KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments through microschooling. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
Episode 74: Making Math Relevant. A Conversation with Jo Boaler.
Dr. Jo Boaler shares her groundbreaking work in mathematics education, exploring how beliefs shape learning and how we can transform math instruction to help every student succeed.
• Starting her career in London schools where she discovered anyone can learn math with the right opportunities
• Joining Stanford and later collaborating with Carol Dweck to spread growth mindset ideas through YouCubed.org
• Explaining how neuroscience reveals five brain pathways used in math thinking, with two being visual pathways
• Discussing how beliefs about math physically shape the brain's ability to learn
• Highlighting the damage caused by fixed mindset praise like "you're so smart"
• Describing how math anxiety activates the same fear center in the brain as seeing snakes or spiders
• Advocating for celebrating struggle as essential for brain growth and learning
• Explaining why standards should be organized into big, connected ideas rather than isolated skills
• Sharing how integrated math instruction (rather than separating algebra, geometry, etc.) mirrors real-world math
• Introducing Strugly.com, which rewards persistence and connection-making rather than speed or accuracy
About our guest
Dr. Jo Boaler is a Stanford Professor. Formerly, she was the Marie Curie professor of mathematics education in England, and a mathematics teacher in London comprehensive schools. She is the author of 19 books, numerous articles and a White House presenter on women and girls. Her latest book is: Math-ish: Finding Creativity, Diversity and Meaning in Mathematics. She co-founded www.youcubed.org and www.Struggly.com. She was on the
writing team for the 2023 California Mathematics Framework and was named as one of the 8 educators “changing the face of education” by the BBC.
Connect with Jo
Visit YouCubed.org, Strugly.com, and Mathish.org to learn more about Dr. Boaler's work and access free resources for teaching and learning mathematics.
Got a story to share or question you want us to answer? Send us a message!
About the podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
Got a burning question?
We're all ears! If you have a question or topic you'd love our hosts to tackle, please send it to podcast@prenda.com. Let's dive into the conversation together!
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And really you know we don't do anything important without struggling, so we have to have students feel comfortable with that. We find that when we share with them, we want you to struggle, they're more willing to be persistent and to keep going.
Speaker 2:Hi and welcome to the Kindle podcast. I'm Katie, your host for today, and in this episode we're talking to Dr Jo Bowler. We talk about math, anxiety, neuroplasticity and what we as parents and educators can do to help kids develop a growth mindset around math. But before we get to our conversation, I'll tell you a little bit more about Dr Bowler. She's a Stanford professor. Formerly she was the Marie Curie professor of mathematics education in England and a mathematics teacher in London Comprehensive Schools. She's the author of 19 books, numerous articles and a White House presenter on women and girls. In her latest book, math-ish Finding Creativity, diversity and Meaning in Mathematics, she talks about lots of the things that we talked about on this episode and I can't wait to get that book. She co-founded ucubedorg and strugglycom and she was on the writing team for the 2023 California Mathematics Framework and was named as one of the eight educators changing the face of education by the BBC. Let's get to our conversation with Dr Bowler. Dr Bowler, welcome to the Kindle podcast. We're super excited to have you on today.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:So let's go back in time a little bit. Take me to the beginning of your work. Where did you start? How did you get to be doing what you're doing, and kind of tell me what your big why is, or like the change you're seeking to make in the world.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, I started my career in London schools as a maths teacher and I taught at Haverstock School, where there were over 40 different languages spoken.
Speaker 1:It's a very diverse school with students as you might imagine in central London lots of students who'd only recently come to the country, and what I found there was students with a lot of gaps in their knowledge and with many of them I worked one-to-one to catch them up.
Speaker 1:And that was when I learned that really anybody can catch up and students can learn anything, and that's really been my North Star through my career that we know that every student can learn maths and it's really just about the opportunities we give them.
Speaker 1:So I went from teaching in London to doing a master's degree at King's College, london University, and then a doctorate, and then was presenting some of the results one day in a conference in Athens when people at Stanford were in the audience and they said come to Stanford, come and be a professor at Stanford, and at first I said no, they started sending me picture books of California and they said just come for a visit. So we thought, well, I guess we could just go for a visit and then I ended up taking the job at Stanford and after some years there, I met Carol Dweck, who is the creator of Mindset, and we together agreed that we really needed to get the ideas out to teachers and parents and since then we started a website called YouCubed that gets the ideas of Mindset out and also how to teach with a growth mindset, lots of free resources, lessons and videos for students and many other things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we actually used UQ about Prenda. We love it.
