The Power of Mathematics, Innovation & Optimal Learning, with John Mighton

Ever wondered why some people are naturally good at math while others struggle ? Get ready to debunk the myth of the 'math gene' as we chat with one of Canada's most distinguished innovators, John Mighton. A self-taught mathematician, John takes us on a fascinating journey from his diverse background in mathematics, literature and theatre, to his innovative approach in teaching mathematics. Discover how his time as a consultant for Good Will Hunting help to shift his perspective on learning and education.

Immerse yourself in an enlightening conversation about the art of effective math teaching. We shed light on the 85% rule for optimal learning and how to create an ideal learning environment that caters to both fast and slow learners. Delight in the realization that these research-supported teaching techniques extend beyond classroom walls and significantly impact the business world. Understand how motivation plays a pivotal role in learning, particularly for those who have a hard time keeping up.

Finally, join us as we touch upon the integral role of mathematics in fostering social justice and creating an equitable learning environment. We explore the dynamics of power relationships in classrooms, delve into creating positive mindsets for learning, and stress the importance of efficient research - supported teaching methods. Learn how helping students make their own discoveries can exponentially boost their confidence and motivation and their mindset for innovation and learning This episode promises to be a treasure trove of insights for educators, students, executives and anyone intrigued by the transformative power of mathematics and innovation.

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Chapters

• 0:21 About John Mighton
• 14:15 Effective Math Teaching and Student Needs
• 20:27 Motivating Children Through Math Education
• 23:55 Challenges in Research-Based Teaching of Mathematics
• 32:41 Mathematics for Social Justice

Transcript

The Power of Mathematics, Innovation & Optimal Learning, with John Mighton

Blake Melnick
Host
00:31
Well, welcome to the first episode of season five of for what it's worth, I'm your host. Blake Melnick, my guest for this week's episode of the #ManyFacesofInnovation, is one of Canada's great innovators. His accomplishments in mathematics, literature, theatre and education are nothing short of extraordinary. He's an officer of the Order of Canada. In the field of mathematics, he's a recipient of the Margaret Sinclair Memorial Award from the Fields Institute for Research and Mathematical Science and the Adrian Pouliot Award from the Canadian Mathematical Society.

In the area of social entrepreneurship, he was awarded a prestigious Ashoka Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship, the Schwab Foundation's Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award and the Ernst Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. In the field of education, he's a recipient of the Edgerton Ryerson Award for dedication to public education and the President's Award from the Professional Engineers of Ontario. 

01:30
His accomplishments in the field of the arts are no less impressive. As an author and playwright, he's been a recipient of two Governor General Awards, a Dora Award, the Chalmers Award and the Siminovitch Prize for Literature. He's an actor and has appeared in a number of films, including #GoodWillHunting, alongside #MattDamon. And he is a sought after speaker and subject matter expert for Scientific American Mind, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and the World Economic Forum, and he's the founder of Jump Math, a charity organization dedicated to addressing student underachievement in mathematics. 

By employing a research-based approach to the teaching of the subject, jump seeks to dispel the myth, and the resulting hierarchy, that there is a math gene and certain people have it while others do not. Introducing Mr John Mighton. 

John, I'm honoured to have somebody of your background and accomplishments on the show to talk about mathematics, to talk about innovation and a number of other things. But I want to start at the beginning, and here's my first question how do you have time to sleep With all that you do? Where does sleep come in? 

John Mighton
Guest
02:45
I don't even feel I work that hard. I constantly feel a bit lazy. You know, I think I just learned to learn efficiently when I was in my twenties by a miracle actually. And I find if you just put in a little work every day, life is pretty long. You can learn a number of different fields, I think. 

Blake Melnick
Host
03:05
I had a conversation with the astronaut Chris Hatfield a number of years ago and somebody asked how can you possibly do all these things? And he said they're all the same, they're all connected. So it's not like they're disparate things I'm doing. They're all related to one another, and I think that's going to be a large part of the focus of our conversation today is how how we build that mindset to allow us to transfer knowledge from one domain to learn in another. When did you start to develop this passion for mathematics? I know you weren't a great math student. That's correct, right. 

