Explain the neuroscience

One way to help your students to develop a growth mindset is to explain that the brain can get stronger and smarter. Research shows that students actually do better in school when they learn this. For example, you can explain that the cells of the brain called neurons are each connected to thousands of other neurons. The strength, number, and location of those neurons affect how the brain works.

Amazingly, these connections change all the time as a result of our experiences. Certain experiences cause new connections to form or strengthen, making the brains smarter by literally rewiring it. Here are two examples of the brain changing in action:

Professor Jo Boaler, Mathematics Education Expert, Stanford University: All London drivers have to learn 320 routes to help them remember and learn the 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and places of interest within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross in London. It's extremely complex, and they have to pass a test, which is called The Knowledge. All black cab drivers have to have passed The Knowledge. It takes between two and four years to pass the all London Knowledge. Once you're licensed, you can work anything in the greater London area.

Here's a photo of London streets. As you can see, there's no grid structure in London. So what the researchers found is that the taxi drivers go through a training period, and by the end of their training period, their hippocampus had grown.

When they retire from being a black cab driver later in life, their hippocampus shrinks back down again. They also found, they compared the brains of London taxi drivers to London bus drivers, and the London bus drivers don't have to learn such a complex set of routes and found that the hippocampus of the taxi drivers was bigger than the bus drivers. So the region of the hippocampus that had grown is specialized in acquiring and using complex spatial information in order to navigate efficiently.

So a second example of brain growth was a nine-year-old girl who had half of her brain removed. She was having fits, and they literally took out one hemisphere. First, her left side, her whole left side was paralyzed, but she amazed doctors. Within weeks, she'd grown connections back and eventually in a very short time developed all of her connections back. That was because of the incredible and fast growth of her brain.

So we now know that all students, maybe except those with a very specific learning disability, but all other students can achieve at the highest levels in maths, in all levels of school, K right up to the end of high school. And other countries that believe this about students do a lot better than we do in the US or in the UK. So countries such as Japan.

So here's the irony. Children can develop half a brain or change their brain significantly. Yet we think kids can't develop the few neurons they need to learn algebra. Many people think that some kids are capable or smart or high ability, whatever you want to call it and some are not.

Now we all know students coming into math classes with some of them finding work easier, some finding it really challenging, but that doesn't reflect their potential for future work. What it tells you is that students have been having different experiences since childhood, and some of those experiences have been calling synapses to fire and some haven't.