Here is the full transcript of Stanford mathematics professor Jo Boaler’s

TEDx Talk presentation: How You Can Be Good At Math, And Other
Surprising Facts About Learning at TEDxStanford conference.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello. So I’m here to tell you that what you have believed about your own
potential has changed what you have learned, and continues to do that,
continues to change your learning, and your experiences.
So, how many people here — let’s get a show of hands — have ever been
given the idea that they’re not a math person, or that they can’t go onto
the next level of math, they haven’t got the brains for it? Let’s see a show
of hands. So, quite a few of us.
And I’m here to tell you that idea is completely wrong, it is disproven by
the brain science. But it is fueled by a single myth that’s out there in our
society that’s very strong and very dangerous. And the myth is that there’s
such a thing as a math brain, that you’re born with one, or you’re not. We
don’t believe this about other subjects. We don’t think we’re born with a
history brain, or a physics brain. We think you have to learn those. But
with math, people, students believe it, teachers believe it, parents believe
it.
And until we change that single myth we will continue to have widespread
underachievement in this country. Carol Dweck‘s research on mindset has
shown us that if you believe in your unlimited potential you will achieve
at higher levels in maths, and in life. And an incredible study on mistakes
show this very strongly.
So Jason Moser and his colleagues actually found from MRI scans that
your brain grows when you make a mistake in maths. Fantastic. When
you make a mistake, synapses fire in the brain. And in fact, in their MRI
scans they found that when people made a mistake synapses fired. When
they got work correct less synapses fired. So making mistakes is really
good. And we want students to know this.
But they found something else that was pretty incredible. This image
shows you the voltage maps of people’s brains. And what you can see
here is that people with a growth mindset, who believe that they had
unlimited potential, they could learn anything, when they made a stake,
their brains grew more than the people who didn’t believe that they could
learn anything. So this shows us something that brain scientists have
known for a long time: That our cognition, and what we learn is linked to
our beliefs, and to our feelings.
And this is important for all of us not just kids in math classrooms. If you
go into a difficult situation, or a challenging situation, and you think to
yourself: “I can do this. I’m going do it.” And you mess up or fail, your
brain will grow more, and react differently than if you go into that
situation thinking: “I don’t think I can do this.”
So it’s really important that we change the messages kids get in
classrooms. We know that anybody can grow their brain, and brains are
so plastic to learn any level of maths. We have to get this out to kids. They
have to know that mistakes are really good.