John Mighton
Guest
03:39
Yes, I sometimes did well, I often struggled Well. What really changed my life was reading a book of letters by Sylvia Plath an American poet. 

Blake Melnick
Host
03:48
No sure. 

John Mighton
Guest
03:49
When I was around 20, her letters to her mother, and it was clear she taught herself to write by sheer determination. So she did a lot of things we wouldn't normally tell writers to do. She memorized poems, read everything she could about the structure of poetry. She even wrote imitations of poems she loved, and her early poems were quite derivative. But as she developed her craft and her understanding of the structure of poetry, she was able to finally incorporate her own experiences into her work and she became one of the most original poets of the century. So that was a revelation to me that you could actually train to learn something, or you could. There was a path you could follow to learn something. 

04:30
I started imitating her poems. Other poets gradually, by a series of accidents, ended up in theatre. I did the same thing and that really gave me the confidence to go back to math, because I'd always been fascinated by math, even though I was a bit intimidated by it. I was interested in science fiction and science and I never felt I understood the things I was reading. So I started getting into math in my 30s. 

Blake Melnick
Host
04:54
So really, you were self taught, you figured it out. 

John Mighton
Guest
04:58
Pretty much, yeah, yeah, that's right. 

Blake Melnick
Host
05:01
As you were talking, I was thinking about how similar you seem to Matt Damon's character Will from Good Will Hunting, who was portrayed as a self taught math genius. How realistic is this portrayal? 

John Mighton
Guest
05:12
Well, the level he's at is not realistic, I think. But to teach yourself like that is. The writers of the movie were very generous. They let me add a little monologue in the middle of it to counterbalance that idea that you have to be born with genius, where I just talk about the fact that many people don't get teachers who believe in them. They never get a chance to see how smart they can be Right. So I was really grateful that they. Let me say that, because what's realistic about the movie is that he was able to teach himself Right If you have the confidence and you have efficient means of learning. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people won't gain that confidence or learn how to learn efficiently unless they get some guidance, Right, Right. 

Blake Melnick
Host
05:54
Well, what was that whole experience like and how did you get involved in that film? 

John Mighton
Guest
05:57
Well, I was supposed to be the math consultant. I was a serious, serious miscommunications. They actually hired my old physics professor. But I, you know, established a good relationship with the director and I think he put me in the movie when he realized there was miscommunication and I think I don't know why. I think maybe he wanted a real mathematician in the movie or he liked my point of view and what was the experience like? 

Blake Melnick
Host
06:20
Was it a positive one for you? Did you have any influence on the script and the direction of the film? 

John Mighton
Guest
06:27
It was a very positive experience and terrifying. Terrifying because I really hadn't acted seriously before that, so I was just terrified I'd mess up on screen. But at one point Stellan Skarsgård said to me, do you want some lines? And we started improvising and that was really fun. It was much easier than doing scripted lines Right, and so we did create some extra scenes and lines that weren't in the movie, and that was tremendous fun. 

Blake Melnick
Host
06:53
What was it like working with Matt Damon? 

John Mighton
Guest
06:55
It was great. The assistant director, I think, said that was the nicest group he'd ever worked with and that's really the atmosphere on set and they were really welcome. The improvisations were very encouraging. It was a great experience. Matt Damon also. I met him at the World Economic Forum because I won an award from the Schwab Foundation. 

Blake Melnick
Host
07:16
Right. 

John Mighton
Guest
07:18
And I was so impressed by the work he's doing around water security and getting people access to water. He's an unbelievable social entrepreneur himself. 

Blake Melnick
Host
07:30
Well, it was a great film, inspiring, highly motivational, as were a number of films in this genre Finding Forester, Dead Poets Society because each of these films illustrate young people's potential, even in the face of some pretty insurmountable odds and, much to your earlier point, john, in each case all they needed was someone who believed in them and was willing to take an interest and guide them towards realizing their true potential. From the case of Goodwill Hunting, the film also makes the point that intelligence, particularly in mathematics, along with a mindset for learning, are great socioeconomic equalizers. So this is a perfect segue into our discussion about innovation and, specifically, the importance of mindset. But as a lead into this discussion, everything I've read that you've written has a central tenant or underlying theme. You don't believe our current education system places enough emphasis on research in the learning sciences, especially as it relates to the teaching of mathematics, and this has had a cascading impact both on student performance as well as on motivating students to pursue careers in mathematics. 

