Making Math Moments That Matter

We want to welcome NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient and co-author of one of the books we reference MOST OFTEN on this podcast: 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions The wonderful Dr. Peg Smith.  Listen in as we take a deep dive to unpack ALL 5 Practices AND you’ll hear from Peg about the other TWO practices that she often references, Why the 5 Practices are you...

In this episode we speak with Skip Fennell, math teacher, principal, A Maryland Council of Teachers of Mathematics' Educator of the Year , Past NCTM President, He's also the author of dozens of articles and books and is a coauthor of the book The Formative Five.  We chat with Skip about all things formative assessment. He shares with you 5 formative assessment strategies that will ensure...

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...

Join us on Episode 30 of the Making Math Moments That Matter Podcast as we welcome Gabrielle Mejia and Jedidiah Butler as we take a deep dive into the Most Effective PD You’re Not Doing: Lesson Study. Sure, many of us have had an opportunity through a district-led initiative or grant to possibly engage in this type of learning, but was it a “one-and-done” experience that is no longer happening in...

In this episode, 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, unpacking what teach...

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. We discuss questions like: How do I adjust my assessments to match the way I’m trying to teach? Do I need to record observations and conversations that I have wi...

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. Show notes: https://makemathmoments.com/episode27 Love th...

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. Show Notes: https://makemathmoments.com/episode26   Love the show? Text us your big takeaway! Get a Customized Ma...

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 awa...

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. Get “hooked” into an intriguing conversation with...

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 and delivering other rich tasks that leverage the nat...

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. You’ll Learn: What can we do when not all our students are engaging in our activities. How we can ensu...

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. What...

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’s been eating, breathing, and sleeping math lessons and...She wants to desperately know how to help her students and GET HER...

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 t...

We chat with Dr. Raj Shah from Math Plus Academy about how how to harness the elements of video games that make them so addictive and how we can apply them to our math classes. We chat about how to build a culture of discussion, creativity and problem solving in our classrooms, and we also chat about how to use the power of mystery to engage our students. Show Notes: http://makemathmoments.com/epi...

On today’s show, we’re bringing on Matt Makuch from Victoria, British Columbia to share his mathematics professional learning journey thus far. Matt shares some of the influencers who inspired him initially to begin thinking differently about teaching his math class including Marcy Cook, Kim Sutton, and Sherry Perrish. He also shares how he took the plunge to take his professional learning to the...

Join us while we chat with the great Marian Small. For us, Marian has been a rock and a foundation for how we’ve changed our teaching practice! She’s an author, math education influencer, and Open question guru! In this discussion we talk with Marian about the origin story of open questions, how open questions compare to open middle problems, and how being more intentional with big ideas versus sp...

Conference season is just around the corner for us at the time of this recording. We attend various conferences throughout the year and a big question that we always have is, “Is this going to be worth it?” In episode 15 we want to give you 5 TIPS on how to get the most out of the conferences you attend and also what can you do if you can’t attend a conference this year. Show Notes: http://makemat...

We’re bringing on a colleague, friend, and fellow Ontarian from the math education world. He’s the author of Pi of Life and his soon to be released book, Math Recess, an international keynote speaker and a part of the BuzzMath team. We talk about the simplicity of mathematics, how learning mathematics should be more like the preparation of a fantastic meal rather than just serving up the final fin...

In episode 13 you’ll listen to Sam Brotherton, a teacher from St. Louis Missouri. Sam’s been teaching for 5 years and we chat with him on this Math Mentoring Moment episode of the Making Math Moments that Matter Podcast about struggling with the idea of where assessments fit in his routines. Sam’s been teaching with 3-act math lessons, desmos activities, and a variety of other great resources he’s...

In episode 12 Jon & Kyle address questions like: how to create a collaborative approach to teaching math AND cover curriculum standards? How to build resilient problem solver?  How do I decide to adjust my unit plans when not all students have made connections during my lesson? They walk you through what planning looks like before a lesson, during a lesson, and after a lesson to ensure we cove...

Episode # 11 :   PLAY IS THE ENGINE OF LEARNING: An Interview With Dan Finkel Show notes page: http://makemathmoments.com/episode11   Play is the engine of learning, that’s the mission of Dan Finkel and his team at MathForLove.com. Over the next 60 minutes, we’ll dive into Dan’s story about how he fell in love with math and in particular, teaching with games in the math classroom, he’ll give us so...

Our conversation begins with Jo sharing some of her memorable moments from math class followed by a rich discussion about the importance of thinking deeply to communicate mathematical understanding, ideas for differentiation in the math classroom, teaching through task, and much more! Get ready to grow your brain with a variety of amazing mathematical ideas for your classroom. You’ll Learn:   How...

In Episode 9 of the Making Math Moments That Matter Podcast we have another Mentoring Moment episode coming your way with Kirsten Dyck, a grade 7/8/9 math teacher in rural Saskatchewan. Kirsten is working though how to bring out effective learning goals in all the great lesson ideas she’s already using. Listen in as we welcome Kirsten to the podcast and we all put our minds together to  work throu...