This week on the More Math for More People podcast:
To find out more about the the Black Feminist Mathematics Pedagogy framework, check out Marlena Eanes - Episode 3.20 !
The More Math for More People Podcast is produced by CPM Educational Program.
Learn more at CPM.org
Twitter: @cpmmath
Facebook: CPMEducationalProgram
Email: cpmpodcast@cpm.org
This week on the More Math for More People podcast:
To find out more about the the Black Feminist Mathematics Pedagogy framework, check out Marlena Eanes - Episode 3.20 !
The More Math for More People Podcast is produced by CPM Educational Program.
Learn more at CPM.org
Twitter: @cpmmath
Facebook: CPMEducationalProgram
Email: cpmpodcast@cpm.org
Hello, hello everyone. It is April 2nd 2024. And this is episode 24 of season three of the More Math for More People podcast. Cheers, hello there, I'm Joel and I'm Misty.
Speaker 2:And you're listening to the More Math for More People podcast, an outreach of CPM educational program.
Speaker 1:We have a lot of conversations about math and math education on this podcast. We're passionate about continually improving the way math is taught and we hope that you learn something in every episode that helps you become better at what you do.
Speaker 2:And we hope that you have some fun and laugh as well. That always makes things a little more interesting.
Speaker 1:Yep, we're pretty passionate about having fun Joel.
Speaker 2:So please have a listen and we think it'll be well worth it. Boom.
Speaker 1:Okay so here's our segment about the National Day of I love it. So what day is it today? I do like this.
Speaker 2:Well, april 2nd is April 2nd, national Peanut, butter and Jelly Day.
Speaker 1:Wow, national Peanut Butter and Jelly Day. Yeah, okay, what kind of jelly do you like, joel?
Speaker 2:That's an interesting question, because I'd say I've been dabbling more in kind of unusual jellies lately, like maybe a jalapeno jelly. Unusual jellies or maybe like a blackberry and pepper or things like that. And I would say that in my friend group there is definitely kind of not kind of they're jelly competitions and people pride themselves on having the best jelly.
Speaker 1:Like do they invite people over to the house, come in and have some of my jelly? Do they do it on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or is this like on toast? No, this is yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it's more like, you need a vehicle to deliver the jelly. So it's not like a spoonful of jelly, but definitely not a peanut butter and jelly situation. Although you like the jelly, you could definitely put on a peanut butter and jelly situation. You understand? I'm actually.
Speaker 1:It sounds more like gourmet jellies to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those feel a little bit more gourmet to me. To me they just feel homecrafted. I guess Maybe that's gourmet. I also really like the jellies that are in, like if you diner, and those little packets of jellies on the table.
Speaker 1:Do you like the plastic ones?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like the little plastic peel off the foil.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you peel off the top, oh man.
Speaker 1:I like it when you go to a place and they have the little tiny jelly jars which is like way more jelly than a person, well than I as a person need for any amount of bread product I might eat, but they're just so cute.
Speaker 2:It is yeah.
Speaker 1:They're very cute. I like them because they're petite, so cute it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're very cute. I like them because they're petite and cute.
Speaker 1:But they usually have their certain. I feel like they're always a certain brand and they have like raspberry.
Speaker 2:My favorite diner, jelly, is grape. Do you have a favorite jelly?
Speaker 1:Not grape, okay, it's just grape. Jelly is odd to me. I'm like grapes don't taste like that and they're not that purple, so I never understood. I don't understand grape jelly. I would say my favorite jelly is probably some kind of a or a. Jelly I might eat would be probably some kind of like a raspberry or something like that. I think a strawberry is okay, but sometimes the strawberries are weird. They're too sugary. I'm not really fond of like super, super sweet jelly.
Speaker 1:I don't eat commercial jelly for lots of reasons, so sometimes like if they're just like real fruit, the strawberries are just blah and not flavorful, but I do like apple butter.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say do you think that counts as a jelly? Because I use apple butter quite a bit actually.
Speaker 1:Man. I don't know, Maybe now, since it's called apple butter.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's technically a jelly.