John Mighton
Guest
08:39
Yeah, I think there's several problems. It's quite a complicated issue, but we vastly underestimate kids' ability in math. 

08:47
There's new research in the hard sciences and neuroscience suggesting that math should be accessible to every brain even more than reading. Reading is much harder than math, but we somehow make math hard. So that's one problem. We can't keep underestimating kids. We've got to look at what they're really capable of. We have to look at the impact of hierarchies in the classroom. As early as grade one, kids compare themselves and decide if they're in the inferior group. They just give up. Their brains stop working efficiently. No one is taking account of the impact of these hierarchies on the lower half of the class. It just sets up a barrier for them that's almost insurmountable, because once they start to develop those anxieties about their abilities, it just becomes a vicious cycle. And then the most serious problem is we're not really looking at the research on how people learn efficiently. I can give you one example that people probably wouldn't even believe, but there's been articles published in Science Magazine and other really great scientific journals for a couple decades now confirming what I'm about to say, and no one's aware of this research. 

09:52
Every textbook or program that I've reviewed in North America is based on the idea that kids learn to be good problem solvers by grappling with a lot of real-world complex. They call that authentic, rich. It's hard to argue against that because the opposite would be inauthentic and poor problems. But basically real-world problems that are often language-dense, complex, have multiple levels. People think that's the best way to teach. Problem solving is just give kids a lot of those problems. But there's an article in Science Magazine that came out in 2008, and the title is the advantages of abstract examples in math instruction and there's research going right down to preschool suggesting that often it's better to start with a more abstract example and move to the concrete, or that even if kids benefit from the concrete materials, it's good to fade to abstract as quickly as possible. No one's aware of that research and all these programs are built on and that's connected to the hierarchies, because if you're not teaching efficiently then you just exacerbate those hierarchies. But a lot of people aren't aware of that research. 

Blake Melnick
Host
10:58
Well, it's interesting you say that and it is so logical and you mentioned this in our pre-call and since then I've been reflecting on things I've taught and things I've learned in my life. 

11:07
So let's take the golf swing as an example. No instructor would suggest you teach golf by standing in front of a student making a perfect golf swing and then saying to the student hey, swing like this, hit the ball into the hole 400 yards away in four strokes or less. Instructors break down the elements of the golf swing for novice students into bite-sized chunks here's how to hold the club, here's how to line up your body to the ball and the target, and so on. The instruction is typically done on a golf range which provides consistent and replicable conditions for each shot. Once the student has mastered the individual elements of the golf swing and gained confidence through the mastery of each step, including a basic understanding of the physics behind the golf shot, can they actually begin to develop proficiency for the game and then to consider things like judging club selection for different types of shots, knowing how far they can hit each club, and then they can begin to focus on developing a strategy for the game. 

John Mighton
Guest
12:08
Yeah, and the analogy for the other approach would be here's a good, real, rich world, authentic problem. Score par on this hole Right, Because if that's going to motivate you, it'll make you never want to golf again. 

Blake Melnick
Host
12:20
That's probably true. So taking a more abstract approach to the teaching of mathematics before jumping to these rich, authentic problems does make sense in an ideal teaching and learning environment, but I want to talk to you about the role of the teacher in this process. As you know, I taught for many years in the K-12 sector and during those years there were two educational approaches that were endorsed by ministries of education that teachers were required to follow. One was de-streaming the idea that students, regardless of their skill and knowledge, have the right to an equitable learning outcome, and if they were placed within a classroom with students of various abilities, they would rise to meet the level of the best students and therefore meet the academic requirements for that grade level. The second was whole language the theory that you didn't need to teach reading and writing using an abstract approach, in other words, the elements of grammar, sentence structure, et cetera. Students would learn these simply by being engaged in the process of reading and writing. 

