Jo Boaler - Mindset Mathematics: Visualizing and Investigating Big Ideas

Copyright 2019 by Jo Boaler, Jen Munson, and Cathy Williams. All rights reserved.

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Mindset Mathematics, Grade 6, copyright 2019 by Jo Boaler, Jen Munson, Cathy Williams. Reproduced by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: Boaler, Jo, 1964 author. | Munson, Jen, 1977 author. | Williams,Cathy, 1962 author.
Title: Mindset mathematics : visualizing and investigating big ideas, grade 6 / Jo Boaler, Jen Munson, Cathy Williams.
Description: First edition. | San Francisco : JosseyBass, [2019] | Includesindex.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018040498 (print) | LCCN 2018049961 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119358770 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119358671 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119358831 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Games in mathematics education. | MathematicsStudy and teaching (Elementary)Activity programs. | Sixth grade (Education)
Classification: LCC QA20.G35 (ebook) | LCC QA20.G35 B6296 2019 (print) | DDC 372.7/044dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040498

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Cover image: Marish/ShutterstockEye; Kritchanut/iStockphotoBackground

FIRST EDITION

To all those teachers pursuing a mathematical mindset journey with us.

I still remember the moment when Youcubed, the Stanford center I direct, was conceived. I was at the Denver NCSM and NCTM conferences in 2013, and I had arranged to meet Cathy Williams, the director of mathematics for Vista Unified School District. Cathy and I had been working together for the past year improving mathematics teaching in her district. We had witnessed amazing changes taking place, and a filmmaker had documented some of the work. I had recently released my online teacher course, called How to Learn Math, and been overwhelmed by requests from tens of thousands of teachers to provide them with more of the same ideas. Cathy and I decided to create a website and use it to continue sharing the ideas we had used in her district and that I had shared in my online class. Soon after we started sharing ideas on the Youcubed website, we were invited to become a Stanford University center, and Cathy became the codirector of the center with me.

In the months that followed, with the help of one of my undergraduates, Montse Cordero, our first version of youcubed.org was launched. By January 2015, we had managed to raise some money and hire engineers, and we launched a revised version of the site that is close to the site you may know today. We were very excited that in the first month of that relaunch, we had five thousand visits to the site. At the time of writing this, we are now getting three million visits to the site each month. Teachers are excited to learn about the new research and to take the tools, videos, and activities that translate research ideas into practice and use them in their teaching.

One of the most popular articles on our website is called Fluency without Fear. I wrote this with Cathy when I heard from many teachers that they were being made to use timed tests in the elementary grades. At the same time, new brain science was emerging showing that when people feel stressedas students do when facing a timed testpart of their brain, the working memory, is restricted. The working memory is exactly the area of the brain that comes into play when students need to calculate with math facts, and this is the exact area that is impeded when students are stressed. We have evidence now that suggests strongly that timed math tests in the early grades are responsible for the early onset of math anxiety for many students. I teach an undergraduate class at Stanford, and many of the undergraduates are math traumatized. When I ask them what happened to cause this, almost all of them will recall, with startling clarity, the time in elementary school when they were given timed tests. We are really pleased that Fluency without Fear has now been used across the United States to pull timed tests out of school districts. It has been downloaded many thousands of times and used in state and national hearings.