Speaker 1:Nice. Yeah, that's some of my story.
Speaker 2:That's great. Okay, so tell me about your own relationship with math, like why math for you? Why, personally, do you choose to focus on that?
Speaker 1:Well, I first. I guess first interest in maths really started, or my first interest in learning math started when I was in school. I was pretty good at maths but I didn't enjoy it that much. It was just answer all these short questions, go as fast as you can, but I did notice that a lot of my friends really struggled with it and I would help them. So I think that was my first like awakening, of thinking about learning and why people find maths difficult. And then in England we choose three subjects when you're 17 and 18, called A-levels. I chose maths and that was when I had my first amazing teacher of maths who just changed everything for me. She had us work in groups, discussing ideas. It was sort of calculus mainly. Then everything changed. I hadn't been planning to really stay in maths. I was going, I wanted to be a scientist. But she changed the way I thought about maths, changed the way I thought about myself, and I ended up becoming a maths teacher in London and from there where I am now, I love it.
Speaker 2:What about math and math education feels broken to you.
Speaker 1:Oh, so much. Unfortunately, there's a lot of things we need to change in maths education. So one of them is I work with neuroscientists at Stanford and they have now got this really important data on the way our brains process maths, and one of the things that they know is we have five different pathways that we can use when we're thinking about maths. Two of them are visual pathways, so at the back of the brain really important to activate these different pathways. So a big message that we always share is math should be taught in a multidimensional way where students get to see things visually, they get to build things with their hands, they get to speak and talk about maths.
Speaker 1:It's not just answering questions with numbers. Then, of course, a big thing that needs to change is this myth that's out there in the system that only some people can do well at maths, the terrible idea of the maths person. Laid into that are all sorts of stereotypes about who it is can do well in maths. So if we could change those ideas people have about maths and also make it this broad subject that's taught, honoring all the different ways we think and learn, I think we would have a wholly different nation of maths loving people yeah, tell me more you know.
Speaker 2:Some of your research goes into kind of like the link between beliefs and cognition and I think this is aligned with Dweck's work, right, right. To help us realize that what you believe about yourself as a learner actually influences your ability to learn right. Go into that. It's so interesting yeah.
Speaker 1:And in my latest book, which is called Mathish, I share this research in the first chapter, actually new research from somebody called Lang Chen, who has shown that not only does what you believe about maths correlate with your maths achievement, but what you believe about maths they see in the hippocampus, as the brain is working on maths. It literally shapes your ability to learn and a lot of times people have thought you know you have beliefs over here and you have knowledge over here and they're kind of separate. But now we know they're not separate and they're very intertwined. So we should be spending a lot more time with learners on helping them feel good about maths. It's really neglected in the school system and we just focus on knowledge and getting kids through tests and that's such an important missing piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when I think about math and my own experience with math, I definitely have a fixed mindset. Around math, I wear the hat of not a math person loudly sometimes and it actually it has closed. I remember being maybe a freshman in high school and wanting to take this physics class that involves some math and it was for a freshman. It wasn't a complicated class, but I think my dad said something to me like that class is for smart people and he wouldn't sign my card to get into it and I was like what are you?
Speaker 2:I mean, he did not know any better, he was doing the best he could. But yeah, just like how we teach kids the language we use with kids. Maybe we could talk about that. Like what are we doing as adults to kind of shape the beliefs. How do we influence that?
Speaker 1:can be and should be or how important these ideas are. The whole idea of being smart is a very damaging, fixed idea. Students think of that in a very fixed way and what we know is that everybody's brains are changing, growing, adapting. So, yeah, we know that students' mindsets are formed by the time they're three years of age and, of course, they can change at any time. And that comes from the praise we give students and the parents who are praising their children in fixed ways. That does lead to the development of a fixed mindset. Some people are smart, some people are not, some people are gifted, some people are not. These are all very fixed, damaging ideas and we try and help people learn to give sort of growth praise. So, instead of saying to your children, that's great, you're so smart that you could do that, saying you know, love the way you approach that problem or that's a really creative way of thinking about that, anything that values what they're doing rather than this fixed notion is very helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so why can you go into a little bit more like what is it about that belief that limits your ability to learn? Like you mentioned the hippocampus a little bit Like can you dig into that? I mean?