13:21
And neither of these approaches were particularly successful, largely because they didn't reflect the realities of the student and teacher lives both within the school setting and outside. Teachers were required to address the entire learning needs of a large classroom of students with a vast range of abilities, while trying to adhere to a prescribed curriculum which assumed a certain level of mastery and knowledge by the students. Really an impossible task for the teachers, who were also dealing with the emotional needs of their students, the socioeconomic disparity and the multitude of additional non-teaching related duties outside the classroom. So, as a result, teachers were forced to focus their teaching efforts at the middle, ignoring the needs of the students at the top end of the class and those at the bottom, and I personally remember struggling with this issue while I was teaching. 

14:09
During this period, whole language didn't work because students were not reading and writing in their spare time. The 90s saw the rise of the worldwide web and the much music generation. Students were spending much more of their free time watching screens and being passive learners. I guess this is a roundabout way to my question. With all these challenges, how did teachers address the learning needs of all students in a math classroom while actually advancing their own practice in the teaching of mathematics? 

John Mighton
Guest
14:41
Well, thankfully in math there are optimal pathways where, if you catch the kids who are at the lower end, you can very quickly bring them up without boring or holding anyone back. I know that's a radical claim, but we've shown it over and over again. I'll give you an example of how you could teach something more abstractly and also how you could keep kids in an optimal learning zone, which again scientists are finding is where you're about 85% proficient. There's an article in Nature Communications called the 85% Rule for Optimal Learning, or it's called the Goldilocks zone. It's a zone where it looks a bit hard, but it's not too hard. The surprising thing is you can do that with a whole class If you take account of the scientific research and you have an optimal way of teaching something. 

15:26
I can give you an example. In grade 3 and 4, kids deal with part-hole problems. You might have five green marbles, three blue marbles and you want to know the total or the difference. Often teachers just give kids lots of word problems and tell them underlying keywords like more. When kids see the word more, they think add, but it could mean subtract. 

15:45
It's not a really good guide it depends on who has more, rather than just giving lots of word problems. We start differently. We give kids a little grid of 10 squares in a row and 10 squares in a row At the side. We just say five green, three blue and they just have to shade in squares to represent the amount. They just get little bars and they can see the difference in the length of the bars. 

16:07
That's not rote, because a teacher can challenge them. They give the problem and say draw a picture. Then the teacher can say you got that. I'm going to give you something harder. What if you had 10 in total and 7 of 1? So they would have to draw 7 and count on. 

16:21
The teacher just makes the kids feel like they're constantly making these discoveries. We keep them in that little world until they have complete mastery and can switch between the problem types. You also might have the part and the difference. The point is the kids are doing the thinking, so it's not rote, but they're kept in that zone of optimal efficiency of learning. You completely take away the hierarchies because the kids don't have to read. They can read green and blue. They don't have to have great number sense coming into grade 4. They can draw a picture. So you've equalized the classroom. Then what happens? We've seen this over and over again Kids wake up. Kids you think are incapable of learning suddenly become the fastest kid in the class, because they can show off in front of their peers, and so that excitement is amplified by the excitement of the whole class. 

17:07
Durkheim  called it collective effervescence. And then I was doing a demo lesson once where the observing teacher said those kids pumping their hands must be your high flyers. And the teacher said no, they've never spoken in math class before. That can happen in literally 10 minutes with the kids. What do you do about the faster kids? First of all, if you're teaching that way, you need a few minutes, usually just to catch someone who's not getting something. So here's a perfect bonus question. I'll give you a bonus question. I'm a mathematician. I can't, I will not be able to give you the answer right now, so you can try. You've got 20 marbles. Eight more of them are green. How many blue have no idea. I'd have to guess and check or draw a picture. That's a perfect one to slow down your fast kids. So I'm not saying you give every kid exactly the same work. 

Blake Melnick
Host
17:52
Right. 

John Mighton
Guest
17:53
There'll always be kids who finish early, but those extra questions are just small variations and that they actually motivate even the weaker kids to speed up so they can Get their bonus questions. Once the kids learn to switch between all the problem types and identify and you start to introduce more language and they get up to full word problems. 

18:09
If anyone wants to try an experiment, run two conditions. One, they just do word problems underlying keywords and stuff, or they do that more structured approach and more abstract. In the beginning those little grids can represent anything. There are marbles, but they could become fish or anything. And that's what I mean by a more abstract approach, an approach that keeps kids in that zone of productive struggle, which is very narrow at first. 

