Four Pillars

Description
Personal Reflection | 15 minutes

Challenging Growth is critical for developmental relationships that are not only caring but also conducive to learning and growth. More than being nice, educators must be effective in promoting students' math learning. Each of the following Four Pillars of Challenging Growth [3] is offered as both a question to reflect on your own approach to tutoring/instruction and prompts to help you more effectively Challenge Growth as you build relationships with your students. Click here to download this page as a PDF. This reflection activity can:

Help educators concretely reflect on their own teaching/tutoring strategies.
Help educators draw tangible connections between their teaching/tutoring strategies and student’s perception of Challenge Growth.

Instructions

1. Do my students experience positive feedback when doing challenging math problems?

Challenging math problems can provoke anxiety and confusion for students, so accompanying challenges with positive feedback is very important. Positive feedback is best when it's applied not only to correct answers, but also for the attempt itself regardless of the outcome (e.g., “I love how you went for the harder one” and “This is a great try.”). Positive feedback like this can help to normalize challenges students face and help them become more resilient as they continue to learn (e.g., “It's okay we can figure this one out together. It took me a long time to get to the answer too.”)

2. Do my students have a positive math self-concept?

Math self-concept pertains to students’ perception of their own abilities related to math. Math self-concept and math anxiety are related in that students with lower math self-concept often report higher levels of math anxiety. You can help increase math self-concept not only through skill development, but also by helping students see how their current learning relates to future success (e.g., “All of these practices you do on probability will really help once we get to statistics”).

3. Do my students see positive and attainable goals for growth?

It can be easy for students to be distracted by comparing themselves to others in their math learning. Positive and attainable goals help students focus on the problem at hand instead of how they compare to one another or to stereotypes in popular culture. When possible, tailor learning goals for each student.

4. Do my students experience consistently high expectations for their math learning?

It's critical to clearly communicate high expectations to all students. This is where learning happens as students feel supported to push themselves beyond their current skill level into new ideas and practices. While you can set individualized expectations for each student, it's also important to cultivate a learning environment (e.g., group norm) where students expect one another to reach beyond their current skill-level. You can also normalize challenges, mistakes, and failures as a critical component for growth instead of something to be feared and avoided.

Tips and Tricks

Group Adaptation. Discuss these questions and your responses with another tutor or staff member to reflect on ways you can adapt these Pillars in your own context. Discuss what can be implemented at the program level to foster each of the Pillars of Challenge Growth.

Repetition reinforces belief. As you challenge your students, it can be overwhelming to know when to encourage and when to challenge. One technique is to develop a few statements that you can say to your students repeatedly over the course of the tutoring program (e.g. “We are capable,” “In our tutoring program, we learn through mistakes,” etc). Short repeated phrases like these can help reinforce beliefs that help students when they face challenges in the future.

Family Adaptation. Consider sharing these Four Pillars with students' guardians and encouraging them to reinforce them in their home life as well.

Page updated

Report abuse