Season 10, Episode 9

Thinking Critically and Creatively in Math

Apr 15, 2025 | Creativity and STEM, Season 10

“I think something like 60% of kids going into STEM drop out in the first year. And a lot of the times that’s because of maths courses. And does that reduce the diversity of the people taking stem? Absolutely. And we’ve put these barriers up for kids. We put them up in school in all those years of school, and then we also put them up in colleges. And these barriers push kids out at every single stage.”

– Dr. Jo Boaler

Episode Transcription

Thinking Critically and Creatively in Math with Dr. Jo Boaler

Dr. Jo Boaler:
I think something like 60% of kids going into STEM drop out in the first year. And a lot of the times that’s because of maths courses. And does that reduce the diversity of the people taking stem? Absolutely. And we’ve put these barriers up for kids. We put them up in school in all those years of school, and then we also put them up in colleges. And these barriers push kids out at every single stage.

Matthew Worwood:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fuelling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the fields of education.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin. How can we rethink the way we teach math to make it more engaging, equitable, and accessible for all students? If you’ve ever struggled with math or wondered how mindset can transform learning, this conversation is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.

Cyndi Burnett:
Today, we welcome you to the show. Dr. Jo Bowler. Jo is the professor of Education at Stanford University and a former Mary Curie professor of Mathematics Education in England. Earlier in her career, she taught mathematics in London comprehensive schools. The author of 19 books and numerous articles, she is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has presented at the White House on Women and Girls in Education. Her latest book, mathish Finding Creativity, Diversity, and Meaning in Mathematics, explores new perspectives on the subject. She co founded U Cubed, a platform providing teachers, parents, and students with resources to inspire mathematical learning, as well as struggly, an online learning tool, and we’ll link those in the show.

Cyndi Burnett:
Notes. In 2023, she contributed as a writer to the California Mathematics Framework and was recognized by the BBC as one of eight educators changing the face of education. Welcome to the show, Jo.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Thank you for having me. I love the show. I’m really happy to be here.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Jo, we’re going to start with a question that Matt and I often get as creativity practitioners and educators, and that is, can math be creative?

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Wow. Yes. I often find that people can’t even think about what those two words mean together. And I think the most beautiful part of maths is the creativity that you can reach and see within mathematics. So, yes, absolutely, maths can be creative, and it’s really not that hard to bring out student creativity with maths, but we can chat about that.

Cyndi Burnett:
Here’s where I’d love to start with all of it, because as I was going through your book, in the first chapter, you touch upon mathematical diversity and how we might bring this into the classroom. Can we start there? Can we start with mathematical diversity and what that means and what it looks like?

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Sure. So what mathematical diversity isn’t is the narrow maths that fills classrooms. And those are questions with one answer, one method. And I talk about mathematical diversity as what happens when we open up maths and we invite students to share their thinking? How do you see this mathematical idea always brings about beautiful visualizations? How do you think about it? Valuing the different ways students think about maths and the different ways they see it, the different ways they solve it. That’s what I call mathematical diversity. If we open up the subject, we can value all of that lovely diversity in student thinking.

Matthew Worwood:
So, Joe, I kind of want to follow up on your first two answers, because can I confess that as a creativity practitioner, I recognize that creativity expands far beyond the arts, But I am one of those stereotypes that have struggled in math. I know you’re not going to like this, but struggle with that growth mindset. So I understand growth mindset. Despite understanding it, I. I still would probably say math I find challenging. I do associate math with a particular way of thinking, and I do often associate it with numbers, numerical values and the need to arrive at a similar outcome. But within your work, what I find fascinating, I’m just wondering if it’s connected to when you said math can be creative, is that it doesn’t always have to be expressed in these numerical values. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that.

Matthew Worwood:
Because the system per se, I do believe I an outcome of the system. I just don’t associate it with that. If I’m completely upfront you and most.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
People, that is how many people think about maths because of the way they’ve been taught it, that it’s numbers, one method, one answer. But actually, one of the things they know from neuroscience is mathematicians brains are different from other academic brains in they’re using visual pathways in their brain all the time. We have two visual pathways at the back of our heads. Neuroscientists have sort of mapped out that there are five pathways we can use when we’re thinking about maths. Two of them are visual. And we want to be exercising those visual pathways, but seeing maths visually, not just visually building things. So Kids can hold objects in their hands and feel and touch them. But schools have for a long time just presented numerical maths.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
And so kids don’t build up that visual thinking. Often when I ask teachers to visualize something, they just look at me and don’t know what to do. Same with students. They have no idea how to visualize mathematical ideas until we start working and sharing. So yeah, it could be completely different from that number only version of maths. And that really is important to creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
So I’d love to bring this to a practical level. So let’s just say you’re working with a teacher and they teach third or fourth grade math and they’re doing multiplication. They need to cover multiplication. And we, we know the standard way of doing multiplication, at least in the States. I can say, I remember doing like 3 times 3 is 9, 4 times 3 is 12. So that’s one way to do it. Now you’re talking about a visual way to do it. So you’re working with an educator.

