Breaking the Cycle of Math Anxiety

Transcript

From Imagine Learning, I’m Lauren Keeling, and you’re listening to Heart Work, an honest profile of America’s educators.

Hillary Rinaldi: It takes teachers learning alongside their students to teach differently. What I’ve never understood is this idea that if you say that you hated math in school, that then you also want kids now to learn it in the same way that you learned it. 

Lauren Keeling: I think the first thing we’ll start with, Hillary, is if you could just give us your Hillary Rinaldi elevator pitch. Tell us who you are, what you do, what your interest is. 

Hillary: I’m Hillary Rinaldi, Vice President at Whiteboard Advisors, focused on K–12 research and strategy. Whiteboard Advisors is an education policy firm. We work across early childhood through workforce development. 

I have the joy and privilege of working pretty exclusively in the K–12 space. Part of that work also includes leading the National Math Improvement Project, which I’m really excited to share more about today. The National Math Improvement Project is a community of practice of six of the largest districts in the country, all focused on improving math outcomes for students. 

We are in formal year three for the National Math Improvement Project. This includes six of the largest high-poverty districts in the country, so that includes New York, LA, Chicago, Miami, Houston, and Philadelphia. 

We convene three times a year in person, and then we host virtual meetings monthly. Those meetings and conversations are all focused around our three core challenges. 

As we think about districts of this size and thinking about scale, they’re representative of 2.5 million students, and so when we talk about how we scale high-quality instructional materials and ensure every student is getting high-quality instruction, what does that look like? What does that mean to tackle?  

Second, how do we support our teachers and leaders in building their professional learning in both pedagogy and practice around mathematics? And third, building math mindset for our students and community. I think that is a critical piece of the math anxiety puzzle that we’re all grappling with. 

So I’m excited to talk more about not just math anxiety, but maybe how we can quell some of those concerns and what our district leaders are doing so well. 

On the Whiteboard side, I do a lot of work with state leaders around math as well. Prior to Whiteboard, I was the Deputy Chief of Staff at the Tennessee Department of Education, where I worked closely on our accountability system and our high-quality instructional materials adoption process. So I certainly bring the state lens into this work, while also seeing how districts are responsible for ensuring learning is happening every day. Even as states are grappling with changes to math standards or what happens next, districts are, in many ways, leading the charge on how we reimagine math and ensure that maybe there’s less phobia for the next generation. 

Lauren:  It sounds like excellent work. All of the words that you just said have been sources of and remedies to math anxiety for students as individuals, classrooms, grade levels, districts, schools, and systems altogether. 

So I’m excited to talk a little bit about that. To start, when people hear math anxiety, what we have come to understand is that they often think about their own experience, or they think about an individual student. But our wonder today is how much of it is actually something that’s produced by the system the student is existing in? 

Hillary: Just a casual question to start with. 

Lauren: Yeah, easy (laughs). 

Hillary: I appreciate the question, Lauren. So I think, even, what do we mean by math anxiety? I think it comes from a place of the rhetoric around, “I’m not a math person,” right? 

What does that mean? Where does that come from? When did we decide as a society that it’s OK to not be a math person? And I think some of that is an assumption that math is what you experienced in school, right? I’m going to steal a quote from Dr. Afi Wiggins from the [Charles A.] Dana Center, who says, “Math is the language of the universe.” So this idea that you can opt out of participating in math just doesn’t make sense, and it also doesn’t give us credit for how we use math every day. 

So when we say, what does the system produce, I think what we know now about how brains function and how kids can learn math can both look different than it did when you and I were sitting in desks in rows, and that also means it takes teachers learning alongside their students to teach differently. 

What I’ve never understood is this idea that if you say that you hated math in school, that then you also want kids now to learn it in the same way that you learned it. Let’s not keep repeating the same mistakes, perhaps. 

Lauren: That’s an interesting and very deep point to make, Hillary, that oftentimes teachers say, “I hate math,” and then hold tightly to using those very math practices in their own classroom and resist trying new things like inquiry-based learning, for example. 

Hillary: Yeah, I would love to talk more about the inquiry-based model or just what we’re seeing, and I can use New York City Solves as an example as well. 

