PDF Summary:Limitless Mind, by Jo Boaler
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1-Page PDF Summary of Limitless Mind
If you believe that some people are naturally smarter, that you’re born with inherent aptitudes and weaknesses, and that if you struggle to understand a subject then you’re not cut out for it, then everything you know about learning is wrong. In Limitless Mind, math educator Jo Boaler shows that the brain is capable of learning new skills and incorporating new ideas all throughout our lives, and that struggling to learn and making mistakes are integral parts of cognitive growth.
In this guide, we’ll explore our modern understanding of how the brain develops, the value of attitude over aptitude, and why flexible approaches to learning and teaching are more productive than older, more rigid practices. We’ll also examine what scientists say about brain development, what teachers and psychologists say about modern education, and the role that parents and society play in determining what and how we learn.
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Boaler says that even students labeled as “gifted” or told they have an aptitude for a particular subject can suffer from the effects of being labeled. If they believe their abilities are a fixed commodity, then when they start to feel challenged by a subject, they’ll think their talent has run out. Gifted students see any possible failure as a source of shame, so they avoid it. They’ll hide any difficulties they’re having by not asking questions and avoiding difficult tasks. Praising students for being talented or smart encourages them to not challenge themselves so they don’t risk losing their elevated status. Students segregated into high-achieving groups will also compare themselves to others and may feel like frauds if they’re not at the top of the class.
(Shortform note: “Gifted and talented” education programs blossomed during the 1960s and ’70s, spurred on by the scientific and technological competition between the US and the USSR. Long before Boaler, though, psychologists questioned the negative emotional impact of labeling students as gifted. In The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, Alice Miller pointed to depression in adulthood as a result of linking a child’s self-worth to their capacity for achievement. More recent studies show that so-called gifted children feel emotions more intensely than their peers, an experience that can be misconstrued as emotional immaturity and manifest as behavioral problems in response to isolation and parental expectations.)
But how do you overcome a lifetime of being taught to believe your talents and intelligence are fixed, and how do we keep from passing these same beliefs along to our children? Boaler insists the key is to adopt the belief that you can learn anything. This isn’t merely a case of wishful thinking—research shows that your beliefs about learning have a direct impact on the way your brain functions. People who adopt the attitude that they can learn show heightened levels of brain activity compared to those who believe their mental acuity is fixed. Plus, if you reframe your attitude toward being challenged by a subject so that you view it as a process of growth instead of a sign of weakness, it will change the entire way you approach learning.
(Shortform note: The psychological power of reframing your outlook reaches far beyond its educational applications. In Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins presents reframing as a fundamental tool of self-motivation. He explains that self-limiting beliefs restrict many of the decisions you make and hold you back from many opportunities for growth. Once you identify your negative self-beliefs, whether in Boaler’s realm of education or in other areas, you can question those beliefs, challenge the assumptions they’re based on, and take measures to change your conceptions of yourself in ways that are more beneficial.)
Boaler says that changing your attitude toward challenges and failures is the first step toward broadening your horizons. Instead of approaching failure with judgment, see it as a sign that you’re on the right track. Just as physical exercise can be painful and exhausting, so too is struggling with a problem or a concept a sign that you’re working your brain’s metaphorical muscles. Teachers and parents can reframe students’ fears about a subject by reminding them that just because they don’t understand it yet, it doesn’t mean that they won’t with hard work. Self-doubt is a natural part of learning, so students and teachers must all understand that making mistakes should be valued as an essential educational tool.
(Shortform note: While Boaler focuses on the role of teachers and parents in fostering healthy attitudes toward learning and problem-solving, television is another avenue for introducing this message to children. Many children’s programs today are built on the premise that anyone can learn anything and that perseverance through difficult problems is a vital part of the learning process. One such show is Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, in which one character famously tells another that being bad at something is just the first step to eventually being good at it.)
Different Approaches
While it’s important to adopt a positive attitude toward learning and accept mistakes as part of the process, it’s also important that students be encouraged to approach learning and problem-solving from multiple directions, not just the techniques and interpretations drilled into them by repeating what’s in textbooks. To do this, our education system should place a higher value on conceptual knowledge than rote memorization, and we must also foster true collaboration so that students are exposed to many ways of thinking.
Boaler describes conceptual knowledge as the understanding of how individual ideas relate to each other. The advantage of conceptual understanding is that once it’s achieved, it takes up less memory space in the brain than lists of memorized facts. Furthermore, understanding how different ideas relate to one another creates new avenues for problem-solving and builds a framework for the mind to incorporate even more knowledge. For example, if you were to memorize a separate list of driving directions to every place you regularly visit—the grocery store, the post office, a friend’s house—that would be a hundred times more taxing than simply building a mental map of your city and how its major roads intersect.
