It has been a very humbling experience putting myself in the role of being a students again. I am always trying to learn and grow but this has been a whole new experience for me. As I speak to my students about trying and celebrating mistakes and developing a growth mindset I found myself needing to do the same. I truly believe on of the most valuable parts of this experience (the Masters Program) has been remembering what it feelings like to be a student. I have frustrated, confused, and ready to just give up. There have also been celebrations growing my mindset, learning new knowledge, and wonderful connections with peers. My knowledge has expanded and I really understand this journey of teaching is very complex and extremely important, we have a huge impact on the lives of our students.
The question guiding my study :What effect does mindset have on math achievement? Provided much insight into the complexity of my students math learning. I was very clear that they all come with anxiety and a lack of confidence. They are so defeated it takes a lot of time to build a trusting relationship before mindset growth can even begin to occur. The addition of new students to my class every 6 weeks definitely adds a real challenge to the work done developing a positive learning environment. This work is important and needs to continue we all know there is a serious problem in student math achievement in our district, state , and country. There is not one single solution to fix this problem. Our students are complex to quote Shrek they have many "Layers like an onion". They bring past school experiences, family challenges, learning disabilities, anxiety, fear, and we are challenged to meet their needs. Our students are amazing , resilient, intelligent, creative and waiting for us to guide them. Our quest is to take the whole students and grow their mindsets inspiring them to become life long learners. In doing this study I know I need to keep my driving and add a few more support questions to refine my work. I need to continue develop practices that support the question How
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I would like to start this Blog by saying my research paper is not close to being completed but I am busy gathering and pondering. I can give some feedback on my results thus far and how these results seem to be evolving. To start I have full classes this year we actually had to open 3 Math 1 classes this year due to the need of student. At the end of the trimester I gave all my students a survey asking them questions about their mindsets when they started and where they are now. My results from this survey were very positive 90% of my students had some growth in their math mindsets. Then we had a new group of students start, as we do at Valley Oak every 6 weeks, and I had new students who needed mindset growth. My observations were that my old students took a few steps backwards as they were influenced a bit by the fixed mindsets of the new students joining our class. Instead of stepping up and helping to change the new students mindsets my students easily feel back into the I can’t do this, I am not a math person, this is too hard, I will never need this type of math in my life, etc. I was very disappointed to say the least but what I realized is that these types of changes are hard and they take time and practice. I also realized as we began doing the coding while doing math students felt it was challenging and instead of trying harder a large group started their fixed mindset behaviors again. These are very telling observations and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since it took years for them to develop fixed mindsets it will take time to develop growth mindsets. The challenges of new students every 6 weeks has always created challenges for building school culture and classroom learning environments, now I see the challenges in mindset growth. I am hoping as elementary teachers are teaching the new math program and working to incorporate Jo Boaler’s growth mindset that this will start to become the new norm.
As I was gathering my data I also made another discovery, it is impossible to create positive math mindsets if students are not present. Attendance has a huge affect on most data, we can’t teach them if they are not present nor can we impact their mindsets. With this said I added a new side note to my data, I am only collecting data on students who have 70% or better attendance. That is the minimum attendance percent that I will be using to evaluate my students positive math mindsets. I am hoping that as they begin to feel better about math that the attendance of poor attending students will improve. I am enjoying this project and I believe the work I am doing is important. I see this a just the beginning I have so many questions about math learning. I want to continue to understand how we best learn math and work to create change, a math revolution ! Resilience, Flipped , Challenged Based Learning
How can we not want to strive to incorporate what we learned in this weeks lesson into our teaching? The students in the resilience video were so inspiring. My own family has had some pretty serious personal trauma this year and we have learned so much together as we find our way to continue to move forward. One of the important lessons I have learned is we as people are able to cope and handle trauma better if we are busy working to help others. If we are able to be part of a solution to help and create positive change it give us hope. That is what those children were doing they were empowered to “Make a Difference” to help others, to beginning the healing process for those survivors of disasters. I think we all need to figure out ways to fit this into our teaching we have so many students with so much anxiety. Many of our own students have survived some seriously traumatic events or they are aware of events in world which are scary. There is a lots of learning that can occur that is Culturally Relevant being able to empathize with and then help those needing help. Also what valuable problem solving and collaboration