Uri Treisman and Better Together. Uri Treisman is not your average college math instructor. In the late 1970’s, working at the University of California, Berkeley, he developed a powerful method to reduce the the drop-out rate among African American and Latinx students in Introductory Calculus, one of the most difficult courses in the university and the gateway into math and science related professions. Treisman’s first move was to play cultural anthropologist. For a few months he shadowed African American, Asian, Caucasian and Latinx students, which led to a single revelation: the African American and Latinx students studied alone, while their Asian counterparts studied in groups—critiquing each other’s mistakes, drawing on tests handed down from one student generation to another and coaching each other until they got it right.
Armed with this discovery, he applied the Asian students’ methods—“study groups”— to all his students. Over the course of a year the grades of the African American and Latinx students increased to the level of their white and Asian counterparts, as did their drop-out rate. Their achievement gap (long before it had such a name) was eliminated. Treisman’s “secret”? Create a group that is safe emotionally—where small failures could be acknowledged openly, even celebrated.
What do Uri Treisman’s efforts tell us? Something that every math teacher knows intuitively—what Treisman calls “math is doing; math is a struggle.” Whatever one’s gifts or cultural background, when it comes to math it all comes down to perseverance and grit, and a willingness to be critiqued by one’s peers. And, by the way, Treisman did not label these study groups as remedial; he called them “honors.” Well-designed and executed groups can change students from within. This is an example of a “group approach to change.”