Blog Post #1: Exploring the Growth Mindset!

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog!

This week we discussed many aspect about the benefits of a positive attitude when engaging in mathematics. I was very surprised by a lot of the science behind the importance of having a positive attitude when approaching mathematics. In this blog post, I will be sharing with you my reflections on this lecture and why I value the knowledge that I have gained. 

This positive approach to mathematics has been referred to as the growth mindset and is discussed in great detail by Jo Boaler in her Ted Talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3icoSeGqQtY&vl=en). Often times, especially in mathematics, students become very discouraged when they have made a mistake or arrive at an incorrect answer. However, Jo Boaler discusses the neurological advantages to making mistakes. When an individual makes a mistake, synapses in our brain are fired triggering more in depth thought to the solution of the problem. When an individual gets the answer correct, however, less synapses are fired because the brain does not need to dive deeper into the context of the problem. This reinforces that mistakes are beneficial to make and thus, we need to teach students the additional knowledge that is gained when mistakes are made. It is important that students learn not to be afraid of mistakes and instead, embrace them. 

With all that said, the growth mindset allows individuals to truly believe that they can learn anything. This mindset makes them more capable of success than the latter of having a negative mindset. However, as teachers, we need to ensure we are providing students with the opportunity to develop a growth mindset. We can do this by providing students with mathematical scenarios that do not just have one correct answer. This will allow students to explore their mathematical abilities and produce one of many correct answers/possibilities. By providing students with short and closed questions that only have one right answer, we are hindering their ability to develop a growth mindset. 

As a teacher candidate studying to become a mathematics teacher, I think that it is crucial that we learn how to effectively communicate like mathematics educators and not like mathematicians. In the reading for this week, Mathematics for Teaching, by Deborah Lowenberg Ball and Hyman Bass (2003), the importance of unpacking one's knowledge was discussed. To unpack one's knowledge means to decompress the knowledge you have in order to effectively teach students and push them through their zone of proximal development. By unpacking our knowledge, we can scaffold their learning in a way that resonates best with the student. If we can successfully do this, we are teaching like a mathematics educator and not like a mathematician. This was really eye-opening for me because I have had a person experience in my grade 11 mathematics class in which my teacher spoke like a mathematician instead of a mathematics educator. He took every short cut and did not explain the logic behind the mathematics he was doing. As a result, he compromised the quality of learning for his students. 

Overall, I found a lot of value in this weeks topic of the growth mindset and how we, as teachers, can help students reach this positive attitude. Some key reflections of mine throughout this week include:

• Minimizing short and closed math questions that have only one correct answer and instead, providing students with the opportunities to explore open questions with multiple possibilities. I believe that this will avoid the development of math anxiety in many students. 

• As teachers, we need to believe in ourselves to unlock our own unlimited potential. Therefore, we need to ensure we can scaffold our students' learning to allow them to believe in themselves as well. 

• As frustrated as I get when I mistakes in my own mathematics classes, I now know that these mistakes have helped further my knowledge to get me to where I am today. 

• We need to be the future of teachers that changes the message that students are receiving in their math classes. We need to create a more positive and open learning environment in order for students' to believe in themselves and gain the confidence to develop a growth mindset. 

I hope that you all enjoyed my reflective thinking on the topic of this week in EDBE 8F83! Let me know if we had any similar reflections or if you were inspired by anything I said in this post. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and reflections too! 

Thanks for stopping by and I hope to see you soon!

Signing off, 

            Ms. Blackwell