Blake Melnick
Host
18:33
I want to pick up on a couple of things you said. Number one the 85% rule. That research has permeated the business world, where if you get your employees working at 85% of their potential capacity, they're going to be more productive. If you tell people like I want 100% effort here, at 100%, it's the laws of diminishing returns, Too much to do, too much in people's heads and productivity declines as a result. So this is research that has gone beyond the walls of academia. 

19:03
It hasn't, unfortunately it hasn't, but it's one of those misconceptions that we carry with us in our lives. I remember people always telling me give it 110% play. In reality, if I gave it 110%, the end result wouldn't be that good. 

John Mighton
Guest
19:20
Especially if you're learning something new. It's motivating to almost have it, to always be conquering these challenges. But if it looks too hard to you, you're just going to give up, you're going to procrastinate, you're going to find ways of wasting time. 

Blake Melnick
Host
19:34
We discussed this in our pre-call John, but mathematics for me was a mystery. I was a terrible math student. In fact, I dropped math after grade 10 as soon as I could. Math didn't make any sense to me. The teacher would put equations up on the board, Something as simple as trying to figure out the area of a rectangle and I would go why am I learning this? We have tape measures, we have calculators. I can figure this out without learning these equations. So most of the things that the math teachers were doing in the classroom really made no sense to me. There was no context. I just couldn't understand how I would apply what I was learning in the classroom in the real world and, as a result, I absolutely hated mathematics and felt that I just didn't have the math gene. I just didn't get it. But in our discussions you were saying this might not have been the real reason why I was not able to be proficient in mathematics. 

John Mighton
Guest
20:27
I think that's one reason kids need to understand that math is beautiful and has all these applications, and so we certainly take them to that in the Jump Math program. But they're also motivated just by solving problems, by seeing connections, seeing patterns. If you ask them a good question and they can answer it, or if they can see a connection, if you lead them to see a connection and make a discovery, that's extremely motivated. One of our deepest motivators is Sense of Mastery. There's a business bestseller drive by. 

20:59
Daniel Pink, where the research suggests one of our deepest motivators is a sense of mastery, and so when kids can experience that, especially in front of their peers, they get really excited. Just to give you an example, I once taught a behavioral class in England in a very violent school. Kids they thought were unteachable. In grade six the first lesson was kind of applied. I taught them how to read binary codes and translate between strings of zeroes and ones in regular numbers. But they were more interested in breaking the code. They thought their little code breakers were longer and longer questions. 

Blake Melnick
Host
21:31
Future hackers. 

John Mighton
Guest
21:32
Yes, exactly. The next two lessons were just on fractions and I didn't feed them pizza or anything, we were just doing operations with fractions. I didn't show them any applications, I was just showing the beauty of this mathematical structure. On the third lesson, when we came in, these kids cheered. So that shows what really motivates kids. It's not only the applications, but it's the mastery, the sense of purpose they feel when all the kids are enjoying something, this sense of awe or purpose when you're part of a group that's all doing well and thinking the same things. Those are also motivators and those are things most people wouldn't believe, because no one can imagine equalizing a classroom. No one can imagine that kids would get excited just about abstract math and solving these challenges, because they've never seen it. 

Blake Melnick
Host
22:21
Well, in the context of my experience, my confidence level around mathematics just plummeted because I didn't feel I really understood it. I didn't get that initial mastery that you've just been talking about, and I felt the teachers were always teaching to the people that did get it and I just kept falling further and further behind. I lost interest and determined that I was just not inherently good at mathematics. 

John Mighton
Guest
22:46
Fortunately people survive that, but there's a lot of kids who never recover from that really. 

Blake Melnick
Host
22:51
Yeah. 

John Mighton
Guest
22:51
In terms of the careers that aren't available to them or that huge loss of confidence that makes them reluctant to learn anything, and it's a common story. 

