved in some really good professional development.  I took more math courses, these ones aimed at teachers and at developing a deep understanding of content.  I did a lot of group work and spent a lot of time learning from my peers.  I saw multiple approaches to solving problems and expanded my definition of what it meant to be good at math.  For the first time, I saw the connections between algebra and geometry and gained a valuable understanding of big conceptual ideas.  This conceptual understanding of mathematics led me to be a much better teacher.

Mathematical Mindsets

Nowadays, I am so much better at helping my students learn math.  I have so many more tools, strategies, ideas and a much better understanding than when I first started out.  Despite all this, I still have students who are struggling.  I know that I have the tools I need to help them but something big seems to be getting in their way.  Their mindset.  The research on the brain and mindsets has been moving quickly over the last few years and now their is so much available information to help students, teachers and parents with mindset.  My research on mindset last summer led me to Carol Dweck's Mindset book.  From there, I found Jo Boaler's Book Mathematical Mindsets and knew it was the next thing I wanted to work on.  I got the book in July and read it almost in one sitting. It got my wheels turning as I was starting to think about back to school season and I have made some big changes this school year based on ideas in this book.  Now that I have the basics down, I am reading this book again (a little slower this time!) and am going to go deeper into some of the ideas as well as share how I have used some of it in my classroom.  Over the next 9 weeks, I am going to take one chapter at a time and take a closer look at these ideas.  I would love for you to join me!

Book Study

I read a lot of math teaching books!  From time to time, I like to dive deeper into a new book or an old favorite by hosting a book study on my blog. I have done book such as Minds on Mathematics, Beyond Invert and Multiply, Mathematics Through Play, Number Talks, Children's Mathematics,Whole Brain Teaching For Challenging Kids, Teach Like a Pirate and Guided Math in Action. It is fun and easy to participate.  I will post my thoughts and share some ways I am using the ideas in my classroom each week and then you can share in the comments section.  If you have your own blog, feel free to post there and leave the link in the comments section. 

This book is easy to access and very inexpensive for a good professional development book.  You can grab it on Amazon, it ships free with Prime.

Here is the posting schedule
Friday February 17th: Chapters 1&2
Friday February 24th: Chapters 3-5
Friday March 3rd: Chapters 6&7
Friday March 10th: Chapters 8&9

What is your math story? How did your mindset change as you learned math? Please share in the comments below!