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

Duolingo rolled out full math courses this year. I spent 50+ days, spending time in number sense, addition/subtraction, multiplication, fractions, and even went into 11th grade Algebra & Graphs….until I couldn't take it anymore. Zak and Mike from Flynn Education have also been using it and the three of us recently sat down to talk about it.

We broke down what's good, what's bad, and what worried us.

If you've wondered whether to recommend this app to families, for your own children, or you're just curious what Duolingo is doing in mathematics, this one will save you the 50+ days it took me to form an opinion (Mike spent 100+ days using it 😳).

I got to sit down with Steve Wyborney, the brain behind Splat!, Esti-Mysteries, the Estimation Clipboard, and so many other tools I know you've used in your classroom. In this session from Day 3 of the FROM Memorization TO Thinking Summit, Steve takes me back to where it all started: an idea for building estimation jars that flopped.

We talk about what estimation really is, why he thinks the second and third estimates matter more than the first, and a simple sentence stem that you can use tomorrow to dig into how students are thinking. Steve also shares his three-part definition of number sense and challenges us to go beyond asking kids how they got an answer, to asking what they noticed that got them there.

If you want lifetime access to all the sessions from the FROM Memorization TO Thinking Summit, including this one, you can grab that at buildmathminds.com/thinking-summit/

I used to think assessment meant finding what my students didn't know - the wrong answers, the gaps, the "not yet." Dr. Nicki Newton flips that in this session from the FROM Memorization TO Thinking Summit.

Her thoughts: assessment shouldn't be about catching what kids don't know. It's about listening for what they do know.

In this episode, she shares the story of a 2nd grader who taught her more in one hand-written note than a worksheet ever could, the one question she now asks before starting any new unit, and three places an overwhelmed teacher can start this week.

If you want lifetime access to all the sessions from the FROM Memorization TO Thinking Summit, including this one, you can grab that at buildmathminds.com/thinking-summit/

A look at math intervention that reframes it from "filling gaps" to "building a staircase." Juliana Tapper explains why just-in-time intervention (keeping grade-level content as the destination) outperforms the just-in-case approach most schools default to. And why teacher expectations, not the program you pick, drives the difference. This episode is the full length conversation I had with Juliana during Day 1 of the FROM Memorization TO Thinking Summit and it covers the pothole vs. staircase model, the research behind high expectations, and why "acceleration" isn't a dirty word in intervention.

👉 Purchase the Lifetime Access Pass: https://buildmathminds.com/thinking-summit/