Blake Melnick
Host
23:00
I've talked to so many people who are exactly the same as me. They just said I didn't get it, I didn't like it, I couldn't get inspired by it and I didn't do well in it. And it's more common than most people perhaps think. And it's a bit scary given our world and given the advances in technology and the need for mathematics and I think that need is increasing. And I had a chance to look at the recent test scores and math and they're touting it as being a great success because it's up 2% from the last time they did it. But it's still abysmal. It's still hovering at that 50% level. That's nothing to be proud of that's right. 

John Mighton
Guest
23:41
In the past decade, scores have plummeted in Ontario, so it shows that what we're doing isn't working, but the same ideas keep getting circulated. 

Blake Melnick
Host
23:53
So that's the next part of our discussion. You've said there's not enough research or evidence-based research to inform the teaching of mathematics in schools. So the question is why? Why are we not looking at the research to drive the practice? 

John Mighton
Guest
24:11
That's an even more complex question. I think it's partly because in education faculties people often come up with lots of great ideas for ways of teaching, for resources, things like that, but there's not a tradition often of testing with control groups or some kind of rigorous conditions. And so if those ideas sound good and they often are I'm not criticizing education faculties but if they sound good, the commercial industry is really good at giving people what they want. So if a fad takes hold of some idea or some charismatic educator manages to convince people that an approach is good, then the commercial industry is really good at taking that and creating a fantastic product, a very sticky product, embedding people in the system that will sell that product. And that's why I think it's hard to ever rise above these ideas and test things, because it's not part of the makeup of the system to actually test things before you ask teachers to do them. 

Blake Melnick
Host
25:12
Right and, as you say, it's a very complex issue because you have lots of stakeholders, from the publishers to the unions, to the faculties of education. It's a complex thing to change that mechanism or to change those structures in the way in which they operate. 

John Mighton
Guest
25:27
And I think there's a problem that goes well beyond the school system. There's a book called the Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn, and he made the point that often for a paradigm shift to happen in science the old guard has to die off. They have tremendous power and there's tremendous inertia, even in science where there's very strong evidence. So imagine in systems where you don't have that level of evidence or rigor. Then those power relationships are even more important. And then that's made even worse by the fact that most people believe that you have to be born with a mouth gene. So we accept these terrible results because we think it's the best we can do. 

Blake Melnick
Host
26:05
Do you think it would help if teachers had more training as researchers so that they could do their own research in the context of the teaching of whatever subject it is? But in the case of mathematics, If they had a background in research and knew actually how to conduct research and were able to use themselves as a test subject, so to speak, in their classes, would that help? 

John Mighton
Guest
26:25
I think the most important thing is if they had enough of a background that they could read the papers, they wouldn't necessarily have to conduct their own research if they were just given access to the papers, like that article in Science Magazine I mentioned. It's two pages long. Anyone could read it. Even if you don't understand the statistics, you can understand the implications of the study. So teachers could easily have access to that research and then they might be inspired by that to experiment in their classroom, to really rigorous research. You need a control group, you need a big enough group, but they could do action research that's well informed by the research that they're reading. So that's one of our missions at Jump is to get that research in the hands of teachers and let them try different things. 

27:11
The lesson that I mentioned where the teacher said are those kids your high flyers? We had ten teachers observing that. That lesson is based on a couple principles any teacher could try. Go to the level of the lowest kid in the class. Give them something they can do, like if they can't add, let them count up on their fingers. But then give them something really hard looking. Get them to read big numbers, which is really easy because if you can read numbers in the hundreds, you can read into the thousands and millions. The kids go nuts in grade two or grade three. If you give them these big numbers to read Then their attention is riveted and you can let them add vertically with their fingers if necessary. They suddenly think they're capable of doing anything. Then you can give them puzzles where you leave numbers out. In 40 minutes you can see the impact of equalizing the classroom, starting at the right level scaffolding. You can see the impact of all those principles in 40 minutes. So teachers should be empowered to do that kind of action research for sure. 

Blake Melnick
Host
28:02
I've done a lot of research with teachers and learning in classrooms. When I was with the Institute for Knowledge, innovation and Technology, leveraging the work of leading researchers, dr Marlene Skardamelia and Dr Karl Breiter, who developed the theory of knowledge building, articulated through the knowledge building principles, their seminal work, surpassing ourselves, examined the mindset of classroom teachers. They identified certain teachers that continually try to move beyond their current best practices and many of the practices they were taught during teachers college. They're trying new things all the time. They're experimenting. In fact, they are engaged in action research. They're motivated to keep improving student learning and advancing their own teaching skills. 

