The Build Math Minds Podcast

When's the last time you asked someone to just show you how to do something, instead of figuring it out yourself? Now flip it: how often do you ask students to just go figure something out on their own?
In this episode, Christina digs into a pattern that surfaced again and again while interviewing presenters for the upcoming Math Summit: we preach productive struggle for kids, but rarely practice it ourselves. Kaneka Turner explains why "can you just teach the lesson so I can watch?" doesn't actually build the reasoning teachers need, the same reason "just tell me" doesn't work for kids either. Elham Kazemi and Allison Hintz share a deceptively simple fix for the instinct to rescue stuck kids one at a time instead of noticing patterns across the room. And Mona Iehl makes the case that kids won't productively struggle because we rarely give them the time to. Sometimes our help isn't actually helping.
Christina's takeaway: struggle isn't a kid problem or a teacher problem. It's a stance toward not-knowing that applies to all of us.
Resources Mentioned:
Register for FREE or get Lifetime Access to the From Memorization to Thinking Summit (Aug 10-12): https://buildmathminds.com/thinking-summit/

Picture two teachers: one runs "I do, we do, you do" with a focus on math procedures. The other hands kids an open problem and steps back entirely. Both are stuck at opposite ends of the same pendulum swing.
In this episode, I unpack a theme that kept surfacing across my interviews for the upcoming From Memorization to Thinking summit: math ed keeps overcorrecting. We ditched rote memorization for conceptual understanding (good move) but now practice itself is treated like a dirty word. We opened up "any strategy is fine" (good instinct) but without efficiency and flexibility, that's not real fluency. The fear: the pendulum doesn't settle in the middle. It swings all the way back to drill-and-tell.
Christina walks through how Sarah Schaefer, Mike Flynn, Becky Lord, Kevin Dykema, and Zak Champagne each hit this same idea from a different angle, and what it means for getting the pendulum to actually rest with structure and flexibility, together.
Resources Mentioned:
Register for FREE or get Lifetime Access to the From Memorization to Thinking Summit (August 10-12): https://buildmathminds.com/thinking-summit/

In this episode, I'm making a confession: there's a free, research-backed guide for helping struggling math students that I haven't done a good job of telling you about and I've found that most educators have never even heard of. It's the 2021 Institute of Education Sciences and What Works Clearinghouse practice guide, Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics, and all six of its recommendations earned the WWC's highest rating: Strong Evidence. I share why this guide stands apart from the usual opinion-driven debates in elementary math, give you a quick tour of what's inside (including one recommendation guaranteed to raise some eyebrows), and explain why working through it together as a summer book study beats reading the PDF alone. If you want a clear, evidence-based picture of what actually helps your struggling students before the school year starts, consider this your invitation.
Join the free 3-week summer book study: https://buildmathminds.com/bookstudy26

After 26 years, Susan Jo Russell's three-part definition of math fluency - accuracy, efficiency, and flexibility - is finally making its way into state math standards. In this episode, I'm celebrating this long-overdue shift, highlighting recent updates in Washington State and Iowa that now explicitly include flexibility alongside accuracy and efficiency in their fluency standards.
Using a relatable cooking analogy, I break down why flexibility isn't just nice-to-have - it's the difference between students who can only follow a procedure and students who can truly think mathematically. I also share where you can learn more to help you make this shift in your own classroom, school, district, or even your state.
Let me know whether your state has made this change, head to the comments to let me know where you and your state stands!

After 10 years of running the Virtual Math Summit, here's what I've learned: what matters isn't the objective you planned. It's the residue - what actually gets left behind once it's over.  My objective in creating the summit all those years ago was to help you build your math mind…but the residue isn't always something about the mathematics.
Last weekend we wrapped up the 10th annual Virtual Math Summit. Over a million minutes of PD watched in just two days. And this week I went through the survey results to find out what residue people were actually taking away.
In this episode I share the six themes that kept showing up - from the power of listening to student thinking, to the confidence to just start implementing now even when you don't feel ready, to what the neuroscience of math actually tells us about how kids learn.
I also share one form of residue that I never thought about when I started the summit, but it might just be the most important.
Sessions are still free through Monday, March 9th at 10pm Pacific. Go to VirtualMathSummit.com to register and I'll send you the link to watch the replays before they come down.