Speaker 1:one of the damages of those fixed ideas. What we know is when you praise students for being smart, for example, they feel good. At first. They're like, oh great, I'm smart. But then later on, when they mess up on something which they will, they start to think, oh, I'm not so smart. And we know about a lot of people. So I teach an undergraduate class at Stanford. I have a whole host of these young people who've been praised for being gifted and smart and they have very fixed mindsets. And what happens when they come to Stanford and they take a class that's difficult and maybe they get a B or a C is they fall apart and they think it's a major crisis and they drop out. So these ideas are important for all students. People think, oh, they're for low achieving students. It's not the case and in fact, the biggest group of fixed mindset students in the school system is high achieving girls.
Speaker 2:Really that's fascinating You've done. You presented at the White House on this right, like about girls in education.
Speaker 1:Tell me about that work that were there were groups like the Girl Scouts and different groups were there, but they all were delivering like an outside intervention to help girls feel good about STEM. So I was there and I was really championing the importance of teaching all the time Like it's. We shouldn't be just thinking, well, we can fix girls, damage girls and then go off and fix them in an afterschool program. We need to do better inside teaching because we know that those regular teaching interactions are really important.
Speaker 2:And the people that I mean from the like attachment theory kind of body of literature, like the people that are closest to the child typically have the greatest impact on that child's belief. So that's the parent. And if you're attending traditional school, like you spend all day long with your early elementary teachers, right, so you're playing a very heavy role in that belief development. I'm I'm curious around like okay, we talked about the belief and then let's shift over to talking about knowledge and actual like math acquisition.
Speaker 2:Because I feel like sometimes, when, when we talk about get, like you said, like trying to get get kids to feel better about themselves and about math, that feels a little like fluffy to people or it's like no, like math has a right answer. This isn't like a socratic discussion, like there's a right answer. We are like speed does oh, in people's perceptions around like speed kind of matters, like the faster you go, the smarter you go, you are, the fewer mistakes you make, the smarter you are right. Like these are the kind of our stereotypes, our beliefs. What's wrong with those beliefs? Like why is this not a fluffy, uh, kind of response to math?
Speaker 1:What we're trying to do through YouCubed and the books I've written is show how you can teach maths in a way that students love the subject and it's really hardcore maths. It's not that we're saying, oh, let's go off and play and that will make you feel better about maths, but you can teach algebra visually by having kids look at patterns and be wowed by the beauty of the mathematics, and they're learning algebra at the same time. So this is not a sacrifice we have to make. We're going to stop doing proper maths so we can help students feel good about it. We can teach in ways that students learn to love and see the beauty in maths and what's so great about that is when teachers start doing that, they start to love maths more and love teaching more because they get such a positive response from students.
Speaker 1:We have a summer camp model and you can see it on YouCubed where we develop this summer camp for students. It's typically about four weeks long and we share this beautiful maths with them and lots of mindset messages and what we find is a really short time in that maths environment and students' scores and state tests really massively go up. So we know that this creative, more joyful maths increases students' mathematical cognition. We don't need to make maths dry and be encouraging speed the same. With that speed message. I mean we might agree that thinking quickly is helpful in some situations not really many but you don't get kids being faster by encouraging speed. In fact, often that makes them slower because it's what brings anxiety to students. Actually, the way to be faster with maths is to be really comfortable with numbers and concepts and then release your mind from these negative anxiety producing ideas. It's a bit like that old expression that you know we don't make kids taller by measuring them.
Speaker 2:I love that saying.
Speaker 1:Completely over again. And the same with math. But we don't make them faster by giving them speed tests.
Speaker 2:That's so true. There's like biology behind this right. Like when you put a child in a stress-inducing situation, they're feeling a lot of anxiety. Like that activates the sympathetic nervous system. The prefrontal cortex comes offline. Like that is the part of the brain they need to stay engaged in that problem, to stay focused to figure that out to reason. So you're disconnecting them from that part of the brain by introducing this fear or anxiety.
Speaker 1:One of the neuroscience I work with, binod Meenan, has shown that when people who are anxious about math see numbers, a fear center lights up in the brain. It's the same fear center that lights up when we see snakes and spiders. So, and exactly as that fear center lights up, the problem solving centers shut down.