28:48
At the same time, then there are other teachers who, by and large, at least according to the ministry requirements, are doing the required job of a teacher. They're engaging their students in the classroom. They're typically having them sit in rows, the students are doing busy work, the teacher is providing some feedback when students come to the front of the classroom, and so forth. They're following the curriculum. They're preparing students to do well on the provincial tests, but they're not really moving beyond the basic requirements as dictated by the Ministry of Education or by the school board. And it really comes down to mindset. Certain teachers have a mindset to continually improve their practice and others simply to fulfill the requirements of the job description and meet the expectation of external bodies. Do you see this as a problem? 

John Mighton
Guest
29:37
I think there's a couple issues there. From my experience, I've worked with thousands of teachers. The significant majority of them actually do want to learn and to keep getting better and they really want to help their students almost all teachers. The problem is, if you're constantly given resources and forced use methods that have no basis and evidence, you get discouraged you get worn out. 

30:02
You keep seeing the same thing over and over again. That's why our teachers guides, we literally scaffold it for the teachers so they can learn the math. The other problem is some math teachers, through no fault of their own, are anxious about math or don't know it. 

30:15
And they don't have time to pull stuff off the internet or find high quality programs. So we created guides for them where they could learn the math as they taught it, because there's not enough time outside of school to do that work. And then we try to make it as easy as possible. We create these slides where they can project all the key questions, the exercises, the diagrams, because they don't have a lot of time to prepare. So we're constantly trying to make it easier and easier. This year in some of our slides we even gave them lists of essential lessons. 

30:41
Because, they don't have time to make those choices even. You also have to inspire them or show them that there's hope, and so we start with confidence building exercise, where they can immediately see the whole class getting excited. We've been so encouraged by what we've seen with teachers. When they are allowed to experiment, to try new things and to use principles and instructions that work, they come alive. They'll volunteer for us, they'll train other teachers. It's really exciting to see that happen. 

Blake Melnick
Host
31:11
You made a good point there. When teachers see students getting excited and wanting to learn more, then they get more excited to change perhaps the way they teach; to try to build on that early success. So it seems to me that at the heart of what you do and Jump Math is this notion of getting people to develop a level of self confidence, feeling that they are capable of understanding math and being a good math student. Do you think everybody can be a good math student? 

John Mighton
Guest
31:43
Almost without exception, yeah. 

Blake Melnick
Host
31:44
And. 

John Mighton
Guest
31:45
I've taught some very severely learned disabled kids. The very first student in jump when it was at the club. They thought her IQ was 70. She was testing a grade one level in grade six. She couldn't even skip count by two. So I built these confidence builders for her and so on. After three years she went into academic grade nine math. So she caught up nine years and then she skipped here and finished academic grade 10. And I'd never seen a kid that challenged I'd been tutoring and so on. So what I've seen is a vast majority of kids can learn math. The exceptions are they have to have such a severe disability. But even those kids love math and they benefit from it Like it literally rewires their brains. 

32:28
They become better thinkers, more confident. So I think math is for everybody, but the vast majority of kids should be able to really excel at the subject If they had a number of years in an equalized classroom with efficient methods of teaching. We all think math is the hardest subject, sometimes based on our experiences. But we've thrown away this tool for social justice. It's a subject where you can equalize the classroom quickly and make everybody feel smart and make everybody feel like they can persevere in the face of challenges. And if you have the opposite approach, one that creates those hierarchies, you undo all the social emotional work you're trying to do. You can tell kids they can get better through practice if they have positive mindsets, but then you show them in the next breath that they can't. You contradict everything you're doing if you're not teaching efficiently. 

Blake Melnick
Host
33:14
This concludes part one of the Power of Mathematics, innovation and Optimal Learning with my guest, john Mighton. Please join us next week for part two, where John and I discuss his book All Things being Equal. We examine the power of mathematics to address a root cause of the growing socioeconomic divide in North America Intellectual Inequality. For what it's worth.