Last month, the Founder of Mathematizing 24/7 Kendra Jacobs, and our Head of Community Engagement Dr Sam Parkes had a really good chat about what it takes to build thriving mathematical communities and support individual mathematical competence. The full conversation will be available as an episode on Kendra’s podcast ‘Beyond the Numbers’ early in 2026! Read on to get a taste of how it started…

Kendra Jacobs: So, the four pillars that create thriving math communities are identity, mindset, collaboration, and communication. Each of these pillars works in balance, like the legs of a chair. If one pillar is out of balance, the chair can’t do its job. Our community can’t thrive. As teachers, our job is always to notice and name the pillars in action and identify any imbalances so that we can strengthen those to create that holistic thriving math community.

When I talk about identity, I’m referring to each child's identity as a mathematician: the way they see themselves as doers of mathematics, their ability to feel competent and capable to think about numbers, work with numbers, and see themselves as a part of that math community with valuable ideas.

Then Mindset is one of your key words as well! For me, mindset goes back to the work of Carol Dweck and the growth and fixed mindset. For children in terms of their mathematics understanding and mindset, they really need to understand that struggle is okay, it can be productive, and when they have that growth mindset, they can persevere through challenging tasks. I’m always looking for that mindset piece, the children's willingness to persevere when things get challenging, because we know that math thinking does get challenging. We want to uphold children's mindsets towards perseverance and a growth mindset.

That brings us to the communication pillar. Communication in a math classroom relies on two different facets. I like to think about oral communication, the ability for children to talk through their ideas. We know that oral communication is foundational to their understanding of what is happening mathematically. I also like to think of their representational communication: their ability to represent their thinking on paper, through manipulatives, or through different means of representation so that the audience can make sense of and understand what is happening for that mathematician, and they can communicate their thinking through that representation if they are not physically there to tell us about it.

The last pillar is collaboration. When I talk about collaboration, I talk about collaboration between the children: children learning with and from one another because we know that at its heart, learning is social, and children take in much more from other children. I also think there is a layer to collaboration that is collaboration between the educator or the facilitator of the math thinking and the child. That is the reciprocity of the educator and the child also learning with and from one another, because as children share their thinking and they communicate with us, we learn more from them and we are able to engage in that collaboration and shift our responses to meet the child where they are at.

So that’s a short overview of those four pillars and how they all work together in that balance to create a thriving math community!

Sam Parkes: I really love those. I think they pick up on really accessible ideas about how we can create healthy cultures around mathematical learning for everybody, for teachers and students.

I love the idea of the chair legs; you need all four of them in equal weighting. I can hear so much in what you are saying in terms of some of the things that I have picked out to create what I’ve called my Four M's for getting good at maths.

So, your four pillars are about developing communities and a healthy culture around maths, whereas I was thinking about what things an individual needs to get good at maths. And it just so happened to fall quite tidily as they all start with the same letter! So, my Four M's are Motivation, Mindset, Mathematical Thinking, and Memory. The image in my head is more like a Venn diagram of these four things. And in the middle, where all the circles intersect is a competent, confident mathematician.

I’m going to start with Mindset because that is the one that overlaps most with your four pillars. For me, Carol Dweck's work about growth and fixed mindset and resilience is in there. I’ve also pulled identity into mindset because I am thinking about a learner’s beliefs. What do I believe about myself? What is my mindset about myself? What are my beliefs about the subject? And how do those two things interact? It is not just my learning mindset, but what is my whole mindset about myself as a mathematician and math as a subject, and how those things match up.

I suppose for me, where that overlaps with what you were saying about resilience and perseverance, is in Motivation. How motivated am I to care? How motivated am I to put the effort in, and keep going when things are hard, when I hit those blockers, when I am stuck, when I am confused? The overlap between mindset and motivation is probably identity because it depends how I see myself, how I view myself. Do I view myself as one who has the right to do these things? Am I entitled to this mathematical understanding? If I feel there is an element of shame attached to my mathematical learning, I am less likely to feel motivated to do it. All those psychological factors start kicking in.

Mathematical thinking captures so much. Everything you were saying about representation and communication—it is all the ways that I have a conversation with myself as a mathematician. How do I make sense of what is in front of me? I suppose reasoning would be the closest synonym for that mathematical thinking. Again, that overlaps with motivation. It overlaps with my mindset.

The last one is Memory. I thought long and hard about including memory because I worry that memory is often associated with just recall. There are real difficulties and tensions around the idea of what learning is and how much of learning we would actually define as memory, what I can remember. I included it because I want to have conversations with people about different types of memory, different ways of remembering. What is it that makes mathematics memorable to the individual? If I’m thinking at the middle of that Venn diagram is my mathematician, what influences my memory of the bits of maths? For me, it is all about bringing everything together: connections, relationships, representations, words - how I bring to mind the things that I have seen before in a way that is useful and meaningful for me that I can use moving forwards.

This is much more than superficial recall - it’s deep, memorable. We talk about "sticky learning" in the UK. That is what I mean by memory. I don’t mean that you have to have a good memory to be a good mathematician. I mean that to be a good mathematician, I have to be supported to develop my mathematical memory. All these things feed into that. That is the four M's.

Kendra Jacobs: That memory reminds me of the work by Pam Harris and how she talks about how we have to own our facts. When you are talking about that memory, that’s what I’m thinking about: children's ownership over their own understanding. As you say, that is different than recall. Interesting.

Sam Parkes: Yes, that ownership, that agency, overlaps with my motivation, my mindset, my mathematical thinking. What choices do I have? Where is the possibility for me to navigate my own way through this? That leads us quite nicely onto games-based learning…