So New York City Solves is the New York City Public Schools’ system-wide approach to elevating math as both a priority and how they’re planning to support teachers and students in math, right? So this is complementary to New York City Reads. 

I think through New York City Solves, they identified specific shifts that they were making, and that is an intentional move away from a set of procedures and practices where it’s “I do, we do, you do,” and instead thinking about how we build in that sense of inquiry and discovery to be able to support students in actually solving problems, right? Because, yes, students need to understand basic facts and understand the standard algorithm, but what we really want is to have students be fluent in numeracy — to build their number sense — and to do that does, in fact, take a different approach than strictly procedural. We need to think about students building their procedural alongside conceptual, and I would also add spatial. 

Lauren: I love this because, as a kindergarten teacher, I only knew how to teach how I was taught. So learning, unlearning, and trying new practices was really an interesting kind of feel-forward for me. And I remember the very first math practice that was newly introduced to my district and myself: subitizing. And to hear tiny five-year-olds say the word subitizing or “I can subitize” was really eye-opening for me. It gave students who were typically resistant to, reserved in, or simply shut down during our normal math practices, the opportunity to think about math differently. Subitizing and thinking about math differently and explaining how I see those numbers or those shapes or that organization was really an interesting practice. 

So I think I’m just telling you that I really appreciate everything you just said, and it really resonated with me. 

Hillary: Thank you, Lauren. You’re not alone in being, especially an elementary teacher, that was not super excited to be teaching math, right? And the part of that is also a gap in our educator preparation programs of very little math practice of pedagogy is baked into our elementary ed coursework, right?  

I’m not pointing this failure as resting on ed prep programs. I think there are improvements that need to be made at each level, but it is true that — and with our work with six of the largest districts, as they are trying to build that competency especially among elementary teachers — it is both a different approach, and it’s unlikely that they are coming into the district prepared to teach strong pedagogical practices in math. 

Part of this comes from the adoption of high-quality instructional materials, right? As teachers are preparing to actually implement new materials with integrity, it takes more than just unboxing the new materials and more about when we say things like lesson internalization and all of that. 

All of those steps, to me, are quite simple. We need teachers to also be doing the math, right? And part of doing the math means that there’s more than one way to do it. And if there’s more than one way to do it, we have to give our students the ability to test and fail and replicate, and this idea that being fearful of making mistakes is the antithesis of math. 

Doing math inherently means that you are making mistakes and then solving for those. That’s not the problem. That’s actually the whole point. And I think where teachers, if we’re going to talk in generalities, like the challenge of the elementary teacher to release that cognitive load to their students is challenging because it’s not what you expected to be doing, maybe as a teacher, and it means you don’t always know exactly where the class is headed. 

I certainly prefer to have control in a situation, and I understand why teachers want that too, but we know that our students are going to be more successful if we give them that time and space to explore, not to be in an unproductive struggle, but how do we support all students and the scaffolds that we can bring in to make math both relevant and rigorous, but I think most importantly, enjoyable. 

Lauren: I’m going to say it wrong, but you said something really beautiful, which was that math is inherently designed as, we’re going to get it wrong, and we’re going to solve through it, and we’re going to make mistakes, which is a statement we don’t say out loud. Or at least when I was learning — it’s unfair for me to say that now — but as a student learning, no one ever said, “Math is designed for mistakes. Mistakes are how we learn, how we grapple, and how we move productively through learning.” 

So do you think that that’s an important statement to start saying out loud and start giving educators permission to honor that in their classrooms? 

Hillary: Absolutely. What’s more freeing than being able to say, “All right. I’m going to write something up on my whiteboard,” or more likely my SMART Board, right? And say, “Here’s a problem.” 

I was actually leading a virtual session yesterday, and we started with the question of “How would you approach the problem 201 minus 68?” Not a complex problem, but even that, we know there are multiple ways to solve it. 

So if I write it up there and I ask my class, “OK, what’s your approach?” I actually am not asking for the first kid that raises their hand with the correct answer. I want to know how you’re doing that, because if we’re building the skills to understand the how and the why, then you’re going to get to the what, right? 

But you also learn so much more about your kids, but then, as students are in those peer-to-peer and student discourses, to say, “Oh, I never thought of it that way,” right? 

