Facilitator Resources
Building The Capacity Of Educators
Suites of resources on a range of early STEAM topics for facilitators and coaches to use in professional learning with educators.
Reflect: Early Math Memories
Your math memories may bring up a variety of feelings, such as joy, curiosity, worry, or embarrassment. Perhaps you feel a combination of emotions. You might wonder where these feelings and thoughts come from and how they might relate to math learning.
In this module, you’ll explore these questions through the concept of math mindsets. Approaching math with a positive math mindset can promote impactful, meaningful learning for adults and children. Everyone can develop their math skills!
Reflect:
Take a moment to think about your earliest math memory. What feelings and thoughts come to mind? Use the My Journal to record your thoughts. Save your progress in the downloaded version.
Math Is All Around You!
As you observe your environment, you may notice aspects of geometry, algebra, measurement, and numbers. Math is likely a part of your everyday routines, for example:
- Leaving for work at a specific time
- Weighing your fruit at the grocery store
- Deciding how much to tip at a restaurant
The interactions you have with math in your everyday environments and routines can influence how you feel and think about math in general.
Reflect:
What are some ways you use math in your daily life?
Observe: What Are Math Mindsets?
When you are tasked with a math problem, what feelings and thoughts arise? You may feel excited and confident in your math skills, or you may feel uncertain or anxious. You might immediately know what to do, or you might wonder what to do first. These feelings and thoughts make up your math mindset.
Math mindsets are a combination of:
- Math attitudes: How you feel about math
- Math beliefs: What you think about your own math ability or the math ability of others
Observe this video of dad, Chet Kingston, discussing his feelings and thoughts about math. Notice how his math mindset changes.
Reflect:
What experiences might have helped change Chet’s math mindset?
Your Math Mindset Matters
Your math mindset can impact your interactions with other adults, like parents and teachers, as well as children. Research shows that adults’ math mindsets play an important role in children’s early math experiences.
- Value of math: Adults who are more aware of the importance of math in early childhood tend to spend more math time with children (Sonnenschein et al., 2012).
- Math attitudes and beliefs: Adults who have more positive math feelings and beliefs can support children to also develop positive math feelings and beliefs (Beilock et al., 2010; Boaler, 2015).
When adults model positive words and actions about math, they can help spread the message that math is for everyone, regardless of gender, race, culture, ethnicity, ability, language, or socioeconomic status (Boaler, 2015).
Math Mindsets Develop Early in Life
Your math mindset is shaped by your environment and lived experiences. As a young child, you may have experienced math through daily routines and play or through math activities at home and school. You may have received messages—directly or indirectly—from others about how they feel and think about math.
Your early memories of math may include some or all of the following:
- Success, excitement, and growth
- Experiences with adults who loved math
- Failure, fear, and embarrassment
- Experiences with adults who felt anxious or unenthusiastic about math
Reflect:
Think about a time when you felt like an “insider” or “outsider” in mathematics. What made you feel this way?
What is Math Anxiety?
When people feel fear or experience increased physiological activity—such as increased heart rate or sweating—in situations involving math, they may be experiencing math anxiety (Luttenberger et al., 2018).
A 2019 study explored math anxiety among a large sample of English-speaking U.S. adults (Hart & Ganley, 2019). Most adults reported mild to moderate levels of math anxiety. Although these findings revealed several possible explanations, one key finding is that many of the study participants attributed their math anxiety to being exposed to a math-anxious parent or teacher (Maloney & Beilock, 2012). This finding sends a clear message: adults’ math mindsets matter!
Implicit Biases About Math
Implicit biases are attitudes and beliefs that we form without consciously knowing we have formed them. These biases can affect math expectations, decisions, and interactions. They can also lead to behaviors that reinforce stereotypes.
Stereotypes are often based on biases about gender, race, culture, ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, disability, and other factors.
Facilitators can combat negative math stereotypes by supporting educators to:
- Offer playful learning opportunities to all children, for example, invite boys to the dramatic play center or girls to the block area
- Hold high expectations for all children, regardless of background (age, race, ethnicity, language, gender, and ability)
- Offer meaningful learning experiences with different entry points to build on the strengths and meet the needs of all children, including children who have disabilities or delays
These behaviors can reinforce the idea that everyone can learn math and develop positive math mindsets.
Math Mindset Myths and Facts
Myth
Math ability is something we are either born with or not. Some groups of people are likely to be better or worse at math.
Fact
Everyone can develop their math skills and positive math mindsets. All children are born with the capacity to learn math (Chestnut et al., 2018).
Myth
Boys are better at math than girls are. This harmful stereotype can impact young children’s beliefs about their own math abilities. As a result, girls may feel less confident and be less successful.
Fact
Research shows that young boys and girls are equally capable in developing their math skills. A 2018 study examined gender differences on math tasks with children ages six months to eight years. They found no differences in how girls and boys performed on the math tasks at any age (Kersey et al., 2018).
Reflect:
Did these or other myths impact you in your childhood or professional practice?
Math Mindsets Can Change
Your feelings and thoughts about math are shaped by your lived experiences. As such, even adults’ math mindsets can change. New math experiences can shift the way you feel and think about math.
Considering your experiences and mindset as a professional learning facilitator can change how you engage others in their math learning. Reflecting on and recognizing ways your mindset can impact others will help you support others to develop positive math mindsets.
Developing Positive Math Mindsets
Here are some strategies for developing positive math mindsets:
- Notice how you already use math in your everyday life. For example, when cooking, you use measuring spoons and cups to measure ingredients. You might also estimate ingredients by including a “pinch of this” or a “few handfuls of that.” In both cases, you are using math!
- Pause, notice, and name your feelings about math. If you are feeling frustrated, you might take a break and consider the source of your feelings. You might also ask someone for help or find resources to help you approach the math problem in a different way.
- Take time to reflect on and journal about math-related strengths or worries. Studies show that expressive writing and reflective exercises can boost anxious students’ performance in math-testing situations (Park et al., 2014).
Reflect:
Identify one strategy you can use to develop more positive feelings and thoughts about math.
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