But maths classrooms have to change in a lot of ways. It’s not just about
changing messages for kids. We have to fundamentally change what
happens in classrooms. And we want kids to have a growth mindset, to
believe that they can grow, and learn anything. But it’s very difficult to
have a growth mindset in maths. If you’re constantly given short, closed
questions that you get right or wrong, those questions themselves transmit
fixed messages about math, that you can do it or you can’t. So we have to
open up maths questions so that there’s space inside them for learning.
And I want to give you an example. We’re actually going to ask you to
think about some maths with me. So this is a fairly typical problem, it’s
given out in schools. And I want you to think about it a bit differently. So
we have three cases of squares. In case 2 there’s more squares than in case
1, and in case 3 there’s even more. And often this is given out with the
question: “How many squares would there be in case 100, or case n?”
But I want you to think of a different question now. I want you to think
without any numbers at all, or without any algebra. I want you to think
entirely visually, and I want you to think about where do you see the extra
squares? If there are more squares in case 2 than case 1, where are they?
So if we were in a classroom, I’d give you a long time to think about
this. But in the interest of time, I’m going to show you some different
ways people think about this, and I’ve given this problem to many
different people, and I think it was my undergrads at Stanford who said to
me — or one of them said to me: “Oh, I see it like raindrops. Where
raindrops come down on the top. So it’s like an outer layer, that grows
new each time.”
It was also my undergrads who said: “Oh no, I see it more like a bowling
alley. You get an extra row, like a row of skittles that comes in at the
bottom.” A very different way of seeing the growth.
It was a teacher, I remember, who said to me it was like a volcano: “The
center goes up, and then the lava comes out.”
There was another teacher who said: “Oh no, it’s like the parting of the
Red Sea. The shape separates, and there’s a duplication with an extra
center.”
I remember this was — sorry, this one as well. Some people see it as
triangles. They see the outside growing as an outside triangle. And then
there was a teacher in New Mexico who said to me: “Oh it’s like Wyane’s
World, Stairway to Heaven, access denied.”
And then we have this way of seeing it. If you move the squares, which
you always can, and you rearrange the shape a bit, you’ll see that it
actually grows as squares.
So, this is what I want to illustrate with this question: “When it’s given
out in maths classrooms, and this isn’t the worst of questions, it’s given
out with a question of: “How many?” and kids count. So they’ll say: “In
the first case there’s 4. In the second there’s 9.” They might stare at that
column of numbers for a long time and say: “If you add one to the case
number each time and square it, then you get the total number of squares.”
But when we give it to students, and high school teachers, and I’ll say to
them when they’ve done this: “So why is that squared you think? Why do
you see that squared function?” They’ll say: “No idea.”
So this is why it’s squared. The function grows as a square. You see that
squaring in the algebraic representation. So when we give these problems
to students we give them the visual question. We ask them: “How they
see it?” They have these rich discussions, and they also reach deeper
understandings about a really important part of mathematics.
So we actually need a revolution in maths classrooms. We need to change
a lot of things. And part of the reason we need to change so much is
because research on maths teaching and learning is not getting into
schools and classrooms. And I’m going to give you a stunning example
now.
So this is really interesting. When we calculate — even when adults
calculate, where a brain area that sees fingers is lighting up, we’re not
using fingers, but that brain area that sees fingers lights up. So there’s a
brain area when we use fingers, and there’s a brain area when we see
fingers. And it turns out that seeing fingers is really important for the
brain. And in fact, finger perception is — scientists test for finger
perception by asking them to put their hands under a table — they can’t
see them touching a finger, and then seeing if you know which finger has
been touched.
The amount of university students who have good finger perception
predicts their calculation scores. And the amount of finger perception
grade 1 students have is a better prediction of maths achievement in grade
2 than test scores. It is that important.
But what happens in schools and classrooms? Students are told they’re
not allowed to use their fingers. They’re told it’s babyish. They’re made
to feel bad about it. When we stop children learning numbers through
fingers, it’s akin to halting their numerical development. And scientists
have known this for a long time. And the neuroscientists conclude that
fingers should be used for students learning number and arithmetic. If we
haven’t published — we published this in a paper in the Atlantic last
week. I don’t know any educator who knew this. This is causing a huge
ripple through the education community.
So there’s lots of other research that’s not known by teachers and
schools. We also know that when you perform a calculation the brain is
involved in a complex and dynamic communication between different
areas of the brain, including the visual cortex. Yet, maths classrooms are
not visual, they’re numerical and abstract.

So I want to show you now what happened when we brought 81 students

onto campus last summer, and we taught them differently. So we taught
them about the brain growing. We taught them about mindset and
mistakes. But we also taught them creative, visual, beautiful maths. And
they came in for 18 lessons with us. Before they came to us they had taken
a district standardized test. We gave them the same test at the end of our
18 lessons, and they improved by an average of 50%.
Eighty one students, from a range of achievement levels, told us on the
first day: “I’m not a math person.” They could name the one person in
their class who was a math person. We changed their beliefs. And this is
a clip from a longer music video that we made of the kids.
[Video clip:
But we keep talking
Can’t stop, won’t stop solving
It’s like something is growing
In our minds every time we try again.
‘Cause the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
We will make mistakes, stakes, stakes, stakes, stakes.
We’re just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake.
Shake it off! Shake it off!
Our method’s gonna break, break, break, break, break.
It’s not a piece of cake, cake, cake, cake, cake.
We’re just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake.
Shake it off! Shake it off!
We represent things visually,
Present them to our class clearly
So that they can see mmm
So that they can see mmm
We know our brains can grow
Who cases how fast we go?
Understanding’s what we show mmm
Understanding’s what we show mmm
So we keep trying
Synapses are firing
This problem’s so exciting
It’s so cool that I want to go and show the world!
• [Video ends]

So we need to get research out to teachers. We need a revolution in maths

teaching. And if you don’t believe me, come listen to this kid. He’s a
middle schooler, and we had worked with his teachers to shift from
worksheet math to open math with mindset messages. This is him
reflecting on that shift.
[Video clip: “Math class last year was notes, and just handouts, and your
own little box — you were just boxed in. You were like by yourself, it was
every man for themselves. But now this year is just open. We’re a whole
big — it’s like a city — we’re all working together to create this new
beautiful world. I think the challenges, and the future that lies ahead for
me — if I keep on pushing, if I keep on doing this someday I’m going to
make it.” – [Video ends]
We have focused for so long in education, in maths education, on the right
way to teach a fraction, on the standards we use in classrooms which are
argued about all the time, and we’ve completely ignored the beliefs
students hold about their own potential.
And only now is the full extent of the need to attend to that coming to
light. We all have to believe in ourselves to unlock our unlimited
potential.
Thank you.