Cyndi Burnett:
Teachers that are listening out there, what would you recommend? How do you even start?

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Number talks are a great way to bring creativity into maths and really help kids with number sense, which we know is so important. So multiplication, for example, you could teach us a number talk. You could ask students, how would you solve, let’s say 18 times 5 and then collect in different ways. Students approach it. So as I’m collecting those in, I draw a picture of it. So 18 times 5 can be represented as a rectangle with an area. And that area is the multiplication fact. So I could say, okay, here’s my 18 times 5 rectangle.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Somebody says to me, I did 20 times 5 and took off two fives. So I’ll now draw a 20 times 5 rectangle and show that taking off two fives. Somebody says, oh, I did. I thought, 18 times 5 is the same as 9 times 10. So I’ll draw what it makes to change that. And at first, when I first do this, I can ask students, what would that look like? How would we draw it? And they have no idea. So often I do drawings first, but students soon pick up on it. And in later number talks, I might ask students, you draw the visual in your book.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Or sometimes I might draw the visual and say, what number sentence would go with that visual. So multiplication is so easy to make into visual images. And in fact, I had a teacher contact me from Germany recently saying, I did this number talk with my students. We visualized it. And one of my students said, do you mean multiplication is really the same as area. How come nobody ever told me that? So yeah, super easy just to, I mean I always say to teachers, give me any area of maths and we will make a visual for you because we can do it with everything.

Matthew Worwood:
And I think what you’re saying here in terms of the visuals is that I’ve got three boys and of course they’re different. I don’t mean to compare the three of them, but the youngest seemed to really be comfortable with math and continues to be comfortable with math. And I think anecdotally I’m associating with the fact that he watched number plocks on YouTube and really, really enjoyed it. But I was fascinated because I would ask him these kind of mathematical problems which dare I say is probably the limit of my knowledge. You know, once they get into second and third grade. I’ve really struggled with my kids homework. But he was able to kind of like just respond really quickly. But I would see him, I would, I could, it’s almost like I could see the way he was problem solving but he was bringing those visuals of what he saw with number blocks.

Matthew Worwood:
And I found it incredibly fascinating. But now he’s kind of in this scenario where I don’t see that on the math worksheets that he’s bringing home. And so I worry he’s going to lose that a little bit. So there’s, there’s one connection I just wanted to make and I don’t know if you’ve got a follow up, but then the, the other piece that I wanted to bring up is that is part of the challenge that we’re experiencing with what I’ve just shared that in education perhaps we don’t see it is that when we’re expressing it visually, is it harder to evaluate, harder to assess? So this system to a certain extent makes it a little bit difficult, whereas if it’s presented in a numerical value, it’ easier. I know I’ve given you two follow ups there. I’m sorry, I do that a lot.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
It may be easier if you’re using a computer to evaluate kids thinking, but if a teacher is the person looking at kids thinking, I don’t think it’s any more difficult at all. I mean those worksheets kids have with lots and lots of numerical questions I share with teachers, just, you know, scrap three quarters of them and instead ask kids, okay, here’s my number question. Can I draw it? Can you calculate it? Can you draw it? Can you write a story involving that question which gets kids really thinking about how it applies to the world. So engage with those mathematical ideas in multidimensional ways instead of having kids just do endless numerical calculations.