Speaker 1:I'm like oh no, and I did not like this when I was a child, but I actually really like marmalade. So if. I were at a diner and I was going to have some of the little packaged jellies. I would really want the marmalade now. I think if there's just like that, it's sweet, but it also has that like tart.
Speaker 2:What about, like an apricot, the bitter of?
Speaker 1:the skins.
Speaker 2:Is that similar?
Speaker 1:Apricot jelly, I don't even know Apricot marmalade or just apricot jam Like a jelly I'm not sure I've ever had. Well, also there's like do you like jelly or do you like jam? Right, it tells you differences too, and then we can go into the whole, like crunchy peanut butter or smooth peanut butter, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:Well, because it's not just jelly day, it's peanut butter and jelly day I know, that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:We got to give peanut butter its due here.
Speaker 2:That's right. I like the crunchy.
Speaker 1:I'm a crunchy too, yeah, and I actually prefer the ones that have something in them that keeps them. So they don't separate the separating the oil and I like natural peanut butters. I don't like sugar in my peanut butter, mostly natural peanut butter, but they have to have like and I get you have to put a something in it to make it do that, because otherwise they just naturally separate. But then the bottom's always like super hard and not it's hard to stir it. The oil gets everywhere, it's just it's chaos.
Speaker 2:It is chaos when you have to do that Small scale chaos. One tip that they suggest here on peanut butter and jelly day to avoid a soggy sandwich, it's recommended that you spread the peanut butter on both sides of the bread before you put the jelly on to prevent the sandwich from getting soggy. So that would be a tip for our listeners.
Speaker 1:I see how many knives do you use to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
Speaker 2:I use. That's a very good question. You know, I guess it depends on the day. I've used two. I've also used it where I'm pretty good at kind of squeezing the bread on a knife to squeegee off remnants. If I do that, I would probably do the jelly first. I think that's easier to get off a knife than the peanut butter. Also, I've done it with a knife and a spoon.
Speaker 1:A knife and a spoon. A spoon the jelly on. Yeah, I'm a one-knife person. You don't need two knives to make a jelly sandwich, but I get that. Not everybody agrees.
Speaker 2:You don't want the peanut butter and jelly to touch. Oh wait, that is the sandwich. Dang it. It is in the sandwich.
Speaker 1:They're touching in the sandwich anyway, and if you just put it in the sandwich, then you just do a little bit, you take a little bit more Anyway.
Speaker 2:I gotcha, I gotcha.
Speaker 1:Alright, happy Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Day. Please enjoy, please. Today's conversation is with two of our writers from the Curriculum and Assessment Department, mike Locas and Ernesto Bautista. We had a conversation with them about a growth mindset. Maybe you're familiar with a growth mindset.
Speaker 1:It's been out in the education world for a number of years now, starting with Carol Dweck, but we are going to talk about some of the things that make the idea of a growth mindset and really promoting the ideas of growth mindset in classrooms really helpful and promising and perhaps even really revolutionary for children and for adults, and also some of the problems that might prop up some of the little sticky areas or other things that might come out of thinking about a growth mindset and may give children and other people a different impression than we intend. So we're going to have a nice conversation with them about that and I hope you enjoy it. Okay, so we're here today with Mike Locas and Ernesto Bautista and they are writers from the curriculum and assessment team and we're going to talk about the problems and promise. I think that's the words we're using for a growth mindset. So welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Welcome. Thanks for joining, thanks for having us.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having us so just to the podcast Welcome.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining, thanks for having us, thanks for having us. So just to kick us off, I think the idea of a growth mindset has been out there for a little bit, but just kind of, are we kind of all on the same page when we're talking about a growth mindset? What are we really? What are we referring to in this case?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so, as you mentioned growth mindset, it's really been around for a long time, I think, carol Dwe. Yeah, so, as you mentioned growth mindset, it's really been around for a long time. I think carol dweck is probably most famously known for it. She really described the growth mindset as this belief that a person can develop their abilities through dedication and hard work. This is often countered with what people call a fixed mindset, which is the belief that intelligence and abilities are static, and so when we're talking about growth mindset, it gets a lot of attention and appreciation because it creates a. It is seen as creating a level of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. That's how Dwight brings that In math education. It's gotten a lot of attention as well through the work of Jo Buller mathematical mindsets in her book associated with that and so translating that work from psychological psychology into mathematics education. That's a growth mindset.