And yet, that’s exactly how we teach many subjects, from science and math to history and grammar. Students are made to memorize rules for reading, writing, and mathematics without being taught why the rules work. We’re teaching students to think in the hardest way possible. Boaler suggests that we focus on teaching students the core concepts underlying rules and facts so that students can reach beyond memorization and apply those core concepts in creative, flexible ways. Once they understand core concepts, they free up the mental space squandered by memorization and can progress even further.
Memorization vs. Memory
Memorization may not be as useless as Boaler seems to imply—it simply fails as a teaching tool when it’s used as the only step instead of the first step of the process.
In Make It Stick, Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel go into detail about how the brain stores skills and information into long-term memory for later retrieval. The first element, of course, is your initial exposure to what you want to learn, which can take the form of memorizing facts or the steps to a process. Doing this places the information in your short-term memory, which the authors equate to messy notes scribbled in a notebook.
The next crucial step is consolidation, a process that can take hours or days as your brain connects its short-term notes to other ideas you’ve already stored in your long-term memory. During consolidation, what started off as memorized data becomes refined and clarified as you gain a better sense of its meaning. The final step is to create retrieval cues that will let you access your new knowledge in the future. This can be done by applying it in more and more challenging situations. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel go on to explain that every time you retrieve the information, your brain makes it easier to retrieve it again in the future.
In A Mind for Numbers, Barbara Oakley offers a variety of suggestions for how to build different retrieval cues for information. These involve associating what you learn with sensory impressions, physical movements, narrative stories, or spatial impressions. Each of these memory techniques incorporates different regions of the brain, which you’ll remember that Boaler recommends you do at the start of the knowledge-forming process as well.
The final element that Boaler highlights as essential to improved learning is to increase the level of collaboration among students. As discussed before, learning is enhanced when multiple regions of the brain are involved in processing information and solving problems. Group work activates the social networking centers of the brain and gets them involved in the knowledge-building process. It also allows students to see how other students think, which promotes the growth of even more neural pathways as they incorporate and mimic the thought processes of their peers while also finding flaws in their own ways of thinking.
(Shortform note: One specific brain component that would be activated in the group work Boaler discusses are mirror neurons—nerves that fire when you witness someone else’s emotions or actions, mimicking the other person’s experience in your own mind. In The Whole-Brain Child, Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson argue that your mirror neurons use interactions with other people to form new neural connections in your brain. While Siegel and Bryson primarily look at how mirror neurons help children develop empathy, other studies show that mirror neurons can help an observer mentally model physical skills, such as those of athletes.)
Collaboration has another benefit—it lets students know they’re not alone in their struggles. Boaler says that because of current teaching methods, in which the teacher instructs and students work on their own, most students aren’t aware of the difficulties their classmates go through and falsely assume they’re the only ones with problems. By finding out about their teammates’ different approaches, students learn that if they’re stuck on a problem, there are always different angles from which to solve it. Collaboration builds a foundation for success by letting students know that it’s all right to ask for help while reducing the sense of isolation that leads many people to give up on their education.
(Shortform note: In a culture that prizes independence and self-reliance, Boaler’s suggestion to ask others for help and rely on a community for support might not come easily. In The Art of Asking, musician Amanda Palmer says that asking for help shouldn’t be one-sided—supportive, collaborative relationships are reciprocal in nature and based on mutual respect. Such collaborations also build communities, such as that between Palmer and the fans of her music or the networks between teachers and students in Boaler’s classrooms.)
Applying the Science
It’s one thing to understand the theoretical basis of how to boost learning, but it’s another to put it into practice. Throughout her book, Boaler gives advice to parents, teachers, and school administrators about how to rethink the education system so that it can better serve the needs of its students. These include celebrating when students work through their challenges, encouraging them to freely make mistakes, using textbooks as merely jumping-off points, and guiding students through effective collaboration. Boaler concludes by reminding us that we never stop being students, and we’re capable of learning throughout our lives.
While such an understanding can help students’ self-confidence, there’s a deeper lesson to be taught. Teachers and parents need to tell students that making mistakes and working hard to correct them is the process by which the brain gets stronger. Students’ efforts must be praised, but in addition to that, teachers must offer productive guidance on how students can improve. Instead of steering students toward subjects where they’re strongest, educators should target the areas in which students have the most problems. In order to dislodge our cultural notions that having difficulty learning is something to be ashamed of, teachers and parents should demonstrate that even they don’t know it all and still have things to learn.