opportunities this creates for our students. If we believe we our students are our future these lessons will be lessons that will stay with them for their entire lives it is very empowering the be a part of something important. I really appreciated the learning of the Flipped Classroom, Blended Learning, and Challenged Based Learning as well. It made me reflect on my own learning/teaching and realize there is a lot of change I could make to engage my students in a more meaningful way. That is why I signed up for this Masters program I know there are teaching strategies that more effective and current and I want to be the best teacher I can be. I also realized I have much reading and learning to do long after this Masters program is over which is exciting and I hope we can all stay connected as a learning community. For me at Valley Oak the homework piece of the flipped classroom is a challenge but I do think I could incorporate this idea into the warm-up part of my class. I really see the value of introducing a topic in this way and when they said you could rewind and go back it really made me think about how we all learn differently. I am a person that has to reread things many time I would /am a student who would benefit from rewinding. I also have realized there is value in watching/learning and then discussing. I need a lot of help figuring out how to make these videos and I want to learn , but in this class you have demonstrated we can use many different resources to achieve this front loading. Blogging has also proven to be a valuable way for me to process my own learning. I would love to have more time to read and discuss each others blogs since we all take different yet valuable pieces from our lessons. The Challenged Based Learning is how I strive to teach science and I am very excited with the new science standards because they focus on presenting phenomena and problems. I am going to work to modify some of my favorite lessons to be more Challenged Based. One real challenge I have is that often my students resist this feels foreign to them when I try to take them on trips to plant acorns or other habitat restoration they are afraid to take a chance and try something new. The quest of continually growing mindsets I suppose. I would love to work with my PLC to develop more Challenged Based math lessons. The C-Stem curriculum we are using is problem solving with coding and that is proving to be engaging as well as lessons from MVP(Math Vision Project). These are the ways we should be striving to reach our students in is more meaningful for us all. It is a process doing research. The quantitative data that will be collected for this project will be scores from mindset surveys, Math Inventory results given each trimester, and final trimester grades. These data sets should illustrate the hypothesized results that an improved growth mindset will result in higher achievement in Math 1 students. The students who are participating in this study have all failed Math 1 for 2-4 semesters before arriving to this class, they are defeated and have fixed mindsets about math. Student attendance will also be used to determine data that will be eliminated for the study. If students don't attend regularly it will be a challenge to observe mindset growth so for this study these students will be dropped from the data collection, 70% attendance minimum is needed. These data values will be evaluated for the effect size.
Qualitative data will not be the main focus of this study but it is valued. Student voice is important data to gather. Students will participate in lesson reflections answering questions related to where they feel they are in their learning as well as mindset questions. This data will be used to help improve lessons focusing on growth mindset development. I enjoyed all of our learning this week especially the work of Zaretta Hammond. I have been stuck thinking about the diagram of the Learning Pit and as I read through our homework to see what else we needed to complete I was excited by the fact we needed to think of a lesson that left our students in the learning pit . This happened to me this week ! I have had a tough week feeling rundown, behind in my life, and then I needed to make sub plans because I was going on a field trip. I created a lesson that I thought was a review for my students to do with the sub. Well this was not the case they all fell deep into the learning pit and I was right there with them. I have been sitting and pondering what went wrong ,where their confidence and perseverance went. I have also been reflecting on myself and why this lesson didn't work. The learning pit isn't a bad place to be and I embrace the opportunity to improve my lesson. I was just shocked that my students after all the progress they have made in the growth mindsets and confidence were not able to at least try to solve equations. As I work my way out of the pit I am realizing that I need to present this lesson in a new way that looks different and is more engaging than their previous experiences with solving equations. I am excited that I have come up with some ideas that would have been hard to leave with a sub but should work to have my students start making their way to the other side and out of the pit. I think this is a very frustrating part of teaching we work so hard to build their confidence and at the early stages of this process they can so quickly go backwards many steps. The learning pit is a great visual and may also be a fun way to have students illustrate where they think they are in their learning of a topic with words and pictures. Another valuable day of learning for me !This is how I feel my brain looks right now ! I am taking in so much information and learning so much so fast I am truly needing more processing time but life won't slow down so we adjust and do the best we can. As my research deepens I have come to realize this program is 1 year long but the value of what we are learning and hope to accomplish will joyfully take years. Who knows maybe someday teachers will be reading our books and studies to help them grow as educators.