I’m of the camp, I’m always looking for friendly numbers, right? So I’m going to make this 200 minus 70 and then take away the other three. But then I had someone else in my group who said, “I wrote it down, and I used the standard algorithm.” And I was like, “Oh, I never even considered picking up a pen to do that,” right? 

And so as you do that, that also releases the teacher from being the sole proprietor of knowledge, right? Student discourse is incredibly important, and I think the more we talk about building students’ durable skills or how states and districts are thinking about a portrait of a graduate and what it means to graduate from high school, what are the skills you’re bringing with you? 

There’s a natural opportunity to build that into math classrooms. Actually, there’s a paper that came out last summer by Student Achievement Partners about the connections between durable skills and mathematics, and I think it is really compelling because any math teacher will tell you, “Well, of course, we’re engaged in critical thinking and collaborating,” right? 

In the classrooms that are building those math skills, you’re naturally imbuing students with whatever label you want to put on them: the non-academic skills, the career-ready skills, the durable skills. Those things are happening, and so how do we give students more opportunities to demonstrate that? 

And that’s through providing them with the ownership of their learning and carrying the cognitive load of the math class. 

Lauren: Are you a Battelle for Kids person? 

Hillary: Of course! 

Lauren: OK, well, you’re saying all of the words that I know and hold dearly to my heart: durable skills, student achievement network, portrait of a graduate. 

Hillary: Yes. They put out a landscape review of different portraits of a graduate, and so I’ve used that in some other work as well. The XQ Institute also looked at different policies that impact high school and how we think about redesigning high school, and I think where those skills come into play is a big piece, but also thinking about things like competency-based learning and not just seat time as well. 

Yeah, but that could be a whole other… 

Lauren: Podcast topic. A whole other collection. I think we’ll have to spend some time there. 

Hillary: I agree. 

Lauren: Let’s talk about the National Math Improvement Project, and what we know is it’s bringing together districts from all around, and they are thinking about those system-wide challenges, right? Like educator capacity, leader capacity, math mindset. You said all of those things to us. Where does math anxiety sit in that work? 

Hillary: Unfortunately, I think math anxiety is kind of like the elephant in the room anytime you’re talking about math. I think within this group, we don’t talk about it as a problem. 

We are hopeful that as we do all of these things, a byproduct of this work is that math anxiety can disappear. And I think we’re actually starting to see that as we visit classrooms across our six districts. So each of our convenings, a different city hosts, and so we get to go into math classrooms everywhere and be able to see what’s happening in practice, right? 

Get beyond our district plans and priorities and say, “OK, but what does this really look like in a school in the Bronx, in a school in the South Side, in a school in Central LA?” To be able to see this work in action. 

And I can honestly say over the last three years, the more math classrooms I visit, the more instances I have conversations with students who say they really enjoy math class, that they’re having fun in math, that they like what they’re doing, or even if it’s not their favorite subject, they’re still very engaged in the work. 

And I think part of that is because of these shifts in pedagogy and practice where math is more engaging, right? Where it is students working in small groups or working with technology-enabled solutions that are really targeted to either catch them up or accelerate their learning. 

I think one of the things that we saw both in Miami-Dade, as well as LAUSD, was support for Algebra 1 and thinking outside the box. 

We know that too many students don’t pass Algebra 1 on the first try. I am certainly not the first person to say this, but I strongly concur that if you fail Algebra 1, your second attempt should not just be a louder, slower version of Algebra 1. That’s true for any intervention. 

And so what LAUSD did last summer with their Algebra 1 course is they actually used Prisms VR and put students in a virtual reality setting to engage in math in a not just procedural and conceptual, but also spatial reasoning. And when you’re connected to your body and seeing what’s happening, predicting the LA fires based on logarithmic functions or the erosion of the beach in Miami, it’s both checking those boxes of extremely relevant to the student, maintaining that rigor of aligned to standards, but also making it fun, right? 

And so LA saw the highest attendance rate for summer school last year and the highest pass rate, and now they’re going to expand it for this summer. 

It’s less about how we are addressing math anxiety head-on and more about how we are doing all of the other things that we know work in math, and that if we do that well, we believe that we will build the math mindset in our students, educators, and our community to then make that anxiety go away. 

