A wide range of evidence points to the need for students to have a growth mindset as they approach their learning, but recent critiques of mindset have highlighted the need to change teaching approaches, to transfuse mindset ideas throughout teaching. This shifts the responsibility from students themselves to teachers and schools. This paper shares a mixed methods study conducted across the US, that measured the impact of a “mathematical mindset teaching approach” shown to be effective when taught by the authors, scaled to teachers in 10 US districts. The effectiveness of this novel mathematics approach was measured using pre and post assessments during a summer intervention followed by measures of GPA change when students returned to schools. Both measures showed that a mathematical mindset approach to teaching significantly improves students’ mathematical achievement, and changes students’ beliefs about themselves and their approach to learning. Accompanying analyses of teaching and of teacher interviews give insights into the ways students change, highlighting the need to bring about shifts in students’ mindsets through a changed approach to mathematics teaching and learning.

After experiencing years of procedural teaching in K-12 mathematics classrooms, many students arrive at college with ideas about, and approaches towards, mathematics that are not helpful to their learning. Students’ prior experiences and misconceptions can then negatively impact their experiences in university STEM courses. This paper describes a short course in the “big ideas” of calculus, that offered students an approach of problem-based learning, combined with mindset messages, otherwise known as a “mathematical mindset approach”. The mixed-method study considered how a ‘mathematical mindset’ teaching intervention impacted the learning, achievement, and beliefs of incoming college students, finding that the intervention significantly changed students’ ideas about mathematics, their own potential, and the value of collaboration. At the end of the course students also significantly improved their achievement on assessments of problem solving and collaboration. Importantly the course allowed students to believe in their own potential and to approach mathematics with a growth mindset, suggesting a role for such courses in students’ mathematics pathways.

Supporting teachers to transfer their learnings from innovative professional development settings to the classroom is challenging. In this paper, we investigate a novel approach to teacher learning, in which teachers from seven US districts taught in a mathematics summer camp using a research-based curriculum centered on student reasoning and mindset messages. We examined the practices teachers did and did not implement in their camp and school-year classrooms, as well as the possible reasons for the greater or lesser changes in practice. Through analysis of classroom video, teacher artifacts, and teacher interviews, we found that teachers implemented several important practices in both camp and school-year classrooms, namely posing open tasks, giving students ample time to collaborate, and asking questions that pushed students to reason. Interview analysis revealed that the act of centering students’ reasoning and witnessing their subsequent engagement seemed to motivate teacher uptake of these practices. At the same time, however, teachers less frequently integrated mindset messaging directly into their teaching and gave space for the exploration of students’ mistakes and struggles. These findings suggest implications for innovative professional development efforts outside of the school year, as well as incremental approaches.

Many education systems aim to support teachers in moving toward conceptually oriented mathematics instruction. The 2023 California Mathematics Framework provides one example of this effort by organizing standards around big ideas and emphasizing mathematical connections. In this study, we report on an early investigation of teachers’ learning about, and efforts to enact, the framework’s big ideas approach. We followed a cohort of elementary teachers who participated in a year-long professional learning fellowship. Drawing on multiple qualitative data sources, we examine the affordances and constraints teachers experienced as they learned to teach mathematics conceptually through big ideas, as well as the ways that the framework's conceptual structure supported their instructional decision-making. Teachers reported meaningful shifts in their teaching, which they attributed to increased student engagement, a sense of instructional freedom, and growing confidence in themselves as mathematical thinkers. Classroom observations corroborated these reported shifts by documenting teachers' enactment of key features of conceptual mathematics instruction. At the same time, teachers identified important constraints, particularly tensions between conceptual teaching and procedural district assessment systems. Across teachers, the big ideas approach provided a shared conceptual structure for organizing instruction around connected mathematical ideas while supporting teachers’ professional judgment in how those ideas were enacted in classrooms. To illustrate variation in teachers’ experiences, we present four cases representing different trajectories of learning and enactment. We conclude with implications for the design of professional learning and the use of coherent conceptual frameworks to support teachers' learning and instructional decision-making.