Speaker 2:I had no idea that. It's like literally the fear center of the brain with numbers. That's shocking. But I can like relate to that. Like when I think about math especially if someone's going to watch me do math even now, like we're like building Prendo, we're leading this company. You know, like if I have to, if I'm sharing my screen or something and I have to do math, I'm like very uncomfortable and like immediately, you know, like you feel all of the same feelings like as if like a loud dog was barking at you or something you'd almost get hit by a car. You feel this like panic in you and then your mind goes blank and you can't do the math.
Speaker 1:It's true, so many people, even people who are really comfortable with maths and so many maths teachers. When they go out for meals their friends are like, oh, you're the maths teacher, you work out the tip and they're all staring at you. Literally people's brains shut down, they're like they suddenly can't do this calculation. That is the impact of that fear hitting the important part of the brain so totally true of everybody I think everybody fears being watched doing maths.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's yeah something that we get. So prenda takes a very similar approach. Like we won't really want to create an environment that is where kids feel a lot of internal safety. So we have access to the prefrontal cortex, right. So we do a lot of a lot of the same mindset work you're talking about, and when we tell people about this, they say like, oh, it sounds too easy. Learning has to be somehow inherently painful for it to be effective. And even when you talk to kids about their pre and post like they went to traditional school and then they came to Prender, or maybe they had a certain teacher that was able to create that environment and then a certain teacher that wasn't able to we ask them how hard are you working? They will actually say that they are working less hard in this environment. That's more conducive to internal safety. But they're growing at like like 1.5 grade levels per year or something like that. They're growing way more. But their perception is, oh, this is easy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, and it's like also yeah, they they're believing that, like they're, they've internalized this idea that learning has to be painful yeah, if you set up that safe environment and you allow students to be successful, they will say this is easier in this environment, even though it isn't easier.
Speaker 2:The math isn't easier yeah.
Speaker 1:You've allowed them to be successful. Well, one of our key messages, talking of this sort of pain, is that struggle is really good for the brain. You want to be struggling. You don't want to find work easy, because that's not good for your brain. And when your brain is struggling, that's when it's really making those important connections and growth. And so we do a lot of work to help kids feel good about struggle. When I teach students, whether they're young students or Stanford students, I will say to them I want you to struggle. I'm going to give you work that will cause you to struggle, because that's really good for you, that's really good for your brain. And we use James Nottingham's metaphor of the pit of struggle the learning pit.
Speaker 2:Tell me about that. I haven't heard about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, teach me that it's a really good one and lots of teachers find it really helpful. Yeah, it's a really good one and lots of teachers find it really helpful. And there's some teachers and I have visuals of these in my books. They get kids to draw their own pit. So you want to go down into the pit of struggle and in these drawings you see kids on the way down going oh I'm not good at maths, I'm terrible. But then, as they're coming out, they're saying I can just use these tools, I can keep going. And the teachers I work with say to students you know, I could take your hand and we could jump over the pit together, but that's not what we want. You need to be in the pit. And when we run workshops with teachers we hear them going oh I'm really in the pit when we give them these hard concepts, hard tasks. So just celebrating those times of struggle, I find that to be extremely liberating message for students.
Speaker 2:I was just thinking, like we have so much fear, right, and where's this fear come from? It's like, oh, I'm less valuable if I'm not good at math. I'm less smart. My parents would be disappointed that all of these very emotionally driven beliefs are in there. And when you, when you normalize that and then you celebrate it, it's like you got a d on your math test. This is going on the refrigerator. This is excellent, because what do we struggle in our family or in our class? Like we celebrate how long you stayed with this problem, or like how, how diligent you were in yeah, persisting, right, right and then next time they're like oh, my mom feels proud of me when I work my butt off right.
Speaker 2:it's like, okay, then, then that's my behavior and that's actually going to engender much more long-term success of in that child's life. Then I usually get lucky. I'm feeling this lucky, smart feeling and I don't actually have any of those. You know, all of the pits in my path so far have been easy for me to skip over and I haven't spent a lot of time developing Like think about just the muscles and ingenuity and all of the skills you would develop if you actually were in a pit and you had to get yourself out Right Like that's a much stronger brain on the other side of that pit.
Speaker 1:And really you know we don't do anything important without struggling and really you know we don't do anything important without struggling. So you're not going to get to that really good knowledge and creativity and everything that we know to be important. So we have to have students feel comfortable with that. We find that when we share with them we want you to struggle, they're more willing to be persistent and to keep going. And although this is a message we share in all of our work, I don't hear teachers doing it very often. I think it's a hard one for teachers to, because now our education system has for so long just been all about correctness, so it's a harder one for teachers, I think, to take on. But when they do take it on, it's really transformative.