Lauren:  So in a minute we’ll talk a little bit more about the great things that districts and leaders and teachers are doing to open up the classroom so that children are able to enjoy and engage in math joyfully and thoughtfully and really pull from the great work and the great changes that are being made. 

But I think in order to really talk robustly about the solutions, we need to understand the problem a little bit. Can you point to just some of the district-level decisions that commonly contribute to systems, classrooms, and districts that may be producing some math anxiety in students even when they don’t intend to? 

Hillary: Yes. I think if we flip the question and say, what are the things that are mitigating math anxiety, because I think that’s what our six districts are prioritizing, and a lot of the work that I think state leaders are prioritizing, as well. What are the conditions necessary to make those classrooms deliver on relevance, rigor, and joy? 

And so each of the six districts that are a part of the National Math Improvement Project has adopted and invested in high-quality instructional materials, right? They’re instructional materials that are pushing the practices that we know work, including a more inquiry-based model in most cases. And then the need to align both what’s happening in Tier 1 instruction along with intervention or high-impact tutoring, right? The student experience needs to be coherent across their school day to connect the dots between what they learned in one place and how they’re maybe addressing any gaps or accelerating to the next grade level too. And that work is incredibly difficult because of the system of master scheduling, right? How do you get students where they need to go, when, and based on what they know and what we need them to learn next? 

Houston ISD has done really interesting work in their approach with the New Education System under Superintendent Mike Miles to say every student is getting that intervention time that is either supporting skills that they have not yet mastered or advancing to the next set of skills as well. 

I think the teacher and leader training and true job-embedded professional development is one of the things that can’t be missed. And so in our recent report about year zero in your implementation of high-quality instructional materials, the NMIP profiled both New York City and the School District of Philadelphia, for both of those districts, this is the first time that they have been focused on narrowing the instructional materials that are being used. And instead of leaving it up to schools to determine what makes sense in their classrooms, they can instead rely on the district to make those decisions, to say, “We know that this is of high quality, and this is where your teacher should be focusing their time and attention.” 

And then, of course, the teacher is still the person who knows their classroom best. It doesn’t take away from the individuality of the teacher and those students because in your application of taking high-quality instructional materials and actually delivering on a lesson, you know where your students might need more support or how you’re building in those scaffolds for however many multilingual learners you might have in your class or students where you need to meet their IEPs. I think, spoiler alert, the best math scaffolds for a multilingual learner are going to be good scaffolds for any student in your class as well. And so I think there is a lot that we can be doing, and it can’t all fall to that third-grade teacher to figure it out all on her own to then be able to support students in thriving in math. 

Lauren:  So talking about coherence and you noted in curriculum intervention, tutoring, professional learning, all of those parts and pieces, how does, or why does coherence matter for student confidence, not just their achievement? 

Hillary: I joked earlier this year that coherence seems to be the word of 2026, and how we even define that gets muddled depending on the context. 

But when we talk about instructional coherence, it’s at every level. So there’s instructional coherence necessary at the system level so that your academics team and your schools team are speaking the same language. Instructional coherence at the school level, that the principal knows what to look for when we talk about what this experience looks like in the classroom, right? 

And then there’s the student experience of, what does coherence look like for that student? I think to your question, we’re talking about what instructional coherence looks like for a student in a system that’s getting it right. 

For a student that might be — let’s go to fifth-grade fractions, right? If I’m a fifth-grade teacher and I know I have a student who is struggling with mastering complex fractions, we know that that’s probably not the skill that’s being taught in fifth grade, right? That’s a skill that actually started as early as kindergarten, right? And we assessed it in third grade. So there are maybe some missing pieces there. What we don’t want is for that student to spend all their time in remediation and never actually get to grade-level content. 

The coherent system means that they have access to Tier 1 content by getting that just-in-time support during intervention or during tutoring, or both, to then be able to access that grade-level content, so you can be building on the grade-level skills and eventually catch up. 

I think that’s also a difference between how we approach intervention in literacy and intervention in math. Literacy is so linear. In math, there are places where we can catch up. 

I think there was a great analogy that Shalinee Sharma at Zearn used. If you’re watching a show, if we’re binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy and you jump in in Season 7 — well, you can jump in in Season 7, and they’re going to play the preview of the past six seasons of what you need to know to still be able to enjoy that episode — you’re not going know every detail, but that’s actually OK because we can get some of those other details as we catch up later.  

