Jo Boaler - The Elephant in the Classroom

For Colin Haysman

This book is the result of an incredible mathematical journey and the important relationships with colleagues, friends, teachers, and students that I enjoyed along the way. The journey started at Kings College, London University, it continued at Stanford University in the USA, where I spent nearly ten years, and now continues at the University of Sussex. In all of these places I have learned from amazing students and teachers and these teachers and students are represented in the pages of this book.

This book was conceived during a year at a very special place, devoted to the generation of ideas: The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in California, where I was on sabbatical. I had given a presentation to the other fellows, a group of scholars who worked in different areas of social science research, on the results of my studies of mathematics learning. As the group heard about the effects of different forms of maths teaching, they responded strongly, with expressions of shock and dismay, and they urged me to get my results out to the general public. They encouraged me to write a book for the general public and many people in particular Susan Shirk, Sam Popkin and David Clark supported me along the way.

From that point I was greatly encouraged by my agent Jill Marsal, from the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, and by Kathryn Court, my editor at Penguin USA who published the US version of this book. I wrote much of this book in the stimulating environment of Stanfords education school, surrounded by a group of graduate students who served as critics and supporters. I would personally like to thank all of my students, past and present, who contributed to the mathematics education group at Stanford. They are: Nikki Cleare, Jennifer DiBrienza, Jack Dieckmann, Nick Fiori, Melissa Gresalfi, Vicki Hand, Tesha Sengupta-Irving, Emily Shahan, Megan Staples, Megan Taylor, and Tobin White. Nick Fiori was my right hand person throughout the book, helping me with research, data collection, writing, mathematical thinking and editing. Nick is an exciting person to work with, he has a deep appreciation of the elegance and beauty in mathematics, and I was fortunate to work closely with Nick on this book.

This edition of the book was made possible by the vision of an incredible man Ernest Hecht, who read my US book and has worked to bring the research and ideas to a broader audience. I have really appreciated Ernests careful attention to all of the details in the book and the ways in which they may be communicated most effectively. It has been a pleasure to work with all of the team at Souvenir Press.

I have learned a great deal from some truly inspirational mathematics teachers in recent years among them Cathy Humphreys, Carlos Cabanas, Estelle Woodbury, and Ruth Parker. They change students lives on a daily basis, and I am fortunate to have been able to work with them and learn from them. I am also deeply grateful to the students of Railside, Greendale, Hilltop, Amber Hill and Phoenix Park schools, they all gave me their honest and insightful feedback on their mathematics teaching experiences and they have paved the way for a much better mathematical future for thousands of students. They are the reason that I wrote this book.

I have learned from some great teachers in my life including Professors Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, both of whom encouraged me greatly at an early point in my academic career and kindly read chapters of this book for me. Leone Burton, one of my strongest supporters, died recently; she will be greatly missed, by me and many others in mathematics education who appreciated her sharp, no-nonsense approach and her support of women. I am also indebted to many of my colleagues at Stanford University, in particular Professors Jim Greeno, Pam Grossman, Aki Murata, Rich Shavelson, and Deborah Stipek, for their unwavering support and collegiality.

Colin is always my rock he looks after me, feeds me, puts up with me, and inspires me. He has great ideas about education and I trust his judgement more than anyone. This book is dedicated to Colin, as well as the smaller members of our team Jaime and Ariane.

Understanding the Urgency

And why do we all need it?

Identifying the problems

Effective classroom approaches

Moving to more effective forms of assessment

How different forms of grouping can make or break children

How girls and women are kept out of maths and science

Key strategies and ways of working

Activities and advice

F ar too many students hate maths. As a result adults all over the world fear maths and avoid it at all costs. Mathematics plays a unique role in the learning of most children it is the subject that can make them feel both helpless and stupid. Maths, more than any other subject, has the power to crush childrens confidence, and to deter them from learning important methods and tools for many years to come. But things could be completely different and maths could be a source of great pleasure and confidence for people. There is a huge gap between what we know works for children and what happens in most classrooms. We have the knowledge of good teaching methods, for schools and the home, but this essential knowledge is usually shared between experts in universities and communicated in scientific research journals. It is time that this important knowledge is communicated to a broader public to parents who want to help their children and to teachers and other educators. This book will provide that knowledge, through real-life stories of children learning maths well, and details of the real maths that children should be learning. If you have the knowledge of good teaching methods and important maths learning principles, you can be very powerful in helping children, or yourself, to have a much brighter mathematical future.

There is an elephant in the room is an expression that refers to an idea that is very important but not talked about. I have called this book The elephant in the classroom because there is often a very large elephant standing in the corner of maths classrooms. The elephant, or the common idea that is extremely harmful to children, is the belief that success in maths is a sign of general intelligence and that some people can do maths and some people cant. Even maths teachers (the not so good ones) often think that their job is to sort out those who can do maths, from those who cant. This idea is completely wrong and this is why. In many maths classrooms a very narrow subject is taught to children, that is nothing like the maths of the world or the maths that mathematicians use. This narrow subject involves copying methods that teachers demonstrate and reproducing them accurately, over and over again. Of course very few people are good at working in such a narrow way, and usually everyone knows which people are good at it and which people are not. But this narrow subject is not mathematics, it is a strange mutated version of the subject that is taught in schools. When the real mathematics is taught instead the whole subject that involves problem solving, creating ideas and representations, exploring puzzles, discussing methods and many different ways of working, then many more people are successful. This is the classic win-win situation teaching real mathematics, means teaching the authentic version of the subject and giving children a taste of high level mathematical work, it also means that many more children will be successful in school and in life. Although this seems to make perfect sense, (why wouldnt anyone want to rid schools of fake maths and bring in the real maths that children enjoy?) changing maths teaching in schools has proved to be very difficult and many children are still subjected to an out-dated and narrow form of teaching.