Speaker 1:So this idea has a lot of potential. I know when I first heard about it I mean personally I realized how much of a fixed mindset I had about a lot of my own skills or deficits et cetera. And then applying that and thinking about it and trying to shift my own ideas around, it felt like this really great thing to do. And if we could have kids do it. So what are some of the promises of that idea? Why is this a good idea? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 5:CPM educational program writ large, and the writers in particular have been thinking about growth mindset for a long time and, like you, shared right, like so many benefits associated with it, myself included.
Speaker 5:I worked at a school where we really talked, where I kind of like joined this conversation.
Speaker 5:So Marlena Ains, who's on the podcast pretty recently, and then Laura Jason, the head of research at CPM the three of us are doing an equity audit using Dr Nicole Joseph's Black Feminist Mathematics Pedagogies framework and, given my experience with it and the ways that I see it play out in my classroom and really the promise and the ways that it was influential for my students, when I was coding a lesson from Inspiring Connections and I saw it talk to my growth mindset, I was like, oh great, awesome, I'm so glad to see this is included. And Marlena actually started to raise some concerns and started to question some of the ways that growth mindset was playing out in communities around the country. So we started to revisit this conversation and really kind of built on conversations that were already happening within the writing team and talking about what are the potential straits, what are the potential pitfalls. So Ernesto and I really joined this as the people who were tasked with, or tapped with, reviewing and revising our growth mindset materials.
Speaker 5:That's going to be used for inspiring connections and core connections.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like Mike said, the definition says it all right. Careful implementation I'm going to use those words meaningfully can create a love of learning and resilience. Who doesn't want that in their classroom? Who doesn't want a student to really love learning? I think even as an adult we want that. We can. Also, research has shown that educators can leverage growth mindset to raise students' academic achievement, to empower them like great things. Right, who doesn't want that?
Speaker 3:And then some other non-traditional ways that sometimes we don't think about is if we attempt to grow with mindset, we can also support students and teachers to reject gendered stereotypes of math as a space where only male students can succeed. If you anticipate student success, then we will continue to see an increasingly diverse demographic of mathematicians emerge, not just those who have historically been represented in mathematical spaces. And then, kind of in that same vein, it can also support racially marginalized students in confronting and persevering in the face of racial bias. So I never had thought about it in that perspective, in that light, but it does that. And it also can be used to nurture student social and emotional learning, because now they're being self-aware of where they're at. It really calls on to them to be more aware of where they're at in the process and just broadly, it also can help them support their social, emotional learning just more broadly.
Speaker 1:So can I just paraphrase to make sure I understand what you're saying. So what I'm hearing you say and I might be wrong on this is that if we think about a growth mindset and we think about it more I don't know if globally is the word, but more broadly and as a teacher, have a growth mindset around my students, as opposed to trying to instill a growth mindset in my students that then that can provide benefit for them as they grow in mathematics. Is that even close to what you're saying, or can you adjust it?
Speaker 3:No, yeah, absolutely I think, and we'll talk about it, I'm sure. But the way that we promote growth mindset is not just about instilling a growth mindset in students. Promote growth mindset. It's not just about instilling a growth mindset in students, but also making sure that teachers also take these practices on and make them their own, because having a growth mindset about your students can improve on their growth mindset abilities.
Speaker 1:So, yes, and I see that kind of as young people take on what they see projected onto themselves. Right, I take on a fixed mindset, for example, because I'm praised for doing well or doing this, and da, da da. It's not just something that's innate in me, it's something that I'm learning about myself, so to speak, because of how I feel I'm perceived by adults.
