Its all in our message and math madness!

Hello everyone,

Welcome back to my blog on math. Today were here to talk about a couple different things. I'd first like to keep going with the flow of how my last blog ended. I was talking about the growth mindset and how we need to help our students to achieve this. Well lets continue with this conversation and delve into the idea that messages convey some pretty deep meanings to our students.

As teachers we wonder why our students change their mindset as soon as we say these three words "you are smart." This is because by telling our students they are smart at something makes them not want to try as hard anymore. We can see that students start to say I will take the easier problem because they know they can do it easily and don't want to risk letting us down by doing something harder. This week we looked into this notion and noticed that the students who we said you did awesome trying vs you are so smart tried harder problems when asked which problem they would like to have next for an assignment.

In the word's of Dory we need to keep telling our students "just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming." This will not only encourage our students to keep trying new things but it will let the students know that we want them to succeed. By telling them to keep trying to move forward with their learning and keep trying new things we are helping to keep their minds active and in that growth mindset we want them to accomplish. We know that students will want to learn more if we tell them we see they are trying and that their success comes from their trying rather than them just being overall smart. Sometimes mistakes happen and that is okay because as long as they keep trying they will eventually succeed.

One neat way of helping students to get the practice they need without doing the same old thing is to set up work stations around the room. Looking through this article with week by Janet Andreasen and Jessica Hunt it was interesting to see the ways in which we can use centers in the classroom to get our kids much more engage. You can set up your stations or centers the way you would feel would fit the atmosphere of your classroom. The examples in the article were to have a Shop Station to help complete any unit projects, error analysis or written analysis of fictitious work. There was a Practice Plaza station that helps give multiple practice tools for students. You can give the students options with this and give them different worksheets or questions that advance them if they feel they can breeze through it the first time through. There was a Proof Place Station that gives students tools and models to solve, explain, and justify a presented mathematical equation. Finally there was a Teachers station. This is where the teacher can help the students. They can give either help to those who need the additional help or enhancement strategies to get them further in their learning rather than feeling they are doing the same things over and over again. These were just a few examples outlined in the article but again you could take this concept and make it your own.

What we truly need to remember is that our students are learning from us and advancing with us. We need to be careful in what we say and how we say it in order to make sure our students progress rather than digress. Our job is make them want to learn more and be better especially in areas such as a math in which some people don't see a point of it beyond the education system years. So keep encouraging and as Dory says "just keep swimming."

Thank you for reading, see you next time.