I actually am not sure what the original question was at this point, or where I can add. 

Lauren: No, that was great because I think it’s important to define coherence, right? So even just in — I did a presentation yesterday in Minnesota, and we talked deeply about coherence, and in that conversation, it was strictly at the teacher level. 

So in my classroom, I’m using the same instructional language as in Hillary’s classroom. She’s using the same instructional language. And the value of that moving students along the pathways — this was specifically for reading — but along the pathways of becoming students who can read and students who can read to learn. 

So I’m going jump ahead just a little bit because you pointed to it… 

Hillary: I know what I wanted to add, Lauren, on instructional leadership and building coherence. 

In the student experience for coherence, it also relies on the school, right, your whole school model being aligned. There’s a lot of work that we’re doing to support teacher pedagogy and practice in math. 

We also know that most principals do not come up from a math experience, and so there’s also a gap in knowledge there. And if we want our principals, or if it’s the assistant or the dean that is the instructional leader of the building, they need to know what to look for in math class as they’re doing those observations, right? 

If they’re coaching those teachers or you have a coach coming in, it’s really important that principals and instructional leaders are brought along to understand what it means when we are implementing new instructional materials and when we are addressing these shifts that support building a positive math mindset, because it’s very different, right? 

We would hope it looks different to go into math class now than it did 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Some of that connection doesn’t always happen. I think Chicago Public Schools has done a really excellent job in bringing their principals along so that they identify as, “I’m a math principal. I know what’s happening in math class in my school.” 

Lauren: That’s great, and that was actually the next question I was going to ask you, believe it or not, was about principals. So that’s perfect. I want to talk a little bit about access for a few minutes and think about how, of course, again, we’re focusing on or framing around math anxiety. 

How does math anxiety intersect with access? And when I ask that, what I mean is when we’re thinking about students who are encouraged to enter into Algebra 1, for example, and who are not encouraged to step into an Algebra 1 space. So let’s talk about how those things intersect. 

Hillary: Yes. So the National Math Improvement Project released a report last year about Algebra 1 access and success: Algebra 1: A Gateway, Not a Gatekeeper, right?  And because so much just does hinge on Algebra 1, it feels high stakes, and that’s because it is high stakes. It’s a strong predictor of your success in high school and that success beyond high school. So when we think about how we are supporting students in early access to Algebra 1, it also has to ensure that they are successful within Algebra 1. 

I’ll shout out to Chicago Public Schools and their work over the last 10 years to expand access while also maintaining the pass rates of success for students. They went from a version of access that meant, you know, if you looked at the demographics of the schools that had Algebra 1 in eighth grade, it was almost a perfect extrapolation of schools that were higher income and mostly white. 

At this point, almost 100 percent of middle schools have access to eighth-grade Algebra, and they’ve completely changed how they’re identifying students to be enrolled in eighth-grade Algebra. So while they also increased the N size of students that had access, they equally maintained the N size of the students who are demonstrating success, and that has disproportionately positively impacted students of low income and students who are non-white. 

That’s important because we know that if you want to pursue advanced math in high school and beyond, you really need to come into high school having mastered Algebra 1. 

Now, there are other pathways, and maybe you don’t need to take calculus in high school. Certainly, most students don’t need to take calculus in high school. But we shouldn’t be making that decision for students, right? We should be allowing them to have voice and choice in what they do, to then be prepared for the jobs of the future that we literally have no idea what they’re going to look like as we sit here in 2026 right now. 

I think the other work that’s been happening, not just in our districts, but at scale as states are pursuing more comprehensive math policy change, is automatic enrollment in advanced coursework. So we now have several states where if your end-of-year state summative assessment shows that you are mastering that math content or above grade level, then you’re going to be automatically enrolled in advanced math in the next year. This means that we’ve eliminated any potential implicit biases or recommendation function for those math classes, and so, again, it’s another way to increase access. 

Now, where the system has to catch up is if we know we’ve expanded access, we have more students that are pursuing advanced math, which is a huge win. That also means we have a wider range of students who are participating in those math courses, and teachers who have been used to teaching maybe the top 10 percent are now teaching the top 25 percent. That also requires shifts within pedagogy and practice to support all students who now have access and ensure that they are successful. 