Speaker 3:And so kind of like to transition who is being praised Right and who are we having expectations about? And that's why I started the conversation with if we are careful about implementing these things, this is where we can go. So I don't know, mike, do you want to just?
Speaker 5:take that. So I'm hearing a little bit of difference too. Missy, maybe what you're bringing up is like we're talking about students developing a growth mindset and the belief that they can develop their mathematical abilities. We're talking about teachers maintaining a growth mindset and this belief that students can develop their mathematical abilities. We're talking about teachers maintaining a growth mindset and this belief that students can develop their mathematical abilities. And, ernesto, what I feel like is we're saying, like some of the pros is like there there is like this history of growth mindset being used, as you said, like in really careful ways, to reject gender stereotypes, to support teachers and rejecting those gender stereotypes, and then students subsequently also recognizing their mathematical competence and abilities.
Speaker 5:Some of the problems that we see, though and this is really coming again to the conversations with Marlena and Lara and writers is that there are still some problematic practices associated with growth mindset. So, for instance, we kind of distilled this into kind of three broader categories, so one being like student blaming. So if we think about growth mindset practices as implicitly messaging that students, particularly if we're thinking about students who experience marginalization and oppression, we're blaming them. If we are saying that they are individually responsible for mathematical success and self-repair, we're not yet attending to the systems and the structures in place that cause that. Similarly we might be perpetuating stereotypes. So if we're really getting to this like critical dimension for the teachers and structures in place that cause that, similarly we might be perpetuating stereotypes. So if we're really getting to this critical dimension for the teachers and we're thinking about teacher practices as what's supported for the implementation of the CPM curriculum, so, again, if carefully attended to, as Anastasia was saying, supporting a growth mindset can in fact reject gendered stereotypes.
Speaker 5:But often and still, promoting a growth mindset alone can actually perpetuate stereotypes, in particular racially marginalized learners, mainly by reinforcing this false assumption that racially marginalized learners have an inferior work ethic, instead of changing the thinking of oppression that have triggered students to have a fixed mindset about mathematics and education more broadly, kind of more broadly. And then the third area that we're thinking about. This is when we're engaging in, like growth mindset messaging, actually undermining students' self-perception, so supporting students' development of a growth mindset solely through praising effort, which is, I think, something that commonly gets attributed. It's like if you just praise effort, then you're doing growth mindset, you're encouraging growth mindset, but that can actually kind of backfire and be interpreted as teachers believing that students are, as teachers believing that students are unable to engage or find success with rigorous math content.
Speaker 1:Okay, I want to dig into those a little bit. So the first thing you were talking about when you were saying I think about like so as a teacher, if I am thinking about, so I'm just going to give an example, because this is what comes to my head group of students. For whatever reason, I need to really work on their growth mindset. I'm already sort of instilling this deficit mind idea that they don't have it right like that.
Speaker 1:There's this piece of oh I need to work on that with this. Students and I'm already putting them in a in a place of deficit is that kind of the idea like I like oh, these students are fine, these students, I'm partitioning already in my brain and I may be partitioning based on implicit biases.
Speaker 5:Right, and I think that's a lot of what we're saying here and we're talking about like, how does this play out in the curriculum? But a lot of it is. How are we prompting teachers to really reflect on those implicit biases in order to attend to them and to not sort of students based on these perpetuates, on these stereotypes or as things?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the amount of times that you hear the words, phrases like my low students and my high students having those perceptions of where students are at. Whether what you're doing is intentionally or not intentionally, you are having a fixed attitude about where these students are, so it causes those. It goes back to what you said about. Now I have the mindset that has been put on to me by the things that have happened to me to me, by the things that have happened to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's this interesting place for me of moving beyond, even just as a teacher, as an adult right, changing my own mindset about myself from more fixture growth to then it really almost embodying that to how I see others, embodying that to how I see others, so that that then that allows everyone to be able to not be in this fixed grouping or fixed idea in my own brain.
