Over April vacation in 2011, I read a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Stanford professor and developmental psychologist Carol Dweck. It shook my foundation. I re-examined my teaching, my parenting and my self identity. Probably many of you are familiar with the book which (in a nutshell) states that:
- Intelligence is not fixed, and the brain is strengthened through mistakes and challenges.
- Our self beliefs affect the way our brains work.
- It is possible to change our self beliefs (and therefore make our brains work better).
When I returned to my classroom after vacation, I put all of my plans on hold. Fostering growth mindset became my first priority. I developed this lesson for my seventh grade students: Ellen's Mindset Lesson. My stated instructional goal was this:
The most important thing for me to teach you is that you are capable of learning math at deep, deep levels if you open yourself to mistakes and challenges.
I've been meaning to post this for a while, ever since I was visiting Heather Robitaille's fifth grade classroom last fall at Rumney. As an ongoing math thread in her class, Heather has her students use checkbooks use to track various debit and credits that she devises for them. In her own words, here's how she works it:
I give the students deposits each day and throw done withdrawals in there as well. For example, students have to rent their chair... If I rent it to them for $3.75 a day, then how much would they be charged for the week? Some students decide to do a daily withdrawal, while others pay the sum up front for the week. At the end of the week students have to have a certain balance. If their balance is off, then they go back and find their mistake and correct it just like you and I would have to do. I really try to make this very realistic for the kids. Adding and subtracting decimals with real life skill.
Greetings, math nerds! I hope you have all had a fabulous summer... Last spring, on the WCSU Math Coaching Blog, I left off with a discussion of mastery and number concept. Obviously, we want mastery, but what does it mean? What does it look like? How do we teach for it? The math non-negotiables give us a sense of what will be "covered," but to focus on mastery, we need more...
This summer the WCSU Math Steering Committee had the opportunity to spend a few days working collaboratively on a document that (we hope!) will be an excellent resource supporting WCSU math instruction. We worked together on the format and content for kindergarten and first grade. I will be working with individual Math Steering folks to fill in other grade levels as soon as possible starting with 5th and 6th grade (because much of the work was done last year as a focus of math coaching, but just needs to be curated).
Greetings, math nerds! I hope you have all had a fabulous summer... Last spring, on the WCSU Math Coaching Blog, I left off with a discussion of mastery and number concept. Obviously, we want mastery, but what does it mean? What does it look like? How do we teach for it? The math non-negotiables give us a sense of what will be "covered," but to focus on mastery, we need more...