In her book Limitless Mind, Jo Boaler writes about Uri Treisman, a mathematician at the University of Texas at Austin formerly with Berkeley University. While Uri was at Berkeley, he noticed that 60 percent of African American students who took calculus were failing the class. This caused many to drop out of college altogether. Uri began looking at more university data and saw that no Chinese American students were failing calculus, so he asked the question: What is the difference between these two cultural groups that seems to be causing this discrepancy?

Uri at first asked the other mathematics faculty what they thought the reason was. They came up with a range of reasons: perhaps African American students came into the university with lower math scores or an insufficient mathematical background; perhaps they were from less wealthy homes. None of these suggested reasons were correct. What Uri found, through studying the students at work, was that there was one difference—the African American students worked on math problems by themselves, whereas the Chinese American students worked collaboratively. The Chinese American students worked on their assigned math problems in their dormitories and in the dining halls, thinking about them together. By contrast the African American students worked alone in their dormitory rooms and when they struggled on problems, they decided they were just not “math people” and gave up. Uri and his team set up workshops for the more vulnerable students, including students of color. They created what Uri describes as a “challenging yet emotionally supportive academic environment.” In the workshops students worked on math problems together, considering together what it would take to achieve at the highest levels on different problems. The academic improvement that resulted from the workshops was significant. Within two years, the failure rate of African American students had dropped to zero, and the African American and Latino students who attended the workshops were outperforming their white and Asian classmates. This was an impressive result, and Uri has continued this approach at Austin. His approach has now been used in over two hundred different institutions of higher education. In writing about the experience, Uri says:

“We were able to convince the students in our orientation that success in college would require them to work with their peers, to create for themselves a community based on shared intellectual interests and common professional aims. How‐ ever, it took some work to teach them how to work together. After that it was rather elementary pedagogy.” As I’ve traveled the country, I have visited hundreds of classrooms and I have observed perhaps less than 5% of the classrooms physically set up for students to interact with each other. We keep talking about how we need to train students for the “real world.” In the real world, people sit at a table together to identify issues and resolve them. We continue to impose this individualistic model and mindset on our students when this is exactly what employers are saying is not needed for a productive workforce. What is so wrong with helping each other? I have observed that when I sit students in cooperative learning groups that there were many times when a student was able to explain a concept to his/her group mate when I was unsuccessful in doing so. A part of the problem is our model of individualism over community, we reinforce individualism over community every day just by the way we sit kids in the classroom