Speaker 2:As you're thinking about this too, and as I know, cpm is going through a new addition creating inspiring connections. How, how is this being addressed? How, how are we helping teachers work through these ideas?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so one thing I think that we mentioned is really including opportunities for prompting teachers to reflect on implicit biases. I think one of the things that's really been coming out of these conversations, really recently too, is that growth mindset isn't something that's happening in isolation, and if we're thinking about attending to growth mindset from like a teacher practice, it's situational, it's relational. So at CPM, we use growth mindset practices as just one way to further foster community and collaboration in math classes, again through teacher reflection, inviting students to sustain their community, cultural, linguistic assets in the math classroom, particularly as we like give them prompts where they're reflecting on their own personal learning goals, and then we also work to address. We outlined these three potential pitfalls that we're recognizing, and so, rather than requiring students to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, we're providing supports for teachers to acknowledge unproductive efforts and work with students to find new learning strategies right. So it's like we're a community, we're a classroom. We can work together To avoid perpetuating stereotypes.
Speaker 5:Teachers need to anticipate student success. That's become like a phrase that we keep coming back to. You're assuming that students are capable In addition to that. That in and of itself isn't enough right. You also need to restructure exclusionary aspects of your classroom culture so that students are supported in accomplishing their goals and, rather than undermining student self-perceptions, cloudfence can reinforce that. Students' unfinished ideas are wanted and can be revised, so things like rough draft thinking is embedded everywhere throughout CPM's resources.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and a lot of what CPM does provides a great foundation to providing their development of growth mindset right. The three pillars we can start with the three pillars right. Like problem-based learning we're providing students with opportunities to engage with complex, rigorous mathematics tasks that explore real-world problems. All of it's the students' communities. We're just providing that so that they can do that. Collaborative learning we're solving problems together, together being the keyword there. We're promoting collaboration.
Speaker 3:In the new edition and IC we've been advocates for visibly random teams. We're acknowledging students' mathematical competence. We're challenging those assumptions that there's a status of students by sorting students like so, my low students, my high students. We're going to visibly randomize those teams because they notice that kids do that. Collaborative learning pillar also fosters that sense of belonging. You belong in my math classroom. I expect you to succeed, or I'm anticipating that sense of belonging. You belong in my math classroom. I expect you to succeed, or I'm anticipating that you will succeed. And again, in both IC and the new version of CC, we're encouraging students to use their full linguistic repertoires when representing mathematical ideas, to reject that idea that in this language, in this way, complete sentences with a period and a noun and a verb, you can. As long as you tell me what your ideas are, it doesn't matter and then obviously make space practice. No more are we associating the speed with mathematical proficiencies. It all happens over time, so we start there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really I like what you're saying there. This is a new facet of thinking around an idea and it's not inconsistent with the things that we've been doing. It's highlighting and adding and bringing a different focus for teachers and for all of us around how we're implementing and thinking about these ideas. So, as we start to wrap up on our time, what have we not asked you that you think we need to say?
Speaker 3:I guess we haven't mentioned that we are calling attention to other ways in which teachers can support students to develop growth mindset. Yes, we have these supports, we have the three pillars, but then we are being intentional about highlighting three named practices in our teacher notes that will help a teacher and be more mindful about these things. Point them to it. We encourage teachers to facilitate what we're calling mindset interventions, making sure students have opportunities to reflect on their process of thinking and learning, have that metacognitive time to be like okay, where am I at? Being more self-aware.
Speaker 3:We also script in opportunities for teachers to highlight some ways in which taking risks and learning from mistakes contributes to student learning. Like Mike said, rough draft thinking, working at vertical, non-permanent surfaces, making their thinking visible highlights that. And then we promote that productive struggle in our materials, continuing to provide those rich tasks it's not going away and for them to collaborate on, and encouraging facilitation that neither over scaffolds nor under scaffolds, they're solving in their thinking. We don't want to take that thinking away from them. Those are the three things that we are calling out for teachers to be aware of. Mike, is there anything I forgot?
