1. Listening to Your Mindset Voice and Mistakes
Core Mathematics Partnership
Building Mathematical Knowledge and
High-Leverage Instruction for Student Success
Thursday, March 26, 2015
4:30 – 7:30

2. Learning Intentions... We are learning to:
Recognize the 4 steps needed to change mindsets.
How mistakes are important for learning and growing the brains of our students (and ourselves).
Strategies for dealing with the mistakes made by students that support growth mindsets.

3. Four Steps to Changing
Your Mindset

4. Praise/Feedback vs Talkback Messages
How we talk to our students? -- Goal: For teachers to give more growth mindset messages How we want our students to talk back to themselves? -- Goal: For students to confront their own fixed mindsets.

5. Steps to Changing Your Mindset
Step 1: Learn to hear your fixed mindset voice.
Step 2: Recognize that you have a choice.
Step 3: Talk back to it with a growth mindset voice.
Step 4: Take the growth mindset action.
Handout ready

6. Step 1: Learn to Hear Your Fixed Mindset Voice
Approaching
Challenges
Are you sure you can do it? What if you fail?
If you don’t try, you won’t embarrass yourself
Encountering
Setbacks
This would have been easy if you had talent.
I told you it was a risk – now you’ve shown everyone you can’t do it
Receiving
Criticism
It’s not my fault. It’s someone else’s fault.
Who do they think they are criticizing me?

7. Step 2: Recognize that you have a choice
You can choose how you interpret challenges, setbacks, and criticism.
Choose to listen to the fixed mindset and…

8. Step 3: Talk back to it with a growth mindset voice
Fixed Mindset
Growth Mindset
Approaching
Challenges
Are you sure you can do it? What if you fail?
If you don’t try, you won’t embarrass yourself
Most successful people had failures along the way
If I don’t try, I automatically fail.
Encountering
Setbacks
This would have been easy if you had talent.
I told you it was a risk – now you’ve shown everyone you can’t do it
That’s so wrong! Many people who have succeeded took risks and followed their passions, and had setbacks, but they learned from them.
Receiving
Criticism
It’s not my fault. It’s someone else’s fault.
Who do they think they are criticizing me?
If I don’t take responsibility, I can’t fix it.
They are trying to help me. I need to use their feedback.

9. Step 4: Take the Growth Mindset Action
Take on the challenge wholeheartedly.
Learn from your setbacks and try again.
Hear the criticism and act on it.
Eureka Math, Grade 6, Division of fractions using a partitive approach and showing it with tape diagrams (bar models).
Recent obsession.
Challenge for me!!!
(1) I don’t get this? It’s not how I think about it.
(2) Choice—blow it off, not important, I just don’t have the mind to understand this, I just don’t get it so I give up..... or I can do something about it....
(3) Confront: Yes, I can figure this out... not just going to magically happen, it is a skill, it is hard, and I have to work at it.
(4) Strategies—read, review example problems, Google it, watch eureka math videos, revisit Liping Ma, reframe it for myself, Practice, Periodic review.
“I just modeled the steps for you...I did a “think aloud” as you need to do for students.”

10. Teach a Growth Mindset
Explicitly teaching students about a growth mindset promotes their development of one.
(Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007)
Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78(1),

11. Famous Failures “If you have never failed, you have never lived.”
“I've always believed that if you put in the work, the results will come. I don't do things half-heartedly. Because I know if I do, then I can expect half-hearted results.”
- Michael Jordan

12. Teaching Suggestion: Reinforce the idea of a growth mindset with students by providing examples of people with a growth mindset who are famous.
Science – Einstein, Edison
Math – Jaime Escalante
English – Walt Disney, JK Rowling
Theater – Lucille Ball
Music – Beatles
Sports – Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods
Social Studies – Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant

13. Model a Growth Mindset for Your Students
Talk aloud about challenges and setbacks you’ve faced and feedback or criticism you’ve received.
Demonstrate hearing the fixed mindset voice and talking back to it.
Ask students for feedback when you’re working with them and then demonstrate how you use that feedback to change your practice.

14. “Talk-Back” Bubbles: What can I say to myself?
I’m not good at this.
I give up.
I’m awesome at this.
This is too hard.
I can’t do this any better.
I just can’t do math.
I made a mistake.
She’s so smart. I will never be that smart.
It’s good enough.
I’m so smart.
That was easy.
Each group will be given 5 paper talk bubbles Each group gets color bubbles. They craft “talk-back” bubbles for these fixed mindset messages.
*What can I say to myself?
*What can students say to themselves?

17. Setbacks, Mistakes and Failure
Your Mindset

19. We don’t always allow students the “opportunity” to fix their mistakes - do over or just move on.

20. Mistakes Are Welcome Here!
Sometimes we think about mistakes and failure as something to be avoided (and hidden). Increasingly though, successful people have come out to say that they use failures and mistakes as feedback, inspiration, and important life lessons that help them meet their goals.
Mindset Works Newsletter, Issue #31, January 2015

22. What happens to the brain when you make mistakes?
Boaler, Ability article: p. 149
Boaler, Hope article: p. 2-3
Takeaway...
Repositioning the role of mistakes in the mathematics classroom.
Option: Dweck book, p , constructive criticism

24. My Favorite No!
Watch the video.
2:46 stop after she shows her favorite no.
Leah Alcala Video (5:45)

25. Turn and Talk in your groups...

26. What defines success in math?
“Students can feel success if they can understand that the struggle is an expected, essential part of learning” (Carter, 2008, p. 135).
Carter: Read p. 136, last paragraph
PtA: Read p. 49, Redefine success (para & table)

27. “Student must rethink what it means to be a successful learner of mathematics, and teachers must rethink what it means to be an effective teacher of mathematics.” Principles to Actions (NCTM, 2014, p. 49)

29. What are some ways you deal with student mistakes in your classroom?
What are some new ideas you are going to try with your students?
Whole group, perhaps...

30. Mistakes are not all created equal
by Eduardo Briceno
Mindset Works Newsletter, Issue #31, January 2015
Read more about the kinds of “mistakes.”

31. Learning Intentions... We are learning to:
Recognize the 4 steps needed to change mindsets.
How mistakes are important for learning and growing the brains of our students (and ourselves).
Strategies for dealing with the mistakes made by students that support growth mindsets.

32. Disclaimer Core Mathematics Partnership Project
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
This material was developed for the Core Mathematics Partnership project through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Center for Mathematics and Science Education Research (CMSER). This material may be used by schools to support learning of teachers and staff provided appropriate attribution and acknowledgement of its source. Other use of this work without prior written permission is prohibited—including reproduction, modification, distribution, or re-publication and use by non-profit organizations and commercial vendors.
This project was supported through a grant from the Wisconsin ESEA Title II, Part B, Mathematics and Science Partnerships.