(Shortform note: Boaler’s discussion focuses on the classroom, where it’s the teachers’ and parents’ responsibility to help students work through their difficulties, but once you’re an adult, the duty of identifying and overcoming your weaknesses falls to you. In Ultralearning, Scott Young argues that when learning a new skill for your job or to meet a personal goal, you should isolate the weakest spot in your learning process and design a process to overcome it. By targeting an area that’s holding you back, pushing through and mastering your weakest area can unblock a flow of related skills and knowledge that should come to you much more easily.)
Since making mistakes is a vital part of learning, we have to stop penalizing students for not getting everything right the first time. Boaler suggests replacing fixed test scores with practical feedback on how students can improve. For example, instead of marking answers right or wrong, teachers could point out what students understand and where they still need work. However, because our education system revolves around test scores as a way to measure progress, teachers and administrators will have to work hard to implement changes that don’t punish students’ imperfections. Changing how learning is measured in schools can drive home the message that it’s the process that matters.
(Shortform note: A particularly punitive form of testing in schools are the standardized tests used to determine students’ placement in classes and eligibility for college. In the US, the No Child Left Behind Act used standardized tests as a way to determine which schools received funding, penalizing whole schools whose students underperformed. Critics of testing argue that it places too much weight on a single unit of measure, resulting in schools spending inordinate time preparing students for the test and not on actual learning of the kind that Boaler promotes. Alternatives to standardized tests include student record assessments, random class samples, and performance exams based on student projects, all of which are hard to implement.)
Another challenge teachers face is the textbooks they’re assigned, which are designed with problems and questions that promote easy answers, shallow learning, and memorization. Boaler says that math textbooks are particularly egregious in the way they present long lists of problems to be solved quickly by memorized methods, not considered deeply from a variety of angles. Her advice to teachers is to not feel shackled by the book. Instead, she suggests choosing only a handful of problems from the text and challenging students to solve them using a variety of different approaches (numerically, visually, conceptually, and so on) so that they can understand the underlying principles and form new neural connections.
(Shortform note: The problems Boaler points out with math textbooks are nothing new. In his memoir Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman recounts that when he agreed to review math textbooks in the 1950s, he was shocked that the books were full of abstract concepts with no real-world applications and would thus discourage learning instead of providing a real-world foundation for knowledge. Current studies show that in math textbooks, fewer than 1% of the exercises cover any practical use of mathematics and that many aren’t vetted for their efficacy at developing math skills.)
The final key is to teach students the value of collaboration, which goes against the grain of the stereotypical group project in which the “smartest” student ends up doing all the work. Boaler recommends that each group session begin with each student sharing their ideas. The purpose of group exercises should be to show how each student approaches a problem differently. Doing so can open up students’ eyes to the value of multiple perspectives and can even help them build connections across social, ethnic, and gender boundaries. Such activities not only grow each student’s learning, but over time they can be a step to heal divides within society at large.
(Shortform note: Boaler downplays the ways in which group projects can go wrong, particularly when one student ends up doing the brunt of the work. However, there are ways to make collaboration effective, as elaborated on by Kim Scott in Radical Candor. Writing in terms of adult collaboration, Scott lists several steps to maximizing collaborative effort, including listening to everyone in the group, debating ideas, deciding on an overall direction, and making sure that what’s decided is put into action. Teachers could use a framework similar to Scott’s to teach students how to collaborate on projects before engaging in group work.)
Never Stop Learning
Because of what we now know about the brain, Boaler reiterates that anyone can form new neural pathways, learn new skills, and explore fields of knowledge at any time in life. Implementing this idea not only helps students in school but also helps adults. Adopting the belief that you can always learn new things can help alleviate the mental decline that many people fear as they age. Recognizing that having difficulties is part of the learning process also frees you from the burden of always having to be right. When you accept that you don’t always have to be an expert and that not understanding something right away isn’t shameful, it lets you open up and ask others for help—which expands both your mind and your circle of support.
Learning Opportunities for Adults
The difference between childhood and adult learning is that unless you’re assigned training by your employer, your learning as an adult is entirely self-motivated. However, it’s been shown that self-directed learning greatly boosts your overall well-being. Among other benefits, lifelong learning keeps your brain active, helps you meet new people, and leads to greater feelings of personal fulfillment.
While many online classes are available, if you learn best while working directly with other people, you can look for workshops and classes offered by hobbyist clubs, volunteer groups, your nearest public library, and extension courses offered by your local college or university. Various types of continuing education courses can give you the training and certifications you’d need to explore a change in career.
You may even consider enrolling in college and earning a degree, whether or not you have one already. As many adults face logistical and emotional hurdles while going back to formal education, Rebecca Klein-Collins offers advice for managing them in Never Too Late. In particular, she recommends that you find a program that recognizes that the complexities of adult life are different from those of young, full-time students, and that assesses and lets you make use of the knowledge you’ve developed from a lifetime of experience.
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