Lauren: What are some of the challenges in that space? So I’m used to teaching the top 10 percent, now I’m teaching the top 25 percent. As an educator, what makes that difficult? 

Hillary: I think it’s what makes teaching the hardest and best job simultaneously, right? The 20-some students that are sitting in front of you, there is no average student, typical student. Each one is coming to you as an individual. They all have their strengths. They all have the things that they still need to work on. 

I think when you have a classroom with a wider range of abilities, which is just more universally true now because our students are coming in with more gaps than they have historically for myriad reasons, our teachers then need to be better supported to allow for differentiation, right? And how do we differentiate for a wider range of students and abilities? 

Again, this can’t all fall on the backs of teachers as we ask them to continue to do more with less. I personally think this is one of the ways that tech enablement and AI tools can really help within the classroom, not for what is student-facing, but for what can help teachers in reducing the administrative burden of teaching to free up their time and energy to do what they do best, which is that direct instruction to their students and meeting individual student needs. 

Lauren: Every teacher in the world just took a deep breath and cheered a little bit because I think that that’s what every educator wants is something to take up the administrative side, the logistical side of doing teaching and learning, so that they can focus on the good stuff, which is actually teaching and learning. 

We have also spoken to Peter Liljedahl about Building Thinking Classrooms, which was a fascinating experience, and I think the question that it points to is what system conditions need to be in place for that kind of really thinking-rich classroom, and then also to actually make it work at scale. 

Hillary: Right. So I think if we take the Building Thinking Classrooms idea, right, this is still high-quality instructional materials at the center, but really prioritizing student learning and building student competence. So I’d also point to other competency-based models or other learning opportunities that are agnostic to seat time, right? So there are several high schools that are doing this work exceptionally well, and they are certainly the exception and not the norm, right? 

How are students in high school engaged in things like internships, career-connected learning, and project-based learning, where they’re identifying a problem that they want to solve, and that is a cross-curricular opportunity? It’s not just that they’re sitting in math class and then science class, right? They’re actually doing this work to solve a real problem that engages math and science and ELA and social studies, right, and communications and all of those things at once. But that is a significant shift to what the system is set up to do, right? That’s like a classroom-without-walls kind of approach. 

I think the conditions necessary to be able to ensure at the end of the day that students are carrying that cognitive load mean that we need to support teachers in trusting not just themselves, but also trusting their students that they can, in fact, do this work, and they will rise to the expectations that we set for them. But that does take a lot of effort, and I think it is a change to what is the status quo for any given classroom. 

Lauren: Yeah, I agree. Surprise. 

So what is it that gives you the most hope right now, just right in this moment? Now that we know math anxiety can be tackled at a structural level and that it’s not just resting on the shoulders of individual students who are feeling their feelings in their classrooms, what gives you the most hope about the work that you’re doing and the change that’s happening? 

Hillary: I have great optimism for the future ahead, knowing the district leaders who show up to do this work every single day. 

The National Math Improvement Project is an incredible opportunity to see up close what is happening in these school districts and where the chief academic officers are relentless in their belief that every single student can be successful in their district, and that they will give teachers the support that they need to be able to do this work well. 

I think our community of practice is one that is a genuine community, and even outside of the monthly touchpoints and the opportunities that we create for the districts, they are constantly in communication with each other. 

Think back to when LAUSD was dealing with the Palisades fires and seeing schools that were going to be shut down for weeks, and just the destruction. It still gives me chills to think about what ravaged those communities. 

The leadership called up Chicago Public Schools and said, “Hey, Chicago, we know that you had really incredible resources during COVID that you had pushed out through a blended learning model. Are there things that we can plug in for our students and our system?” 

And those are the things that you can’t plan for, you can’t create. You have to have trust and faith in one another in that shared leadership, and I think we’re now at a point where, yes, there are six individual districts that are all working towards their own goals, but there is a common goal of wanting to support one another, and that will continue, right? 

We’re three years in. We want to continue this work. And even if it’s not in a formal convening, we know that these touchpoints between district leaders will benefit the students across the system and will continue to report out on what’s working to benefit students across the country. 