Speaker 2:What are some of the other blockers to like really changing this in society? What's getting in the way?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, first of all there's resistance to these ideas, and I've faced a lot of it in my career. There are some people who don't want to believe that they're not especially gifted or you know that they've really absorbed these fixed ideas and they want to keep them. That can be hard for some people to take on that idea that everybody can learn and grow.
Speaker 2:OK, I'm having, like sorry, like a major epiphany here, because I've never applied fixed mindset to, like, say, an administrator or someone who's like making decisions. It's like I was special, I was gifted and if I allow everyone to, if we let go of these labels, then I am now less valuable and I as an adult am still feeling like I'm fighting for my value and using these things and my credentials and things like that to substantiate myself.
Speaker 1:Wow, never really thought about that A lot of high school maths teachers in particular have built their whole identity around this idea that they were the special one who could learn maths, and so they as a group tend to be more resistant to the idea that we can all learn. And then other factors that work against change. I think there's too much in the standards that are given to teachers every year just way too much in there. So when we teach, say to them you know, let students work in depth and think deeply about things and make connections that they think. I don't have time. I've got to get through all of this in the book, these massive maths books that are in the US that kids can hardly carry.
Speaker 1:So we have one of the things we did in California working out the new California framework is rearrange standards into bigger ideas so teachers don't have so many to get through and they can think well, this is a big idea. There's like eight in each grade level. I'm really going to go into depth on that big idea. I'm really going to give kids rich experiences and so, um, yeah, teachers, everything feels too rushed in the school system and they feel that they have to get through so much right and that I mean they are under a lot of professional pressure to perform right those, those state tests.
Speaker 2:Like their schools are judged on that, they're judged on that and a lot of it's out of their hands. Kind of like it's the district saying like this is the curriculum schedule for all of the kids that are nine in your care. You know, like you have to expose them to fill in the blank, and it's a thousand things long. So it's like there's this immense amount of pressure and so it's like you really need, like a system wide change to really it's not just like, oh, teachers do a better job, be more creative. It's like, well, the teacher is acting a certain way because of, like you know, I don't want to kick the can off the road, but it really is like a very high level problem that's trickling down and damaging, damaging the student's education that's trickling down and damaging the students' education.
Speaker 1:That's right. And then we have these books that are written to teach kids maths, that really don't draw from research or what we know about learning. They're written very quickly by publishing companies to get them out there and they don't teach maths in a creative, visual way. It's just lots and lots of short, uninteresting questions. Yeah, yeah, teachers, if they really are under that kind of pressure, here's this book to teach from. Here's your district pacing guide. Here are all the tests. It's hard for them to really implement the ideas. So we need leaders. We need change at the leadership level as well.
Speaker 2:Tell me a little bit more about standards, Like how did standards become the way we do education and what is? You've mentioned kind of big ideas like go into a little bit more about like maybe an alternate view on that, because we don't want to let go of like there are right answers in math and we do want to have high expectations. It's not about making it easier, and I think standards have become kind of synonymous with like excellence or like a high degree of rigor or something like that. So talk to me about that idea a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when I was working with the Department of Education in California, one of the things I learned in that process was the standards were never intended to be a guide for teaching. They were never written to be the guide of what teachers teach. They were more written as a setting out somewhere what is everything. But they have become this guide for teaching, and textbooks have taken all these small little standards and turned them into small little questions for kids. So, as I mentioned, one of the work we did in California was to really think about what are the big concepts in each grade level. That is what is really important. That is what will underpin everything students do, and so we combine standards into those bigger concepts. It's exactly the same mathematics If you teach to those big ideas, kids are learning a number of standards at once.
Speaker 1:We don't have to go one by one, by one. I mean, if you teach that the standards what's happening is you might be teaching fractions for some weeks of the year and then six months later, you're teaching shape, but actually kids can learn fractions through shapes. Why aren't they combined? Why do we separate everything and make it disconnected? So, yeah, any work that we can do to bring back the connections in maths. Maths is a very connected subject. Anybody who works in mathematics knows that it's actually a subject of a few big ideas and a lot of rich connections between them. So having kids see and know those connections is important. In our system the teachers don't even know the mathematical connections.