I found 3 more articles this week which were very informative in my quest to understand the value of growth mindsets and celebrating mistakes. Duckworth and Quinn 2009, Blackwell , Trzeshiewski, and Dweck 2007, and Shroder "How Brains React to Mistakes" . These articles have inspired me to continue to develop my knowledge and skill for supporting mindset growth in my students. This work is important and will have positive results in my students success. At Valley Oak we do trimester grades so our students are able to see their progress often. I just completed my trimester grades and I am seeing very promising results. 90% of my students self accessed that they have had growth in their math mindsets. I have also seen a higher rate of students passing my class and earning full credit. The only factor I have little control over which is negatively impacting student success is attendance and even that seems to be improving. I look forward to diving deeper into my research as I start the process of writing my own paper. Good Luck to us all !! Everyone should care about the math mindset of people in this country ! It has become a social norm to accept the philosophy that some people are good at math and many are not. The United States is falling behind in math achievement compared to other developed countries. These findings are particularly important in light of continued concerns with US mathematics achievement. In the most recent international comparisons students in the US ranked 40th out of 72 countries (OECD, 2016). This is not a new problem for the United States this has been going on for decades. The continued struggles our math students have been experiencing has developed other problems affecting math learning.Low mathematics achievement is not the only problem that faces the US—math anxiety is widespread among school children and the general population (Ashcraft and Krause, 2007; Foley et al., 2017). Algebra a course widely considered to be the “gateway” to advanced high school math and science (U.S. Department of Education, 1997). There is extensive amounts of data illustrating this serious issue with math in the United States. It is believed in this exciting time of a math revolution that the secret to success is in opening the students mindsets. The work of Carol Dweck and Jo Boaler is proving that “when people change their ideas about the malleability of their potential, from “fixed” (my ability is not changeable) to “growth” (my ability changes as I learn) their learning and achievement improves” (Dweck, 2006). The students in Math 1 classes at Valley Oak High School have all failed 1 to 2 full years of Math 1, they are defeated with very fixed mindsets.Creating a learning environment promoting a positive math mindset using Jo Boaler curriculums, collaborative learning, Math Vision Projects, and C-Stem curriculum is hypothesized to result in higher passing rates. The resulting higher rate of students passing Math 1 will result in more students being able to move on to more advanced math classes.
This research project has the independent variable of a positive learning environment promoting mindset lessons, collaborative interactions, and student reflections. The dependent variable is the data that will be measuring mindset growth, improved Math Inventory scores, and final trimester passing grades. Data will be collected for each trimester gathering final grades, MI scores, and mindset survey results. The mindset survey results will be measuring on a scale from 1-5 how students felt before the class and how students felt after a trimester in the class. 1 is fixed mindset and 5 is growth mindset. These results will then be used to calculate the effect size to determine the extent of growth that has occured. The same comparison of effect size will be used to evaluate Math Inventory results and final trimester grades. As a district the goal is to see one years growth in one years time. Jo Boaler,Jack A.Dieckmann, Garciela Perez-Nunez, Kathy Liu Sun, Cathy Williams (2018): Changing Students Mindset and Achievement in Mathematics: The Impact of Free Online Course. Jo Boaler , Carol Dweck (2016): Mathematical Mindset Linda Darling - Hammond (2010): The Flat World and Education Mark H. Ashcraft, Jeremy A. Krause, Psychonomics (2007) I am so enjoying learning and being part of a group of like minded people questing for similar answers. As we learned in these videos and readings it is in the groups where we are doing the hard work of really trying to push ourselves, to take a chance make mistakes, to keep searching and trying, and then finally that we may gain some real insight into how we can better serve our students. I feel like this masters program has given me the permission I have been wanting to really think about learning and how we foster that in our students. It is making me really look at myself as a teacher and why I do the things I do. I have been given permission to synthesize what I do everyday and what I have been doing for 25 years. I and I feel like my feeling of things need to change , things are not quite working for the kids, things can improve are okay and validated. I wish I had more time in my day to dedicate to this thinking and for me my frustration is life pulls us in so many directions everyday and I really just wish I had more time to really take this in and think about all we are learning more. I do want to point out that as we are all juggling so many things in our professional and personal lives it does give us the ability to practice what we are learning in class for ourselves and our students which is a true gift and is the learning that will stay with us as we persevere through our journey of educators. I have enjoyed all of Sir Ken Robinson's videos his insight is wonderful and really resonates with me as an educator and as a mother of 3 amazing daughters. It It is his video "Schools Kill Curiosity" that really pulled together what want continually touched upon in the previous videos; humans are naturally different (diverse), curious, and creative. These are the 3 principles for humans to flourish and I feel like education is floundering with these basic principles. His example of the dancer who was thought to have a learning problem because she couldn't sit still made me think about 80% of my class. There is another serious research question here" Why are so many students struggling with focus and attention in school? " . I will try to work on that after my math question but the reality is this question is affecting us all in our classrooms everyday and I don't think as a system we are addressing it. Nature can't be contained it finds ways to survive and flourish and I feel that some of these behaviors we see in our students is because we are not supporting their basic needs as learner, as humans. I have so many boys in my class who have so much energy and are so social and so different, I am eager to continue reading my gender section in Brian Rules because I know there is a lot to the gender difference which is not bad but as a system how to we honor and support these differences. For me I think I started the work I am now thinking hard about in this masters program 4 Summers ago when I applied for a Napa Learns Maker grant. This grant provided money for myself and my partner science teacher at the time to go through the Sonoma State Makers Certificate program. This was the first time in a long time I was a students and I loved it. This program was something I knew my students needed, that all students need. Making is problem solving, it is creativity, it is collaboration, it is making many mistakes, and it is play. It is a model that our district needs to fully embrace and support. This is how we bring play and creativity into our classrooms, this is how elementary teacher address the NGSS standards, this is how we support these human principles.
