Dinner with Authors

Last week, I had the opportunity to have dinner with and hear talks from both Carol Dweck and Zal Usiskin.  Carol is the author of Mindset which I have found very relevant to how I teach.  I worked with Zal on the third edition of UCSMP Precalculus and Discrete Mathematics and he is also one of the authors on another book I have enjoyed, Mathematics for High School Teachers: Advanced Perspective.

Carol Dweck had been invited to speak at ETHS, and the speaking engagement last Friday and the dinner on Thursday were sponsored by the Family Action Network.  The "Jeffersonian Dinner" was attended by a couple dozen people with connections to FAN; I was invited by my principal.  We started the dinner conversation, in which everyone participated, around the topic of balancing achievement with ethics, but the direction quickly changed to developing the mindset that intelligence is malleable, and people can get smarter.  (The change was not surprising, given Carol's presence at the table; not that she changed the conversation, but the rest of us really wanted to hear from her on the topic.)  Given the number of educators at the table, we talked at length about how to help students develop grit, to persist in the face of failure, believing that setbacks are common and helpful to the learning process.  We also discussed how most school systems are not designed with this mindset and also how as a society we try to avoid failure.  I wondered, as did others by the end of dinner, to what extent do each of us truly embrace the mindset of malleable intelligence.  Two dozen well-educated people around the table had spent a couple of hours talking about the importance of the mindset, but acknowledged how hard it is to maintain when faced with our own children's, our own students', or even our own failures and difficulties.  It becomes very easy to blame a failure on someone else (because then we don't have to acknowledge the learning we should be taking from it) or to decide that we must not have an aptitude for the thing we failed at (so we shouldn't really bother trying again and be faced with another opportunity for failure).  The danger for me, as a math teacher, is two-fold.  First, if I don't continuously provide my students with the message that their math ability can be grown, and provide the classroom structures and learning opportunities to demonstrate this, then a significant number of my students will face more limited opportunities moving forward.  The second danger is more personal: if I don't truly believe that I can continue learning and that I can get better at teaching, then I face a fairly unhappy and stagnant rest of my career.

In her talk the next day at ETHS, Carol presented some additional research about the power of a malleable mindset.  Studies have demonstrated that if students can be convinced that they can continue learning despite setbacks and failure, then they do.  And not just small children; some of the research Carol presented involved high school and university students as well.  When the efforts and work of students are honored, and they are not just praised for being smart, they are more willing to expend additional effort to continue working in a field even if they have experienced failure.  This is particularly significant for women and Black or Latino/a students.

Completely unrelated to Carol Dweck's talk, I also attended the May meeting of the Metropolitan Mathematics Club of Chicago, which included dinner and a talk by Zal Usiskin.  The MMC is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, and Zal spoke about the history of the organization (which he has been a part of for many years).  The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics actually originated in the MMC, and when the national organization started granting affiliate status to local organizations, MMC was granted Affiliate Charter Number 1.  Zal pointed out that the tension between "traditional" and "progressive" mathematics education existed 100 years ago, which was one of the reasons the MMC was founded.  That tension still exists today, currently embodied in the fight over the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, and the MMC still has (and will continue to have) the role of providing an opportunity for discussion and collaboration around this tension.

The conversations and talks with Carol and Zal both have given me lots to think about.  I'll post some of my thoughts here as I continue to wrestle with them.