Cyndi Burnett:
One of the things that you shared in the book was around metacognition. So building on what you’re saying and really thinking through our process when we do math. And that’s not something I’ve sat in a lot of math classes, both in my own education, but also in coaching teachers. And I. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a teacher really get into metacognition around mathematics. So can you share us an example of how teachers might do that? How can they put that into practice? This point of metacognition, which I think is such a necessary skill right now, is especially with the advent of AI. So I would love for you to share with you.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Yeah, well, I think a lot of people I’ve heard over the years talk about metacognition, think that it means thinking about your own thinking. And it is partly about that. But to be metacognitive goes way beyond that. It’s really how people approach, let’s say, maths. What strategies do they use? A metacognitive person has a lot of strategies at their fingertips that they can apply to problems. And I think of it really as teaching students how to learn. I teach a course at Stanford that’s called how to Learn Maths, and it’s always oversubscribed with these undergrads who really want a different mathematical relationship. But I teach kids.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
There are different ways you can approach maths problems. A lot of people think, well, you get a maths question, your job is to answer it. They don’t think, oh, I can think about different strategies here. So I actually have a to go with my Mathish book. I have a Mathish website now called mathish.org and on there I have like, here are key strategies to help you learn maths and a little handout for teachers. So it’s really about getting kids thinking more about how to approach problems, how to approach tasks. And I really regard that to be an important job for maths teachers, particularly because of the way maths is usually taught. When I teach students maths, whether it’s middle schoolers or undergrads or whoever, I always start from the premise that they have experienced damaging maths ideas.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
They’ve had some sort of maths damage in the past. My undergrads at Stanford come to me thinking maths is just all procedures that they have to memorize. So you have to start by undoing that and helping them See maths as something different, and then amazing things happen.

Matthew Worwood:
If you don’t mind, I just want to make a quick observation. One of the things that I found inspiring is that, you know, you’ve got this passion for math. And it sounds like when the neuroplasticity or neuroscience research started to emerge, you started to get fascinated on your taking that, your knowledge, and then making that connection. And then obviously, with Caroline dewick’s work around growth mindset, you’ve kind of like formed all of these three things together. And from your interaction with those three areas, I’m just wondering is one of the big challenges that we’re facing is in terms of retention of math? Because so many students say, you know, as I said at the beginning of the show, I feel like I struggle with math, and I literally feel like it is a compartment of my brain that there’s no synapses, there’s no bridge, there’s nothing connecting to it. And so I haven’t been able to work out how it applies to every other thing that I do in my life. But so much of your work seems to be about connecting that to the larger world of problem solving. Could you talk a little bit about how you’ve kind of furthered your understanding around that area based on the neuroscience?

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Yeah, I mean, I’m glad you raised the sort of connection idea, because one of the things we know from studies of expertise is that expert knowledge is different from novices because it’s more connected. Like, they might see maths, a mathematical idea, as in the way you might see a map where you can journey around on this map, and different cities are connected to each other, and that’s how they hold knowledge. It’s this whole connected map of this connects with this. This connects with this. So we don’t give kids a connected experience of maths. I’m not surprised you don’t see it like that, Matt. We give them a disconnected, lots of procedures version of maths. And one of the initiatives I’ve been involved in in the state of California, and I also share in the book, is teachers for a long time have really been hampered by the fact that they’re given these books to teach from.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
And these books have taken these long lists of standards and turned them into little small questions. And so kids don’t see the connections. Teachers don’t see the connections. What we’ve done in California is combine lots of the standards into what we call big ideas. And if you teach to a big idea with a rich task where kids go deeply thinking about the idea, making connections, working on it for days. Then you develop this idea deeply in your brain. You develop the pathways, the connections, the synapses and it stays with you. What we have for many kids is just this quick shallow rush through different questions and that doesn’t build that connected understanding.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
So yeah, going deeply into ideas and exploring mathematics and as you get into that depth, you start to see those connections. That’s what really helps kids build up mathematical brains.

Cyndi Burnett:
There’s so much discussion right now in the US about math scores. And I’m curious based on this work that you’ve been doing, what kind of impact you’ve seen on students math abilities with this change of looking at things in a different way?

Dr. Jo Boaler:
We’ve absolutely seen that. And we have the evidence, we have the studies. I wish they were more shared with teachers so we could get broader impact. But I mean one example was we went out to the Central Valley of California, which is very agricultural. They had very low achievement from kids. And we worked with teachers for a year to show them this creative visual approach to maths, the different ways you can think about problems. And they changed inside that year to the point that their kids test scores went up significantly, particularly girls, language learners and socioeconomically disadvantaged kids. They jumped up.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
And we’ve also had schools who are moving to the ideas of the framework and they were amongst the first to move cause it only just passed last year. But when it got the ideas were starting to be shared, they started to make changes. They started doing number talks and visual maths and got amazing differences in their kids achievement in state tests. So we have all of those on our website under evidence, under news. We know that this works for kids. Really the big struggle, the big question in my career is how do we get it to more teachers?

