Do you allow your students to struggle?

As a new math teacher, I always felt some students are math abled, meaning they can do math with ease while there are other students that can never learn the math. During my third year of teaching, I met my mentor and guru who shattered my beliefs by teaching the same children whom I had mentally given up and making those children explain and peer tutor others in the class. Then I realized that it’s not the students, but the way mathematics is taught to students that make them decide if they are math abled or not. Jo Boaler is one of my favorite educator/researcher that I look up to from time to time. She uses the concept of growth mindset to motivate students. In her speech given at the NCTM conference this week, she shared some of her findings from her study. Jo Boaler shared that when students think they are good in math and face a situation where they have to struggle, they decide they are not smart anymore and quit doing math. Students’ belief about themselves impacts their success in math according to Jo Boaler’s study. She is asking teachers to help students appreciate struggle and associate struggle with success versus the common belief that students have now- if they struggle in a particular discipline, then they are not good in the discipline. One another educator and researcher from Columbia University, Dr. Xiaodong Lin presented a similar idea in her address at NCTM. According to her research, students do not value struggle and see struggle as a negative trait. She uses stories narrating the struggles of great scientists such as Einstein as a motivating factor. According to her study findings, students are willing to struggle and persist to accomplish a task after having read the struggles of achievers. How many of our students at our school value struggle and do we even provide the opportunity for our students to struggle?