Lauren: Because I never am actually done asking questions, I have one more question that was sparked by what you said, and it’s actually a thread that we’re kind of tugging at as we continue to have conversations for this particular collection of the podcast. 

Being bad at math — having math anxiety — is really isolating. Justyna and I have had this conversation a lot. We sort of sit alone in our badness at math and start to believe things about ourselves. And one of the reasons, in my opinion, that we wrap our arms around “I’m not a math person” is because it creates community for us. So it creates other people with whom we can be bad at math together or dislike math together. And that’s sort of the remedy, too. Being bad at math allows me to not be a math person, which then puts me in a community, and I’m not alone anymore. 

You talked about the value of community for the National Math Improvement Project. You talked about the value of community for educators, and you talked about the value of community in classrooms, so students having the opportunity to make mistakes and ask questions and think out loud, and work on real-world problems. 

So this is probably a Hillary opinion question, and I love that maybe most of all. 

Why is community so important? Why is community one of the things that we can point to that actually helps districts, leaders, systems, and students change for the better, make changes that have an impact? 

Hillary: In my opinion, the connection and community is really all that matters. 

No problem is going to be solved in complete isolation, no matter what the problem is. I think one of the greatest myths that we’ve told students about math is that math is something that happens while you’re sitting at a desk in silence alone with a paper and pencil. 

That is not how mathematicians or engineers or anyone that’s in STEM works, but more importantly, it’s not how any human works. 

When’s the last time that you were grappling with something and you’re like, “I know how I’ll solve this. I’m going to sit alone and talk about it to myself”? That’s just not how we function, and I think some of what we learned during the pandemic years is that we as humans crave that connection to one another. 

We have the luxury of technology that allows us to have different types of connection and from all over the world, but what it still sometimes takes is that in-person relational connection as well. 

And I think what our community of practice allows for is the real talk of it’s not just what’s happening bright and shiny in our school districts. Of course, we celebrate the successes, but we also know how critically important it is to be honest about the challenges we’re grappling with because the likelihood that they are shared is almost guaranteed. 

And so being able to see, OK, Chicago was able to expand access and maintain success. How can we replicate that as we think of ways for other districts to expand the ways in which they’re identifying students for advanced math courses? 

We know that Houston is saying all principals are going to be the instructional leaders of their building. If that’s what’s going to happen, how do we train principals to know what needs to be done? Those are learnings that can be taken from any district. 

And so I think part of that too is how do we present the good news and the good stories that help us to build that community, right? 

Community can be built around all disliking the same thing, but I actually think it’s much more compelling when we build community around the things that we’re most proud of and the things that can actually help us all grow and learn together. 

 Lauren: That’s beautiful, and so true because being in my I’m not a math person community really didn’t do anything for me positively. 

But joining this community that I’m in now of people who like math has been really, a really great positive impact. So what, what’s left? What do you want to say? What do you want to point to, talk about? What did we miss? What’s important?  

Hillary: Yeah, I think from the state policy perspective. So as I mentioned, prior to Whiteboard Advisors, I was at the Tennessee Department of Education and focused exclusively on state policy. 

I think now, from where I sit, thinking about K–12 across the country and tracking policy momentum, math is certainly having that boost, right? We’ve had the science of reading momentum build and pretty much hit its nexus, right? We have almost every state that has some type of science of reading legislation in place and are ensuring that districts and schools are implementing instructional materials that are evidence-based. 

There is a similar effort in math. However, we can’t talk about science of reading in the same way that we talk about math. Science of reading is really focused on the early grades. When we talk about comprehensive math policy, we need to be thinking about K–12. We actually really need to be thinking K–16.  

We do know what works in math. We might have a smaller evidence base than we do for literacy, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t evidence-based practices that we know and should be working toward. 

I think there are a handful of states that are really leading in the math space and tackling at least one part of the challenges that lie in ensuring we improve outcomes in K–12 math and prepare students for whatever postsecondary choice they are seeking. 

I think Alabama was arguably the first state to pass a comprehensive math bill with the Numeracy Act, and that was really focused on creating math coaches for schools, especially in the early grades. Now, one of the challenges they ran into is that they didn’t have enough math teachers, nor enough math coaches, right? They’re not alone in that challenge either. 

