Room to Grow - a Math Podcast

In this episode of Room to Grow, Curtis and Joanie tackle ideas around rigor in mathematics. We start by defining what we mean by rigor, acknowledging that it’s a frequently used term that invokes different ideas and meanings! We believe that it means something different than just “difficult,” but frames a way of describing deep, robust, and applicable understanding of mathematical ideas, and we share a couple of visual images that help make sense of this complexity.

Through our exploration of rigor as an integral part of learning math, we connect it to previous conversations about productive struggle, making connections in math, and student agency and identity. Rigor isn’t just for high level math courses and high-achieving students, rigor is for everyone and may even be an unexpected approach to overcoming struggle in learning mathematics!

We believe that the best way to address rigor in the classroom is by intentional, collaborative planning, where teachers decide which obstacles they want to steer students around and which obstacles they want to steer students straight into! We hope you enjoy the episode and hear a new idea or two to consider for your own setting.

We encourage you to explore these resources, mentioned and referenced in this episode:

• Definition of “rigor” from Achieve the Core: College- and Career-Ready Shifts in Mathematics
• This report from the Dana Center at the University of Texas, Austin: What is Rigor in Mathematics Really?
• This archived (free) blog post from former NCTM President Linda Gojak: What’s All This Talk About Rigor?
• myNCTM discussion about rigor (membership required): Archived HERE

Did you enjoy this episode of Room to Grow? Please leave a review and share the episode with others. Share your feedback, comments, and suggestions for future episode topics by emailing [email protected] . Be sure to connect with your hosts on Twitter and Instagram: @JoanieFun and @cbmathguy.

In this episode of Room to Grow, Curtis and Joanie consider ways to uncover how students are actually thinking about the mathematics they are learning. Using a real-life, recent incident between Curtis and his sixth grade son, our hosts consider the challenging fact that many students think that success in math class means figuring out what answer the teacher (or the computer program/app, or the back of the book) is looking for.
They posit that when educators are always focused on the mathematics of the moment – what is being learned in a single lesson, week, or unit – we can focus students on the smaller grain size ideas instead of helping them to place their learning in the bigger picture of mathematics as a whole. As always, the episode recognizes that teachers work very hard at a very complex task: teaching young minds to deeply understand important mathematics!

We encourage you to explore the resources below, referenced in this episode:

• “Listening to and Learning from Student Thinking,” by Elham Kazemi, Lynsey K. Gibbons, Kendra Lomax, and Megan L. Franke from Teaching Children Mathematics, October 2016.
• “Making Student Thinking Public,” by Shari Stockero and Laura R. Van Zoest from The Mathematics Teacher, May 2011.
• “Attending to Evidence of Students’ Thinking during Instruction,” by Miriam Gamoran Sherin and James Lynn, from Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, May 2019.
• The Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions by Margaret Smith and Mary Kay Stein, ISBN: 978-1-68054-016-1

Did you enjoy this episode of Room to Grow? Please leave a review and share the episode with others. Share your feedback, comments, and suggestions for future episode topics by emailing [email protected]. Be sure to connect with your hosts on Twitter and Instagram: @JoanieFun and @cbmathguy.

In this episode of Room to Grow, Curtis and Joanie continue their conversation with Grace Kelemanik and Amy Lucenta. In follow-up to our previous episode, this conversation shifts to a focus on teachers and how the Reason Routines help them to be more effective with more students.
We begin by talking about what makes teaching hard – including the fact that teachers make a million decisions every day in response to the students in the room and how they are engaging with the content; and that doesn’t even include the day-to-day challenges of interruptions, meetings, grading papers, and on and on! The routines are a support for teachers to use a structure for learning that frees them up to be responsive to the students in the moment.
As we learned in the previous episode, the routines help teachers to (a) focus on student thinking, (b) get out of the middle of learning, and (c) support students’ productive struggle. These concrete strategies engage all learners in mathematical thinking, supporting special populations from the start rather than requiring an additional set of approaches to support them. Additionally, the routines create student agency in mathematics, providing ways for students to listen to, engage with, and learn from one another.

We encourage you to explore the resources below, referenced in this episode:

• Be sure to explore Grace Kelemanik and Amy Lucenta’s website, Fostering Mathematical Practices ...
• ... and their books, Routines for Reasoning and Teaching for Thinking.
• Explore infographics, tasks, and more for the Connecting Representations routine.
• See the Connecting Representations routine in action in this classroom video.

