The Build Math Minds Podcast

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/   

Have you ever had a student add 3/4 + 3/4 and get 6/8? We usually call that a procedure problem, but it's not. It's a WHOLE problem. In this video I show you how the "part of a set" fraction visual quietly changes the whole and makes 6/8 feel completely logical to kids. Then I share why part of a whole and number lines need to come first, how I use fraction subitizing to keep kids focused on the whole, and why I want kids iterating fractions, not just partitioning them. Even if you teach K–2, stay with me, because those first fraction visuals show up way before third grade. 🔗 Grab my FREE Fraction Subitizing Cards: buildmathminds.com/fraction-subitizing 🔗 The Flexibility Formula: BuildMathMinds.com/enroll

Have you ever had a student who looks lost before they've even started a problem? Or a kid who can do the steps but can't see the pattern that makes them work? I sat down with Becky Lord of LordMath.com to talk about the five cognitive areas that affect how our students learn math: working memory, processing speed, verbal comprehension, visual processing, and fluid reasoning. Becky explains what each one is, how it shows up when a student is struggling, and what we can change in our teaching right now. That includes cutting down directions, using white space on worksheets and slides, trimming words from anchor charts, and setting up a sequence of problems on purpose so kids can actually see the pattern. One of my biggest takeaways: strong number sense doesn't come from more language. It comes from stronger visuals. Most of us got very little training on the brain side of learning math. If that's you too, this conversation is a great place to start. Share it with your team to get the conversation going. Watch the video of this episode at https://youtu.be/uWqW_OkGq_E