I think as Kentucky has worked to train more teachers through educator prep programs, but also as they’re in the field, they’re working on that as well. And they actually have a state-created course focused on math to become a math specialist. I’m pretty sure it’s the only state that requires teachers to take a math-specific course in that way. 

As we also see a lot of momentum from last legislative session and this legislative session in the number of math bills, most of them fall into that automatic enrollment policy of ensuring students have access to accelerated coursework and that they are automatically enrolled because we know that opting out of something reduces participation. It’s another barrier to entry that is then eliminated. 

I think where we go next, we need sustained investment in what works in math. We can’t change course because we’re not seeing results fast enough. It took a long time for us to get where we are. 

We can look to the early literacy movement and say, you know, the Mississippi Miracle, as Carey Wright has described it, it’s not a miracle, it’s a marathon, similar to the work that we did in both Tennessee and Louisiana as well. 

It takes time to do this work and see the results. That doesn’t mean we should be letting up on the gas by any means. There are students sitting in classrooms who will go through their whole K–12 experience never having a high-quality math teacher or never not being in a “failing school.” 

That doesn’t mean we let up on the gas, but we do need sustained investment in what works. And that is up to states to make those calls so that districts have the resources they need to be able to implement instructional materials with integrity, ensure every teacher has an instructional coach who has depth of content knowledge in math, and that we are supporting students on this journey to actually enjoy math and courses that are relevant and rigorous to them. 

Lauren: Excellent, OK. 

Hillary: So I guess, yes, I had a little bit to say about policy. 

Lauren: We’re glad! This was excellent, wonderful, everything was amazing. We appreciate it so much.  

Hillary: Thanks, y’all. 

Lauren: So I think the thing that really struck me is we often have conversations about an individual student’s needs or an individual teacher or an individual principal leader. Our focus and our conversations are often around how to help one person or how to help a small subset of a system. 

And what I really appreciated about what Hillary brought to the table and was talking to us about so thoroughly is that it’s actually systems-level, right? So it starts at the top, and it knits itself or folds itself or waterfalls itself down. 

And when we make good decisions as systems leaders and as systems in general, that support — I think she called it the school’s leadership and then the student-facing leadership, right? So when we make good decisions from a systems level, and that can be from the state to the district, those good decisions around what good practice is and looks like and the capacity for our teams to be able to take that on, that trickles down into great principal leaders who are instructional leaders and understand why we’re doing this work. 

And that trickles down to great teachers who are working hard and understand why we’re shifting our practice, why we’re choosing a math curriculum that feels so different from what we’ve been using before, why teaching children not at rows of tables and rows of desks as individuals in their seats, but as classroom communities who engage in problem-solving and mistake-making and digging into not just rote memorization — because there’s value there, we’ve learned that — but also having a deeper understanding of numeracy, of what actually the number four means and how to make it and how to disassemble it and how to reassemble it in different ways. 

And that ultimately — you know, I’m moving my hands a lot; you can’t see it because this is all audio — but that ultimately trickles down into producing student outcomes that are not only improved, but improved across all of our populations of students. 

So everyone has access to high-quality learning because our tippy-top decision-makers are making good and sound decisions about how we support everyone below them and ask for the resources we need from everyone above them. 

So that was a really long answer just to say I appreciate the systems focus. This doesn’t rest on the educator in the classroom. Educators are already carrying such heavy loads, and they’re on cognitive overload at this point. 

I love that we are taking that off their shoulders and saying, “You are absolutely part of the solution, but you’re not the standalone problem in the classroom.” 

We’ve got a lot of work to do before we can really start to get into helping to support better instructional methodology in our rooms and more sound pedagogy. 

So I think that’s probably my biggest takeaway. I also think just the size of the systems that the National Math Improvement Project has been working with, to think about how they have made the moves they’ve made at scale, is impressive. 

This episode of Heart Work is produced by Justyna Welsh, editing by Kristan Crawford, mixing by Fraser Allan. Artwork by Kate Clough. Our series producer and director is Justyna Welsh. Executive producer is David McGinty. Music is from Universal Production Music, and special thanks to Hillary Rinaldi. 

Heart Work is brought to you by Imagine Learning.