Be sure to go back and listen to Part 1 of this conversation if you haven’t already!!

Did you enjoy this episode of Room to Grow? Please leave a review and share the episode with others. Share your feedback, comments, and suggestions for future episode topics by emailing [email protected] . Be sure to connect with your hosts on Twitter and Instagram: @JoanieFun and @cbmathguy.

In this episode of Room to Grow, Curtis and Joanie dig into a conversation about data science. They start by trying to define what data science is, describing it as the intersection of content, statistics, computer science, problem solving. It is complex, and allows people to interact with information that content, statistics, or computer science couldn’t do alone. In our current technology and data rich world, this topic is timely, relevant, and growing in importance.

Curtis and Joanie describe data science as a process by which we start with a question we want to know the answer to, then gather, interpret, analyze, and model data that can help answer the question. Although we acknowledge that data science in school looks different than data science in the world, we recognize it as a valuable way to foster students’ natural curiosity and to build their modeling, problem solving, and communication skills.

Our hosts recognize and discuss that not everyone believes that data science is relevant content for K-12 students and educators, and offer the complicating factors that come alongside bringing new ideas such as these to the curriculum. We encourage you to explore the resources to decide for yourself!

• Blog series in support of data science https://justequations.org/blog
• Article expressing critique against using data science in place of calculus-centered courses Jo Boaler and youcubed data sicence big ideas for K-8 https://www.youcubed.org/data-big-ideas/
• UCLA data science course https://www.introdatascience.org/
• Berkeley data science course: http://data8.org/
• Cal State free Course for teachers Course Kata: https://coursekata.org/
• Jo Boaler and youcubed data sicence big ideas for K-8 https://www.youcubed.org/data-big-ideas/
• Data talks for students in younger grades https://www.youcubed.org/resource/data-talks/
• New York Times’ What’s going on with this graph? https://www.nytimes.com/column/whats-going-on-in-this-graph
• Data Science 4 Everyone: https://www.datascience4everyone.org/

Did you enjoy this episode of Room to Grow? Please leave a review and share the episode with others. Share your feedback, comments, and suggestions for future episode topics by emailing [email protected] . Be sure to connect with your hosts on Twitter and Instagram: @JoanieFun and @cbmathguy.

In this episode of Room to Grow, Curtis and Joanie welcome Juliana Tapper, Math Intervention Specialist and Founder of CollaboratEd Consulting.
We start by apologizing for mispronouncing Juliana’s last name when she is introduced at the start of the podcast! Please note that her last name is Tapper, rather than Trapper. We are so sorry, Juliana!
Juliana brings her experience teaching and supporting middle and high school math teachers and math interventionists to help us consider ways to break what she calls the “struggle stigma” in math class. She grounds our conversation with powerful results from research around math anxiety, which suggest that math anxiety activates the same fear centers in the brain as seeing a snake! When teachers use this understanding, we can create more effective responses to students who are experiencing math anxiety in our classes.

Along with Juliana, your hosts discuss the importance of establishing a classroom culture that makes space all the “mathematical baggage” that students might bring with them. Providing the opportunity to talk about past experiences, positive and negative, allows students to understand that our classroom is a safe and welcoming place, where struggle becomes a normal and expected part of the learning process. Juliana has some practical tips for using instructional protocols with no math to build that classroom culture. She also shares how she established participation as an expectation rather than an option, and how those expectations along with appropriate scaffolds create small successes for students to build on.

We know you’ll walk away with some great ideas that will help you better reach more students in your classroom.

We encourage you to explore these resources, mentioned and referenced in this episode:

• Juliana’s website with resources and much more information about supporting students in math www.Collaboratedconsulting.org, or email Juliana directly at [email protected].
• The youcubed® article Valuing Difference and Growth Juliana refers to the findings in this paper about how math anxiety lights up the same centers of the brain as physical fear such as seeing a snake.
• Juliana mentioned this The Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction Course from Student Achievement Partners; the third course of the series will be available in the fall and you can take it without having taken the first two.
• Juliana suggested this Good Groupwork activity for helping to build a classroom culture that supports all students’ learning from youcubed.®

Did you enjoy this episode of Room to Grow? Please leave a review and share the episode with others. Share your feedback, comments, and suggestions for future episode topics by emailing [email protected]. Be sure to connect with your hosts on Twitter and Instagram: @JoanieFun and @cbmathguy.