Matthew Worwood:
And just to follow up on that in terms of these studies, could you talk a little bit if it exists on the relationship that we see in other subjects as well? So you know, you’re talking about making connections. Do we see students who experience an improvement in math outcomes as a consequence of this intervention also beginning to flourish in other subjects as well? And why is that do you think we absolutely do?

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Well, a lot of our interventions that we do have mindset at the core and we do a lot of teaching about, you know, you can learn anything, there are no limits to what you can learn and it’s good to struggle. And so when students take that on, it changes them in all their subjects. I actually have a free online class on our website, YouCubed it’s six 15 minute sessions and teaches kids about their brains, about mindset, about how to approach maths, all of the things we’ve talked about. And when we’ve studied that, what we’ve found is kids who take it at the start of the school year do significantly better a whole year later on a whole range of standardized tests. They get better GPAs, they get higher math scores, but they also get higher scores in science and English. And so it’s hard to know whether it’s the approach that we’re teaching them or the mindset messages we’re teaching them. But either way, it unlocks students and that transfers to lots of subjects.

Matthew Worwood:
So, Joe, you mentioned struggle there. And I just recently wrote a chapter and I just got some feedback to make a little bit more of the struggle with learning. Because, you know, in this chapter, I’m kind of potentially proposing how generative AI could remove some of the struggle that we might experience. And I’m just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, why it’s so important because we quite often as creativity practitioners talk about. It’s not really per se, about like, failure. I don’t always think it’s about failure. I think it’s about the struggle that we go through. And through that struggle, the outcome is those meaningful connections that also help us construct knowledge that we can apply to the real world.

Matthew Worwood:
And as you. As I just shared, I’m worried that we lose a little bit of the struggle in education. And we’re concerned about students expressing negative emotions as they struggle, and almost like we want to take it away from that. So I’m a little bit interested in your research on that and also just your general opinions about struggle in education and maybe its relationship with problem solving.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Yeah, I mean, it is very clear, I think if you look at these studies and research, that the people who are successful in life are not the people who didn’t struggle. They are the people who went through struggle and came out the other side and kept going. They learned how to deal with struggle. They learned how to keep moving through struggle. And it turns out that that’s a really important process when we’re struggling, when we’re at the edge of our understanding, making mistakes, correcting them, moving on, making more. When we’re in that space, fantastic for our brains, it’s when our brains are connecting. And so struggle’s very important. You’re absolutely right.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Teachers are trained generally to save students from struggle, to take away that experience, show them what to do, break it down into steps and that’s been something we really try and change in the education system. We know as well that other countries, China, Japan, welcome struggle, invite students to share mistakes. It’s a big part of their teaching. But in the US it’s very rare that teachers, except for those who’ve learned these good ideas. But many teachers really try not to have kids struggle. And kids often feel bad about struggling. So it’s really very important we work on that. With explicit messages with kids telling them how important struggle is, modeling for them, going through struggles, struggling yourself as a teacher and talking about it, showing them achievements that have come from struggle, all of those things really help students.

Matthew Worwood:
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Cyndi Burnett:
Curiosity to Create is a non profit organization dedicated to engaging professional development for school districts and empowering educators through online courses and personal coaching.

Matthew Worwood:
And if you’re craving a community of creative educators who love new ideas, don’t miss out on their creative thinking network. Get access to monthly webinars, creative lesson plans, and a supportive community, all focused on fostering creativity in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So Jo, this sounds amazing and it makes me actually want to go and take one of your classes. Like that would be a dream. But you do have things that you could do on your website.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
So yeah, we have online classes on our website and we also the professional training we do, which is usually two days. You can do that online as well as in person.

Cyndi Burnett:
Great. But tell us, what are the challenges to teaching math creatively?

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Well, if you’re a teacher in a district that requires you use textbooks all the time and then doubles down on that with pacing guides with tests that match the textbooks, it’s hard for teachers to feel they can break out of that system and invite creativity. Invite students to think. Teachers often think they don’t have time to do that. They think, oh, I’d love to have students go in depth, but I have all this content to get through. So this was really a big part of moving to a big ideas approach, that it frees up teachers time if you don’t think you have to cover all these isolated things. But you can see we’ve reformed the standards in maths and you can find this on our website and the California Department of Ed. So every teacher has maybe eight big ideas in their grade level. And what we say to teachers is, here’s a good beginning.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Make sure for those eight ideas, kids have really rich, deep, creative experiences where they have time to make those connections, build things mathematically. And even if that only happens for those eight big ideas, it will give students an important foundation for their whole year of learning. So there are challenges, certainly in the system, but I also think there are ways forward even with those. I mean, the amazing teachers we work with, we have videos of them on our website. They’re in exactly the same kind of districts, public schools in the US and they’ve found ways to give students a really different maths experience.

