Rich Maths for Everyone: A Review of Jo Boaler’s Mathematical Mindsets

Right at the start in the Introduction to her book Mathematical Mindsets – Unleashing Students’ Potential through Creative Math, Inspiring Messages and Innovative Teaching, Jo Boaler describes her first meeting with Carol Dweck, soon after Dweck had joined Stanford University as a professor of mathematics education. By then Carol Dweck and her team had published enough research work about mindsets and their impact on learning. Dweck categorizes the beliefs people have about how they think about their learning abilities in two kinds of mindsets – a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. When people have a fixed mindset (yes, people can have different mindsets in different contexts), they think of their abilities as unchangeable. In contrast, when people have a growth mindset, they think they can learn by putting in more work and also most importantly their smartness can increase with hard work. Dweck’s work has shown that these mindsets change our learning behaviour and hence our learning outcomes