The Build Math Minds Podcast

What do you do when the math scores are low across your whole school, not just one class? Where do you even start?
Barbara sent me this question after her school was rated unsatisfactory in mathematics, and she asked specifically about improving numeracy school-wide. In this video, I'll walk you through the two things I'd check first if I walked into your building:
Is there consistency? 

Which part of mathematical rigor is missing? 

Then I'll share where I'd start Barbara's school: subitizing. It works in every grade, from small amounts all the way to multiplication, money and fractions, and I'll show you how to get even your PE teacher and lunchroom involved.

Most math "group work" is students working side by side, then comparing answers.  That's not collaboration, that's what Amy Lucenta and Grace Kelemanik call parallel problem solving.
In this video, I'm sharing one microroutine from their book MicroRoutines called "Getting on the Same Page." It fixes this by changing just one thing: how many pieces of paper are on the table. When partners share ONE workspace, they have to agree on what goes on it, and that's where the math talk starts.
Microroutines aren't something new to add to your plate. They take what you're already doing and make it a little bit better. Try it this week with a task you already have planned, then come back and tell me in the comments how it went!
📘 Grab the book: https://link.amazon/B034zzGqv

Sold a Story Season 2 has us all talking about Project Follow Through, one of the largest education studies ever done. But after listening, I came away with more questions than answers. Even the program that "won" had schools where it worked and schools where it didn't.
In this episode, I share three things I keep pondering: When a school "uses" a program, how many classrooms are actually teaching it, and how well? How much training does it take to teach a curriculum well? And did teachers' pedagogical content knowledge have anything to do with the results?
I'll also clear up the difference between capital-D, capital-I Direct Instruction and lowercase direct instruction, because they are NOT the same thing. And I'll explain why I've landed on this: it's not curriculum OR teachers. It's curriculum AND teachers.
Listen to Sold a Story S2E3, The Forgotten Experiment: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2026/10/22/sold-a-story-s2-e3-the-forgotten-experiment 
Listen to the live session I did with Marnie from Reading Simplified about Sold a Story 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI6oylNH9VY&t=2s 
Research mentioned: Hill, Rowan & Ball (2005), Effects of Teachers' Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching on Student Achievement

Have you ever asked a student "How'd you get that?" and gotten a shrug, or "I just knew"? What you ask NEXT decides whether you actually get them to explain their thinking.
In this episode, I break down two patterns of questioning from the NCTM article Questioning Our Patterns of Questioning by Beth Herbel-Eisenmann and M. Lynn Breyfogle: funneling and focusing. Funneling feels like good teaching, but we end up doing the thinking for our kiddos. I'll show you what each pattern sounds like in an elementary classroom using a 38 + 25 example and a K-1 dot image. You'll get the focusing questions I use to turn a funnel around, plus a simple way to check how much you funnel in your lessons.
Want to go deeper? Watch my round table with Sarah Schaefer from Mathodology on purposeful questioning:  https://www.mathodology.com/videos/purposeful-questioning-guiding-student-thinking/