Speaker 2:Well, because you're like, you're a geometry teacher, right, like we've even taken math and we've made it into subjects. So it's like, hey, I'm only thinking about geometry, I'm only thinking about algebra. So it's like the way we've set it up makes it impossible for even well-educated people to see those connections high school maths into different courses.
Speaker 1:No, in fact, the US is one of very few countries in the world that do that. Most countries teach maths and that was what I learned in school. So when I was doing high school, we would do problems that involved algebra and geometry, because that is the maths of the world. And when I first got here I was like wow, I don't even know where I would put this problem. It has algebra and geometry inside. Is that a geometry?
Speaker 1:Not allowed, not allowed. So, yeah, any moves we can have to integrate mathematics in the high school levels is also really helpful.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So what you're saying here is reminding me, actually bringing me back to high school, because I grew up in California and I remember my math actually being more integrated like this. Now that I think about it, I've lived in Arizona and done other education things, so now my brain is like more segmented thing, like that. There was like a few. It wasn't totally interconnected, but it was. It was algebra and geometry and all like all. You got everything in that year, you know, and then you'd build on that and all of those different, but it wasn't super connected or visual like you're talking about, but maybe that was. Maybe that's what they were trying to accomplish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there was a move in the is and nice to teach more integrated maths and it was being really pushed out by people who love the traditional ways and want things to stay the same. But some states have made tremendous progress. In Utah there is only integrated maths. That was made as a decision at the state level and everybody teaches integrated maths in Utah and they also have pathways in data science. They can choose in high school whether they're focusing on data or you know more calculus route and they get really great results. You know their results have really gone up since they've moved maths more into the 21st century. Yet still we fight about it. You know in California there's huge battles about it. We don't look at the evidence and look at, for example, the data from Utah. We just fight about it.
Speaker 2:There's this analogy that my back. I'm a speech language pathologist and I'm very into early literacy instruction, so the whole reading wars back and forth is it's sounding? It kind of smacks of the same thing where it's like, is it this way?
Speaker 1:Is it this way it's like you know where it's like. Is it this way? Is it this way? It's like you know. It's very similar. We have the math wars that that are like the reading wars and are so unproductive because that's not helpful if people are at war with each other. Same with reading, I mean. Of course we had the whole language approach. So how I learned to read? Then we had phonics and now everybody's saying it's all about phonics. Of course kids need both. It doesn't make sense that you just isolate the sounds and learn in that way. It's meaningless for kids and of course you need some of that. Both are important. But now we're pivoting. We're going to go all one way.
Speaker 2:I just love fighting, I think.
Speaker 2:But there's an analogy that I learned early on in my literacy education about chocolate cake.
Speaker 2:If I was like, hey, joe, you want to come over and I'll make you, we'll have a snack together, we'll have a treat, and then I sat you down and I gave you a quarter cup of cocoa and some vinegar and some salt and some flour and made you eat them, you would not want to come back to my house to eat my treat, right?
Speaker 2:You would hate this. And then you'd be like, oh, I don't think I'm a cake person, like you know, but if you mix all of those things together and make it delicious, that's a story in the literacy analogy, right, and it's like I can help you fall in love with this story. And then eventually you'll want to know how to make it yourself. And I feel like you're doing a similar thing in math with like tell me a little bit more about U-Cubed. And like visual math, like the moves you're trying to make there, because it seems, it seems analogous, where it's like if we can help kids experience math and like an awe, inspiring, like, like fun and engaging way, then they'll be more interested and like the, the things that they discover. The concepts will be more relevant.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 1:You know we love to have units for kids where they're really engaging with something.
Speaker 1:One of the things I'm most proud of and you cued at the moment, that is one of our most recent things is we developed a partnership with Stanford Women's Basketball Team because we know that sport has a lot of data and mathematics inside it, and we said we'd like to develop a unit on basketball and they worked with us, which was fantastic. So in this basketball unit this is all free on our site kids watch videos of the Stanford players explaining basketball to them and showing the moves and then they try it themselves on their desks and they're doing really important maths. And we have a nice little video of students reflecting on the unit and one of the students says I think this is really important that people teach maths in this way, and then us kids wouldn't see it as useless as we do now. And when I play this for teachers, they all laugh at this student saying maths really isn't as useless as we all think it is, because that seems crazy to teachers. How can you think maths is useless?