Social interaction (collaboration) on topics we are learning about and interested in is exciting, creativity opens a whole world of critical thinking, exploring , and testing, and curiosity is what fuels all learning. Jo Boaler speaks of deeper learning, of questions, of many ways to arrive at a solution, and about math being creative and visual. These are the themes running through all of my research as well as in the information being provided to us in this masters program. Now the question is what are we going to do with it? I can tell you from my experience it is much harder at times teaching with collaborative groups, hands on lessons, discovery based curriculum. Our students can be a bit of a handful when we are in our Makers Space at Valley Oak and they are working on projects frustration levels rise, the temptation to give up is real, and collaboration can be tough when people are absent. The same is true with the coding and robotics it is a big learning curve for me as the teacher to create ways to mange a class that has students playing with linkbots around the room or others wanting to give up because their code has a error. The research is defiantly supporting these types of learning experiences now I look forward to there being more support for us as educator with the how, the what in terms of more inquiry based curriculum's, and the understanding that we too need the space to make mistakes and learn. I am excited to be trying some of these new ideas but I also realize that I have a huge learning curve and I get frustrated that I don't have the time I need to plan and think about creating more experiences for my students. I do celebrate that I am learning !! How can I create a safe learning environment for my students to develop Positive Math Mindsets? One of my research sources is Jo Boaler, her work with math learning resonates with me as a learner and a teacher. I became a teacher because school wasn't easy for me I had to work very hard(I still do) but I love to learn and embrace the challenge. Since I struggled I felt I could help other struggling learner and that is why I know I am where I am supposed to be at Valley Oak . For so many reasons our students have struggles some are not academic but many are and they benefit from our smaller learning environment. I have been part of a broken math system for many years working hard to help my students learn the math that was on our pacing calendars using the curriculum that our district instructed us to use., and for years I have watch my students feel frustrated and defeated. I have been searching for answers for years. When I was introduced to the work of Jo Boaler it was like my math teaching light bulb turned on. Her research into grow mindsets for math, students learning, math anxieties is all spot on. I September she released Algebra lesson designed to prepare students for success in Algebra. I have been using it and is so fun, collaborative, and visual for the students. One concept has students see that X can be anything before they start to solve for X so they understand X can have many values. Her website youcubed.org is full of visual collaborative assignments. She also offers classes and I took one of those classes and it really helped me understand how and why presenting these types of lessons has value to positive math mindsets. Then Napa Learns introduced me to Professor Chang at UC Davis and the C-stem computing and robotics curriculum. Then I watched this video and I thought these are my kids I need to try this. research.ucdavis.edu/harry-cheng-cstem/ That was the beginning of my journey as a computing and robotics teacher. I am in my second year of teaching math this way and I do think it levels the playing field and makes math more accessible to a large amount of my students. I am using this as well as Jo Boalers methods and I am using the research for these two professors who understand we need to present math in different ways to our struggling populations. Actually I think all students would benefit.
Just this week I found information about changes SFUSD has made in teaching math which is having very promising results in students success and completion of higher level math. They are not having any student take Algebra 1 until 9th grade and requiring all students take common core level math 6, 7, and 8. The results are impressive and it seems like a simple shift to make if it supports student learning and success. I have also gathered a few other articles and I need to set a weekend aside to dedicated to plowing through my research. I did forget my most important research source, my students they teach me so much everyday as we reflect on the learning in my class daily. I am becoming a better teacher by spending time asking them to reflect as well as my own personal reflection. I am learning so much and feel so good because I feel like the focus is on student learning and how they learn best and not on pacing. First I want to start by saying how very much I have enjoyed reading this book"The Flat World and Education" it really opened my eyes to some important issues in education as well as many celebrations. My emotions were stirred I have been talking to colleagues about topics covered in this book it really has me thinking. I especially enjoyed how math was a topic throughout her study which helped to support some of my thoughts and questions about math learning. The tremendous change that some countries and even states have made are very hopeful and have inspired me. I appreciate that my world has grown and become more round after thinking about topics covered in this book.
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Julie LovieJulie Lovie Is a Math and Science teacher at Valley Oak High School with 25 years experience in teaching at a continuation high school. Julie Also teaches at Napa valley Adult School in the High School Diploma Program. She is passionate about the environment, loves gardening, and learning. Archives
June 2019
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