During this first year of teaching one of the hardest challenges hasn’t been teaching proportional relationships to bored 7th graders. What is harder than explaining exponents, is actually getting students to buy in who are operating at a third grade level in math on most good days.

Since day one, all the way back in August, students have been acting out or giving up because they have gone through school thinking that math is hard and they can’t do it.

I’m here to flip the script.

Honestly, even if it’s as simple as “we can do hard things”, I will often have them repeat phrases after me. Like directions, short phrases, but in this case, I often come back to this phrase right before something I know will be incredibly difficult for them.

Unfortunately, there has not been a tangible way to track their progress using this mindset trick, but there has been lots of research done on the impacts of student belief on growth mindset improving their outcomes. It’s one of the reasons I run my math support students through Jo Boaler’s “How to Learn Math” earlier in the school, and I plan to do that with all my support classes in the future.

For some further reading, you can check out “Dr Jo Boaler | Transforming Mathematics Education Through Mindset-Based Teaching”.

While this post is more introductory in nature. I am very concerned about growing that resilient and growth focused mindset in my classes and there will likely be more updates as I teach longer and discover more about my students and their needs.