Embracing the Growth Mindset

My main goal this year has been to reflect on my teaching and make sure that my lessons and instruction was encouraging my students to think and problem solve.  About a week ago I began the proportions unit with my Accelerated class.  As I planned for this unit, I found a lot of great activities through the Math Assessment Project.  Looking through these lessons, and planning cause me to really think about what mindset I had been growing my my classroom.

The more I work on interactive lessons, problem solving and project based learning, the more I realize that for the past several years I had been teaching my students to be robots.  I was putting them in a box with 60 foot walls and only allowing them to think linearly. The had to show their work my specific way, the “right way”.  But as I approached this unit, I realized that as a student, even though I was always “good in math”  I was usually that student that approached the problem in a different way.  I was squashing that student in my own classroom.  

So with a little apprehension, and fear of the repercussions of their future success in other teachers classrooms, I have approached this unit from a completely growth mindset.  I wasn’t going to focus or even directly teach the correct proportional way to solve these problems, but we were going to discuss what proportionality meant, and look at many approaches to solving.  It was going to be about their thinking and approach to getting a clear understanding of what proportal relationships are.  

Today I just taught solving proportions using the math shell lesson, and the students came and presented their approaches to solving 3 separate problems.  Some did use the “correct proportional cross product” method I had been accustomed to teaching, but so many of them present beautiful explanations and approaches that showed they understood how a proportional relationship worked, but solved it in a different way.  The conversations were so excited.  They were eager to share their method, some even presented ways I would never have thought of.  

I have been coming off a bit of a low point in teaching this year, feeling like my methods were not getting through to my students.  But today I saw so much thought, enthusiasm and validation in my students.  And I realized this is what I got into teaching for, to engage and excite them to find a path to problem solve.  I feel like today i learned just as much, if not more, from them than they did from me, and it was wonderful.