Matthew Worwood:
I have a really quick random question just out of curiosity, because you mentioned teachers in my network, small network with math teachers. I don’t want it in any way saying there’s any kind of scientific support for this. But I feel like some of the teachers that I’ve spoken to, we get into their story about why they became a teacher and a math teacher. Funny enough, they seem to express a struggle in math. Like they found math difficult, but then as they found a way through that struggle, they then wanted to, I suppose, almost give back. Am I just kind of like seeing something that’s not there, or is that something that you perhaps have also noticed with math teachers?

Dr. Jo Boaler:
I think everybody has gone through struggle in maths. It’s really been very hard to find somebody who’s never struggled with maths. So I would bet every maths teacher has struggled and learned how to come through that struggle. And great, if they’re reflective enough to think about that and to see how they went through that and how important it is. So, yeah, I definitely think we would find that, that all teachers have struggled with maths, and if they were to reflect on that, it would be helpful. There’s a really good book written for mathematicians, I think, by the Maths association, the MAA of mathematicians, sharing how much they’ve struggled in their journeys and doing maths. And one of my favorite mathematicians, Steve Strogatz, who’s at Cornell University, talks about how in his maths degree he got the lowest grades of any grade of any courses he was taking. And it was really hard for him because it wasn’t visual, it wasn’t creative, but he kept going.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
And now he’s one of the leading mathematicians in the world. And, you know, his papers on maths are in the top 100 most cited scientific papers in the world. And he talks openly about how much he struggled to get there. So I think that’s great. We need to talk about it more. And if your friends are talking about it, that’s a really good thing.

Matthew Worwood:
And also things I think, hopefully people listening if they’ve got colleagues who are in math to share that. And as you said in a previous answer to your question, part of that modeling part is being open about that struggle. I wanted to kind of transition a little bit to a conversation around diversity, which is something that you talk about as well. But if you don’t mind, I’m going to premise it with one of the concerns I have a systematic challenge and a little bit in higher education, shall I say, is that the interdisciplinary nature of math, and we see it obviously more in the STEM subjects. But like so many of our students, if they want to do computer science or physics or chemistry, they kind of, in that first year, even business, they find themselves in a scenario where they have to take a collection of different math classes. And I see so many students have been unsuccessful, shall I say, and therefore they change major and they find themselves in something completely different. And then so it opens up the question for me is that, does that mean that because of the system, only certain types of students are finding their way to these STEM careers or to kind of like math orientated careers? And what impact is that having again, from maybe a diversity perspective?

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Yeah, so true, so true. I think something like 60% of kids going into STEM drop out in the first year. And a lot of the times that’s because of maths courses. And does that reduce the diversity of the people taking stem? Absolutely. And we’ve put these barriers up for kids. We put them up in school in all those years of school, and then we also put them up in colleges. And these barriers push kids out at every single stage we mentioned the film counted out. That is what the film is about.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
Why are we pushing kids out of maths over and over again at all these stages? So we end up with a very narrow group of people going forward. They don’t reflect the diversity of our country or our world. And that is a serious problem. You might say that that is why some people are fighting to keep the system the same. Because when we open it up, we do get a more diverse group of people going forward. But that’s maybe my cynical take on some of the people trying to block maths change.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, Jo, this was such a great conversation and we really appreciate you coming on today to talk about your work. Before you go, we ask all of our guests if they would share their most creative educational experience and we would love to hear yours.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
You know, that’s such a hard question because I always want to Engage kids creativity with maths. I would say I have a TED talk that people might want to watch where I pose what is usually a algebraic question that’s usually just symbols. And I ask people how they see this pattern. And in this TED talk I share all the different ways people see it. And it’s so beautiful and so creative. The different ways people see this single algebraic pattern. And of course these different ways they see it, the different visuals they come up with help them understand what’s going on in the pattern in ways that just moving symbols around in algebra don’t do. So there are many examples of that.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
We have lots on our website of number visuals. You can Google number visuals on our website, see what comes up, their visual ways of showing all the different numbers and they’re all incredible and beautiful. So maybe that one.