Speaker 5:No, I think you did a great job. I think maybe a takeaway for me is again this interconnected way in which we're trying to incorporate these practices. Ernesto talked about the three practices and then he also shared the three pillars, cpm, how these three practices really relate back to those. We're also thinking about the ways that growth mindset is really affiliated with cultural, responsive teaching. You know, like classroom practices, as you're supporting students have a growth mindset, you're critically reflecting on your own ways in which you're thinking about students and your own implicit biases. How are you attending to elevating diverse voices in your classroom? How are you leveraging students' cultural capital? How are you making sure that students' reflections are resources that inform your own teaching? How are you doing all of these things together and growth mindset is just one of these things that really undergirds it and throughout all the core connections and Aspiring Connections resources, we're going to bring additional attention to the ways that you can do that, or that teachers can do that in your classrooms.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Thank you so much, both of you, for coming on the podcast today and sharing this information with us and having this discussion with us. We really appreciate it, yeah thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:This week, due to the timing of spring breaks, we have one Join them on their Journey update, and that's from Graham.
Speaker 4:Hi Joel and Misty Graham here reporting just before spring break and it couldn't come fast enough. Students are getting squirrely and I am tired and ready for a long-needed rest. This week I've been thinking a lot about student engagement and ways to increase engagement, but also things that CPM has already built into it that increase student engagement. One thing that I've noticed is that the collaborative learning has become easier for students and I think it encourages students to engage with each other and it gives students a way to access the material through their peers and through discussing and sharing ideas. I also appreciate the different tasks that CPM has and the different ways of engaging students through those tasks and the study teams and teaching strategies that encourage students to share in different ways.
Speaker 4:I had a behavior specialist come and observe a few of my classes and I was surprised at the amount of engagement that she observed. She recorded 89% engagement in one class and 95% in another, and these are classes I usually think of as more challenging and there can be less engagement in those classes, so it was really good to see that I still had most students engaged most of the time, despite a few students checking out in one way or another. She gave me some good feedback for managing the class as a whole, but also for those reluctant learners that were not engaging. One suggestion was to emphasize just a few of the agreements at each class, which I thought was a great idea, especially as we were going to be practicing solving equations and I know students can struggle with that and we were having partners help each other, and so one of the agreements is that we will help anyone that asks, and so that was a great idea to just emphasize a few agreements at the beginning and explain what behaviors I would be looking for. I realized that I give a lot of academic praise but not necessarily behavioral praise, and that was a good distinction for me to see, because I think I can give more behavioral praise when students are exhibiting those behaviors that follow those agreements.
Speaker 4:I also use a phone break in my classes to encourage students to not use their phones during class. They have a certain amount of minutes for the phone break, and if I see phones during class time we lose minutes, and so another good idea was to allow students to earn minutes for those good behaviors. Good idea was to allow students to earn minutes for those good behaviors With the few students who were not engaging, the behavior specialist suggested a more individualized plan with those students and making small agreements, taking small steps for those students to help them see that engaging in class and working with their peers maybe isn't as intimidating as they might think it is. So I appreciate how CPM has a routine where class is launched, there's tasks, students discuss their ideas is launched, there's tasks, students discuss their ideas, but the tasks are also different enough and engaging in different ways to keep their interest as time moves on. Well, I'll be enjoying this next week off and I hope everybody else has a great week, so take care. Thanks for listening. Find our handles in the podcast description.
Speaker 1:The music for the podcast was created by Julius H and can be found on pixabaycom. Thanks, Julius. Join us in two weeks for the next episode of More Math for More People. What day will that be, Joel?
Speaker 2:It'll be April 16th, National Orchid Day. I love orchids. We have orchids here at the house, If any of you are familiar with our national teacher conference when it's in San Francisco. One year I was lucky enough I joined the San Francisco Orchid Society and it was amazing to go to that event and be a part of that. It always coincides with our national conference, so I can't wait to share stories about my experience there and about how orchids have affected my life since then. I can't wait to hear what Misty has in mind about orchids. So on April 16th, see you for National Orchid Day. Thank you.