Speaker 2:But of course, that's what kids think when they never get used to it when, in the course of your daily childhood, are you put in a situation where you really need math to solve a real world problem. Like it's. Not like that, because we've created a synthetic world for kids and we need to like help. Help them make the tie.
Speaker 1:That's so abstract and removed from their lives. One of the first studies I did was it was my PhD study in England followed kids through different high school, different school, and then I was actually able to go and interview them 10 years later, after they'd experienced these different school approaches. And the kids who'd gone to the traditional school they were in ability groups, you know, copy these methods. One of the biggest reflections of the kids afterwards, when they were adults, when they were like 24, 25, was I see maths in the world everywhere. Now, why was it so disconnected when I was in school? Why did we never know that this is, you know, everywhere in the world, which is a good question, and that was really very strong for them.
Speaker 2:Mm, hmm, yeah, it's like it is all around you, but a normal kid is not going to be like that's math, right, because they need someone to engage with them in a way that kind of teaches them to think that and to teach them like trains you know, like when you're, when you're doing art, like you know, your art teacher is not just training your skill but your observation skills too, to help help you see angles and see light differently, and we teach this very fake maths in schools. Right, it's very synthetic.
Speaker 1:It's really only useful for school, and so we do things to stop kids seeing that this is the maths in the world, and that's part of what we need to change.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do this exercise with our prenatal kids where they'll set. So they're all doing master race learning. You know this age mix everyone's on their own track doing their own goals, but they have to set a purpose. Every time they set a goal, like a year long math goal, come with a purpose and sometimes I'll go through our system and I'll read them and I am always surprised to see how many of them say something like I want to complete fourth grade math so that I can be ready for fifth grade math.
Speaker 2:Like oh, that's not a purpose. It's like it's like that's just like doing number computations for computation's sake, like that's not a real broad, deep, meaningful purpose. And so I'm trying to still like push our community to understand what purpose and relevance looks like and authentic use of math. But it's a struggle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, indeed, and we set ourselves up for that. By the way, we teach kids, we're not helping them see how important these ideas are for their lives. I mean, of course, a lot of teachers are and they're doing it fantastically, but we need it to be more widespread.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a new project you have going. I don't know if it's new new but Struglycom, oh yeah, strugly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, tell me more about Strugly, a little online tool we've developed. So this came about. I've had a lot of people over my career say, come and work with us in this app firm and I look at their maths apps and they're all about speed and calculating. But this was different. So I was contacted by a really cool design firm in Germany, by one of the leaders of the company who had said that her daughter had significant maths anxiety. She was eight until she started doing the tasks that we share, and now she loves maths and is top of her class in maths, and so she became really passionate about getting this maths up to more kids. So what I love about what they can do in this design company is they can make these mathematical ideas really come to life through their amazing digital work. They do so.
Speaker 1:It's an online tool for kids of really any age. It's particularly good right now, I think, for students of about four to 12. But there's more and more being added to it because it's giving kids the message that struggle is good, and we know we talked about how important it is. But yeah, it's just a tool where they get to see beautiful maths and kids are loving it everywhere. We're finding is from everywhere that every the kids who engage with struggling love it. And parents are saying to me you know, we used to have film night at my house, special treat. And now my children are saying, can we do struggling instead? And there's just. You know, kids really, they get get badges for struggling and for making connections between ideas and for persisting for a long time on problems and they love those, they love the badges. So yeah, I'm really happy about how Strugly is going.
Speaker 2:Those are actually like the metrics, like the gamification of Strugly, isn't how many right answers can you earn? It's literally like how long can you persist? That's amazing. And can you see a?
Speaker 1:connection between ideas and what I really love is they've managed to bring into Strugly valuing the different ways kids think about something, because so many maths apps and textbooks they're really looking for one way and if you get it slight, if you do something slightly different, then you get a big, no, big wrong where it's not wrong, it's just somebody thinks about it differently. So I I that's great about struggling they've managed to really value that yeah, I was playing with it a few days ago.
Speaker 2:I was there aren't like instructions, like you're kind of given an activity and you kind of have to figure out what you're even supposed to do, and my brain was immediately so frustrated by that because I, my brain, just like wants to win right, like wants to like do it as fast as it can, and it's like yeah there's no instruction, Like I have to like experiment with this thing and like that is my brain. It's engaging my brain in a struggle right there and that's changing the architecture of my brain.
