Teaching Mathematics

"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes." - John Dewey In the commercial above, a widely known successful basketball player admits his success is due to failures. This is a powerful statement to embrace failure and encourage a growth mindset. Encouraging mistakes in the classroom might possibly be the best teaching strategy a teacher can implement.  Research shows that mistakes make our brain grow, whereas when we get an answer correct, there are no changes to the brain.  Making mistakes allows for learning opportunities and opportunities for reflection. Therefore, if Michael Jordan had never failed, he would have never learned how to improve and he may never have come to be known as the greatest basketball player ever. Celebrating mistakes and failures will encourage students to shift their thinking of mistakes from a negative to a positive learning experience. In my recent placem...

Image Retrieved September 15th, 2017 from http://bit.ly/2xrdv41 "Mind over Matter." How many times have we all heard this phrase over the course of our lives? And how many times have we been given this advice and answer it with an over dramatic eye roll? But we can no longer answer this advice with an eye roll because research supporting this phrase is plentiful! The power of our brains is truly incredible and coming to the realization that we have the power to do anything we want to is even more powerful (Or atleast, almost anything). Research shows that having a positive mindset can actually increase our chances of achieving what we want, but we already knew this right? I certainly did. However, even knowing this, I still never lived my life with this fully in mind. As educators I think it is imperative that we open our students eyes to the power of their own mindset because developing a growth mindset can help our students succeed in anything the...

I'm not a math person. That doesn't mean that I can't be good at math, it just means that I don't enjoy math the same way I enjoy written languages, or music, or art. To simply accept, however, that there is some kind of uncontrollable reason that prevents someone from being good at math (or anything, for that matter) is an idea that has been ingrained into our society. Math seems to be the biggest victim.  In order to break this cycle, we as educators need to know two things: 1.  Everyone can do math and everyone can be good at it. 2.  Not everyone likes math, it is our job as educators to motivate students and change their mind about math.   We've been programmed to believe that if we aren't good at math, it's because we aren't supposed to be good at math. We were born with some kind of different wiring. As educators we need to realize that this is not the case.  That all students can do math and all students can do well in math....