Matthew Worwood:
I love it because I could, I can literally kind of see there was something you said, but it’s like as opposed to worksheets, seeing it almost like a project. And I can almost see students kind of, you know, adopting some of the project based learning models that we have where the culminating experience is them standing up, delivering a presentation. It’s of the visual. They’re explaining their visual, they’re explaining its relationship with the math concept. Maybe you then throw in a little bit of what part of the process did you find most struggling and how did you overcome it? And, and I think just listen to what you had said some something earlier that does not feel like an add on. It feels like something that’s super engaging and hopefully maybe some math teachers that are listening could potentially with the resources that you reference, look at doing something like that. And in addition, I think that’s also a great way to celebrate all of the different achievements and diversity in thought because I suspect we’re going to get lots of different typ of visual ways of expressing that concept. So I absolutely love it.

Matthew Worwood:
It got me really, it almost got me thinking about I could do good at math. It almost got me thinking I could do good at math. Yay.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
That’s a great achievement. I hope so, Matt. And yeah, I love that idea. Perfect.

Matthew Worwood:
Now Jo, we are closing out now. The music might be coming up, but I do want to quickly ask you parents who are struggling to support their children’s homework in math, can we also send them to your website? Are there some stuff specific for parents and parents supporting math homework?

Dr. Jo Boaler:
We have a parent not as extensive as all the educator materials we have. We do have a parent section and what I would love is to change the homework kids are given in maths to make it a more meaningful experience or even a reflective experience we share with educators. Instead of getting kids to do more of the same, ask kids to reflect for homework. What idea were we working on today? What struggle did I have today? These are great questions. I know that wasn’t your question, though. So I would recommend that parents take the little online classes I have which says it’s a student class and it’s called how to Learn Maths. But it’s short and lots of districts have given it parents to take and that will give them ideas about how to interact with maths for their children. Oh, and we do have a parent sheet on our website with tips for parents that’s super important that tells parents sort of how to interact with their kids around maths when they’re doing homework and other things, which is in Spanish as well.

Dr. Jo Boaler:
So, yeah, lots of things to check out.

Matthew Worwood:
Fantastic. Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this episode. I think it speaks for itself. Please take a link to this episode and share it with your math colleagues because I think there’s some wonderful insights, tips, and obviously a collection of online resources to reference as well. My name’s Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. You’ve been listening to the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast hosted by Matthew Worwood and Cindy Burnett. Our creative producer is Catherine Fu. Our editor is Sam Atkins, and this episode was made possible thanks to our sponsor, Curiosity to.

Can math truly be a canvas for creativity in the educational landscape, reshaping mindsets and unlocking diverse potentials?

In this episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education Podcast, Dr. Jo Boaler delves into transforming the way we perceive and teach math, advocating for a more creative, equitable, and connected approach. Dr. Boaler, a professor at Stanford, emphasizes the importance of moving beyond traditional methods that focus solely on numerical calculation towards fostering a more holistic understanding of math’s visual and interdisciplinary nature. She highlights the significant barriers of current math education systems, which often stifle diversity in STEM fields.

By introducing big ideas and encouraging visual and creative problem-solving, Dr. Boaler argues for a learning process where students actively engage, reflect, and grow through struggle. This approach not only boosts math achievement but also reflects positively on other academic areas. The discussion touches on practical classroom strategies, the importance of struggle in learning, and broader implications for educational diversity.

About the Guest

Dr. Jo Boaler is a Professor of Education at Stanford University and previously held the title of Marie Curie Professor of Mathematics Education in England. With a career that began in teaching mathematics in London, Dr. Boaler has become an influential figure in math education, authoring 19 books and numerous articles. Her innovative work has been recognized by the BBC as one of eight educators transforming education and by delivering presentations at the White House on Women and Girls in Education. She actively engages in projects aimed at reshaping math education, notably co-founding the You Cubed platform and contributing as a writer to the California Mathematics Framework.

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Podcast Sponsor

We are thrilled to partner with Curiosity 2 Create as our sponsor, a company that shares our commitment to fostering creativity in education. Curiosity 2 Create empowers educators through professional development and community support, helping them integrate interactive, creative thinking approaches into their classrooms. By moving beyond traditional lecture-based methods, they help teachers create dynamic learning environments that enhance student engagement, improve academic performance, and support teacher retention. With a focus on collaborative learning and exploration, Curiosity 2 Create is transforming classrooms into spaces where students thrive through continuous engagement and growth.

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