Now I had a baseline of my students’ attitudes. Although it was quite healthy, I wanted to try to move it ahead and make it stronger. A stronger belief in one’s mathematical abilities may also prevent negative beliefs from seeping in later on. It seemed to me that they were still too young to believe that they were “not” math people. I liked that very much, but was concerned that this belief may creep in during later grades.
I started the discussion by putting a negative math statement on the board. The statement was, “This is too hard.” The first recording of their ideas is below:
I started this journey by writing a negative math statement on the board. The statement was: “This is too hard.” I began by asking them if they had ever said this to themselves when they were doing a math question. Many of them said that they had.
I found that they were very receptive to changing the attitude that “this is too hard.” They were very keen to find new statements that would allow them to think of the statement in a way that was more positive. We spent quite a bit of time talking about the power of the word “yet”. I expressed to them that we are all coming from a different place of understanding math and that, even if you did not understand the question now, that they would, in fact, get it soon. We can’t all arrive at the same understanding at the same time. This really seemed to resonate with them.
We spent about 10 minutes discussing this idea. We moved on to our regular math lesson after this discussion. I did not want to spend too much time on this concept, at first, but would revisit it the next day.
The following day, I wrote another fixed mindset statement on the board. The next negative math statement is below:
With this discussion, we talked about the statements that we could make instead of, “I just can’t do math”. We brainstormed statements that we could make in place of the negative statement. After the lesson the day before, they were very quick to suggest replacements for such an opinion.
At this point, I also introduced the concept of fixed mindset vs. growth mindset. We talked about a fixed mindset as being an attitude where one believes that our brain’s abilities are fixed and do not change. Whereas a growth mindset is an attitude is one in which we believe that our abilities can change with a positive attitude and hard work.
We continued to discuss how we could change negative statements into positive statements during the beginning of most math classes.
The above photo is another example of how we can adjust our mindset.
And that is just what education is, isn’t it: an ongoing conversation about learning – whether that is hard knowledge and content, or learning about how one learns about oneself. Your work here is very important and serves as a reminder to us all that education is about shifting minds to think, not just filling them…
Thanks,
garth.
It would be cool to follow these kids next year and see how they do … I also think it would be amazing to follow up whole-school with some initiatives, but I will leave that to you and next year’s math department. Thank you for doing this important work in elementary school – the messages students receive about their math learning at this stage are critical to their future success! Keep up the great work!