Promoting Growth Mindset in the Mathematics Classroom

Teachers often encounter students with a fixed mindset who believe they cannot learn mathematics. Part of the reason many students believe they cannot learn mathematics is that many students do not experience mathematics as uncertainty, explorations, conjectures, interpretations, and patterns. As educators in the mathematics classroom, our practices can foster a growth mindset and change our students’ conceptions of mathematics. We can help them to respect and value their mistakes by creating a culture where “Mistakes are expected, respected, inspected, and corrected” (Boaler 2016, para. 6). For students to make mistakes, we must provide them with challenging work where they can experience productive struggle, which will inherently provide teachers with the opportunity to praise students’ effort and not their ability. Additionally, it will lessen their discomfort with failure. We must not use tricks to guide our lessons and focus on conceptual understanding. When we use productive struggle in our classrooms, we provide the students with an opportunity to build on or amend their prior knowledge and thus, create new knowledge that they can use in future mathematics classes.