Speaker 1:Kids are really good at that, better than we are yeah there are no instructions, so they dive in and they have to figure out how it works, makes it great for language learning because it's not language heavy and the kids totally get it. Yeah, they're expecting me to figure out how to do this. I'm going to press this. Press that try that and they're in, so I think it's harder for us.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is definitely harder. We don't have the neuroplasticity that the kids do. I don't think Right.
Speaker 1:Well, there still is neuroplasticity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's there, isn't that? Like when I was in grad school, I was like I'm pretty sure they taught us that like your brain doesn't change, like you can't make new synapses, and things like that, that we believed that for a long time yeah uh-huh and um.
Speaker 1:You know when the first evidence came out was actually done with taxi drivers in london. Taxi drivers I don't know if you've taken a black cab in london, but you are told that you can get into a black cab name any place street, landmark, street, anything and they'll take you there. That is the expectation and is pretty true. I've never found a black cab driver to not know somewhere. But to become a black cab driver, you have to take this extremely difficult test called the knowledge, where you have to have memorized every street, every landmark in a 25-mile radius of London, which is complicated, and I think the average amount of times it takes to pass the knowledge is seven times. So the neuroscientists were like oh, we should look at the impact of this knowledge training on taxi drivers' brains. And what they found was going through this process changed their hippocampus.
Speaker 1:So when they released this evidence and I think this was in the 90s people didn't believe it and they argued against it because that's what they thought. Your brain is fixed by the time you're an adult. Maybe as children it's not, but by the time you're an adult your brain is fixed. And they have absolutely shown. Now that's not the case and in fact some of the studies of neuroplasticity have been done in retirement homes, where they find that the greatest evidence, the greatest times for people's brains are when they're learning new things. So they've studied all these older adults and find that the most neuroplasticity comes when these adults take on something new that they hadn't learned before. Interesting.
Speaker 1:But yeah, neuroplasticity is happening all through our lives and yeah that was not what people believed, is still not what people believe I just wonder what else we believe right now.
Speaker 2:That's not going to be true. All of the things that you know that engender these limiting beliefs. It's like, oh, can we just rip the band-aid off and just stop with all of this, all of this, let's just let every kid be gifted and everyone learn. Like it really isn't about.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think education has just become a giant sorting machine, essentially, and like if you can't do it in this way, after the teachers explained it once like you're, you're not special, and I just feel like we're losing. Uh, there's the concept of like the lost Einsteins, where it's like how much, um, how much human innovation and creativity and and problem-solving power are we leaving on the table because we're not able to nurture it in these early educational years?
Speaker 1:And how much in maths, more than any other subject.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you don't have to turn the whole world. You can still do meritocracy, you can still compete in the market, you can do all of those things but, like, education should be a place where you can come and everyone can have access and success. Ok, well, thank you so much for coming. We're going to wrap up with our favorite question who is someone in your life that has helped shape your perception of yourself, like helped you overcome limiting beliefs, helped like you find your passion or kindled your motivation, like who is that person and what do they do?
Speaker 1:I would have to go to somebody I mentioned at the beginning, which is that the maths teacher I had when I was 17, 18. Up to that point, as I said, maths had always just been about speed and right answers, and mostly men as well. So here I was, doing A-level maths. I had a woman teacher. I always remember, you know, we had a head teacher who was very strict and you weren't allowed to wear earrings not children or teachers and she would run into our maths classroom and like slam the door behind her, panting because she'd just passed the head teacher in the corridor and she'd got these big, dangly earrings on and I was, wow, this is a different kind of maths teacher and she was very personable. As I said, she had us work in groups and we would discuss ideas and then she would teach us new things inside these projects. You know very much what we teach now and she did change the way I thought, both about maths and myself. So I think she's been very influential in the career I've had.
Speaker 2:I love that. And then last question how can people learn more about your work? We've those are the places I would say Strugly and for.
Speaker 1:Mathish. I have a website now, mathishorg, because I share some ideas in Mathish which are just ina black and white book and I really wanted people to have visual, nice handouts to give to kids and things. So they're on that website. So, yeah, those are the main places.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Thank you so much for your time, dr Bowler. I've just like loved this conversation, thank you. Thank you Great. I've loved it too. Thanks. The Kindled podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy to start and run an amazing micro school based on all the ideas we talk about here on the Kindled podcast. Don't forget to follow us on social media at PrendaLearn, and, if you'd like more information about starting.
