Mathematical Mindsets Book Club

For the second year in a row, I had intended to participate in the MTBoS blog challenge, and for the second year in a row, I managed to post exactly zero times in January.  So… it’s February 1st and I am going to re-commit to reflecting on and cataloging some (hopefully) interesting math-related happenings.  January has been a busy month for workshops and classroom visits, so I have lots on my mind to write about… now to set aside the time to get it on the screen which seems to be the more complicated thing for me.

Yesterday was the start of our new Math book club (we hosted Making Number Talks Matter in the fall).  This time around, we are reading Mathematical Mindsets by Jo Boaler and our district’s entire Math Enhancement Team (our full-time Numeracy teacher and 5 of us part-time Math Liaisons) is participating, so we opened the book club up to teachers from Grades 3-10.  We have 21 teachers signed up and we will meet monthly until the end of April.  We have adjusted things slightly based on the feedback we received from our Number Talks follow-up survey and to better accommodate our secondary teachers.

This book is quite different in focus from the Number Talks book, so I have been really pondering what our sessions should look like.  We have only set aside an hour for the meetings, and I really want to make the most of that time, and also to make sure that teachers find the meetings valuable and worthwhile.  The Number Talks book was very practical and hands-on, and we had lots to talk about as teachers began implementing Number Talks in their classrooms.  This book is a little more theoretical and part of our goal is to shift the mindsets of our teachers as well as impact the way that they are approaching their math instruction.

I decided that we should start with a math task (given that this is a math book club and we are all math teachers).  I am a frequent reader of Dan Meyer’s blog and have been very interested in his posts on recreational math and becoming a better math teacher through DOING more math.  I think we (especially as elementary generalist teachers) don’t DO enough math just for fun, and it is hard to get kids excited about doing math if we don’t ourselves believe that doing math is fun.  (After all, how much buy-in would we get if we tried to get kids excited about reading and then admitted that we NEVER read ourselves… there are so many interesting double-standards around literacy and numeracy instruction).

Anyways – we started with these Zukei geometry puzzles that I have been itching to try since I saw them on Twitter in the fall.  I wanted to make sure that I chose a task that would be accessible and relevant for my elementary teachers, but also interesting for our secondary teachers and I think these puzzles did the trick nicely.  We had a nice hush over the room and some interested chatter – I was definitely hooked – they are challenging in a nice way and sparked some interesting table conversation about precise definitions for geometric shapes.  I realize that it has been a long time since I have thought about the exact definition for a rhombus…

After taking about 10 minutes for people to get settled and work on the puzzles, we dove into discussions.  This book has so many interesting and thought-provoking ideas, it was really hard to narrow down the discussion questions.  I was aiming for 5 and I ended up with 8.  Some of these questions are adapted from the Mathematical Mindsets #mathbookchat that was happening on Twitter in the fall, and others are just things that really resonated with me as I read through the Chapters. I had intended to leave some time at the end for a whole-group debrief, but the discussions were going well at all the tables and I am a terrible timekeeper (definitely one of my biggest weaknesses as a teacher and a facilitator), so we ran out of time.  My table had a really great mix of expertise – Grade 4, 5, 7 and 8 teachers – and our discussion was so engaging and thoughtful.  It was a really fun experience.

At the end of the meeting, teachers left with two resources that we had printed off from the YouCubed website: Classroom Norms and the Building a Mathematical Mindset Community card.  For “homework” we asked participants to read Chapters 4 and 5 and to try some kind of activity in their classroom on growth mindset or mistakes or brain science and math learning or…

A few of my take-aways from this week:

• I am really loving the book study structure for offering professional learning – I love that I get to be a learner/facilitator right alongside our participating teachers and I love that I can offer resources to teachers who participate in these groups.
• I am continually grateful that I have the opportunity to work with individuals and groups of teachers.  Teachers are such creative, thoughtful and passionate people, and it is exciting to be with a group of people who are excited about improving their practice.
• My office is a mess – I really need to figure out a system for organizing and re-using leftover handouts and activities from workshops…

I am really looking forward to diving into task creation across the grades with our teachers in late February!  Are there any other math/instructional coaches out there who lead book studies with their teachers?