Making Math Moments That Matter

Listen in as we take a deep dive to unpack ALL 5 Practices AND you’ll hear from Peg Smith about the other TWO practices that she often references, Why the 5 Practices are your roadmap to implementing high level tasks, How you can use assessing questions and advancing questions, and How to get STARTED with the 5 practices. 

We speak with Skip Fennell about all things formative assessment. He shares with you 5 formative assessment strategies that will ensure you’re making math moments that matter!  Join us as we dive into a great discussion with a contagiously passionate math educator at heart, Skip Fennell.

We chat with John SanGIovanni - a Math Supervisor from Baltimore and Author of the book series Daily Routines To Jump-Start Math Class. In this episode John shares why your traditional warm up / bell ringer activities need to change, how to build number sense at any grade level and save time doing it, why traditional homework take-up doesn’t work, how to avoid creating math sheep! And you’ll walk away with 5 Specific Routine Activities to jump start your day.

We welcome Gabrielle Mejia and Jedidiah Butler as we take a deep dive into the Most Effective PD You’re Not Doing: Lesson Study. Listen in as Gabrielle and Jed share what Lesson Study means to them, why they think it is worthwhile to do AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE, and they debunk some common myths and challenges one might encounter as you look to build this highly impactful professional learning structure into your department, school, or district.

We’ll dive into a great conversation about shifting mathematics teaching from what many of us remember from our K-12 learning journey to a more progressive, inquiry approach to teaching mathematics conceptually. In particular, we’ll discuss with Jennifer Chang-Wathall how to be brave in your classroom to make necessary changes to promote student understanding.

In this episode we speak with another Math Moment Maker who reached out to us for a Math Mentoring Moment Episode. Nathan Vaillancourt, a jack of all trades teacher talks to us today about how he can change the way he assess his students.

In this episode, we’ll dive into a great conversation about Andrew Stadel’s math teaching journey, where he came up with the idea to create the math class favourite resource, Estimation180.com and how we can maximize the use of this resource to build number sense in our students and promote mathematical discourse in our classrooms everyday.

In this episode you’ll get to spend some time with Jon and I as we share the story of a recent school walk-through that we participated in recently while attending a conference. The story leads into a common math teaching myth about how we prepare our students for the next grade level.

In this math mentoring moment you’ll meet Carol Edlin, a travel bug who entered teaching with a business degree, slowly but surely began teaching math courses. What is she to do when your background is not mathematics and you’re trying to make math moments that matter for all of your students? Stick around while Carol shows some vulnerability when discussing her lessons flops and we’ll whittle away and reveal her real struggle. Show Notes: https://makemathmoments.com/episode25

On episode 24, we welcome the Queen of Context for Learning Mathematics, Cathy Fosnot! We are so excited for our Math Moment Maker Community to dig into this great episode with a Champion of Fuelling Sense Making in Math Class as she will share her mathematics journey - including some discriminatory barriers that she had to overcome along the way.

In this Math Mentoring Moment episode, you’ll meet Bill Zbozny Del Percio, a Grade 3 teacher from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who always felt drawn to teaching, but feels like he’s struggling to squeeze as much mathematical thinking out of each task as possible. Having built familiarity and confidence in sparking curiosity through 3 Act Math Tasks that leverage the natural curiosity of his students, Bill is seeking support from the Math Moment Maker Community. https://makemathmoments.com/episode23

In this Jon & Kyle only episode we’ll introduce math classroom challenges that we’ve heard from educators we’ve talked to in person, educators that have emailed us, and also Math Moment Makers who filled out filled out some of of our surveys and how we can work toward fixing those challenges. https://makemathmoments.com/episode22  Resources: The Making Math Moments Academy https://makemathmoments.com/academy

In this Math Moment Interview, we talk with Dr. Peter Liljedahl, Professor of mathematics education at Simon Fraser University who has been researching ways to get students to become resilient problem solvers through ideas such as using vertical non-permanent surfaces, visible random groupings, selecting tasks with evolving complexity, and much more...He calls his work The Thinking Classroom. Show notes: http://makemathmoments.com/episode21 

We speak with Lisa Geggie, a teacher of 24 years and self proclaimed perfectionist. and a brave, caring human being. Lisa, like many of us, spends countless hours of after school time, weekends, and evenings planning her lessons and activities for her students benefit. She wants to desperately know how to help her students and GET HER LIFE BACK! Listen in as we help her realize she has the tools herself to address this big issue. Show Notes: http://makemathmoments.com/episode20

One of the biggest challenges WE teachers have right now is helping kids not give up when problem solving in math class. It troubles us when students are working on problems that are slightly different from classroom examples and they either SHUT DOWN, or quickly raise their hands and say, “I don’t know what to do!” In this episode we share the audio recording of a webinar we ran in January 2019 to help address those exact issues. Show Notes: http://makemathmoments.com/episode19