inTERVIEW
TEACHING WITH A GROWTH MINDSET
Professor Jo Boaler has shown how a growth mindset enables students to get to grips with maths. She tells Alan Thomson that the same approach can help teachers achieve results in any subject.
o subject causes our education system as much pedagogic anxiety as mathematics. While places like Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and the much- lauded Singapore regularly top international maths performance tables, in England more than half of students leave school without what is considered a good pass in maths (a grade 5). And, every year,
a third fail GCSE maths (and English too). Most students failing to gain a grade 4 (pass) or
above in maths and English GCSEs at school head straight to further education which, since 2015, must ensure that they continue to work towards achieving a Level 2 in these subjects.
The task for FE teachers of maths is particularly challenging due to students’ often ingrained sense of failure, compounded by the belief among many that they simply lack a mathematical brain and don’t ‘get maths’.
All of this is anathema to Jo Boaler, professor of mathematics education at Stanford University Graduate School of Education, California, and author of several books about teaching maths, including the best-selling Mathematical Mindsets (2015). “Just about every belief people have about maths is incorrect and needs upending,” says Boaler, whose own work is heavily influenced by Stanford colleague Professor Carol Dweck’s work on fixed and growth mindsets. Briefly, a fixed mindset leads us to think we are born with certain talents and ineptitudes. It tells us we will never be any good in areas for which we have little or no aptitude, so why bother. Those with a growth mindset realise that they can
achieve proficiency, and even excellence, in most things through hard work and persistence – potential is, therefore, elastic. “I had an interesting experience when Carol Dweck was giving a session on mindset, and there was a person there from a maths department. He said ‘that’s really interesting, but it doesn’t apply to maths – you can either do maths or you can’t’,” recalls Boaler,
10 ISSUE 39 • SPRING 2020 inTUITION
who started her career as a secondary school maths teacher in England, later moving into academia and joining Stanford in 1998. Boaler wasn’t particularly surprised as data suggests that maths academics are more likely to possess a fixed mindset than any other group of American college professors. “Some don’t like the idea that maybe everybody could get to that level in maths if they had the opportunities,” she says. Boaler says that most of the advantages that people
may have at birth – for instance a predisposition to be interested in, and good at, maths – are far outweighed by the subsequent opportunities that we have to achieve in any given area. The key to unlocking this potential is a growth mindset. “We have been obsessed with the idea that some people have a brain advantage and they’re the ones that should go in a particular direction – not just maths, it could be anything,” she says. “Yet we have so much evidence now that shows that
this really does not matter compared to the millions of opportunities people have to achieve. “We’re born differently, but how important are those differences when we know that our brains are constantly growing and changing?” Boaler’s work, including her latest book, Limitless Mind: Learn, Lead and Live Without Barriers, draws heavily on neuroscience. But she says that while education has a great deal to learn from brain science, much of that information never finds its way into pedagogy, much less teaching practice. “I do think it really is important that people in education are aware of the latest developments and knowledge we have from understanding the brain,” Boaler says. “But I would also say that teachers are not usually given access to that knowledge – it sits behind paywalls and highly technical language.” Boaler says that studies show that five different neural pathways are activated when learning maths, and that two of them are visual pathways. They also show that the highest-achieving people are those who have more communication between the different pathways. “We know maths should be this multi-modal experience, not just visuals but movement and
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
