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. 

Lauren Keeling (to Peter): When students get to experience a thinking classroom that very first time, what do you see happen in that room? 

Peter Liljedahl: A cacophony of emotions. I start with a task that every single student can do so that when they’re walking away from the launch, they’re already feeling like, “I got this.” 

Lauren (to Sam): Sam, I am so excited because our listeners are about to tap into a conversation with Peter Liljedahl, who is a genius. 

Sam Murro Shea: I mean, yes, genius and mathematician and researcher, all of the above. He’s kind of run the gamut. And why I’m so excited to talk to him is because he had a really interesting start to mathematics. I, of course, listening to different podcasts and talking with him at conferences and listening to him at conferences, definitely reading his books, right, I feel like his journey is really important for us to talk about how he came to discover these 14 different practices. 

Lauren: I love it. 

Sam: So today we’re here with Peter Liljedahl, and I should probably start by explaining how I know Peter, mostly because it involves lines. I was working in a school district as a math director, and I found Peter Liljedahl’s work by reading Building Thinking Classrooms during COVID. What a wild time that was to be in education. And I remember thinking, “This is exactly the lens principals and teachers need if we want problem-solving in math to actually be accessible to students.” That book shifted how I thought about classrooms, not just curriculum, but really the conditions under which students are asked to think. Then came the math conferences, where I truly spent an unreasonable amount of time standing in long hallway lines just to hear about these 14 practices and a more in-depth story about Peter’s journey. Peter Liljedahl, hi. 

Peter: Wow. It seems like you and I have been in a relationship much longer than I thought. 

Sam: We have been — for years, for many years. 

Peter: OK, well, it’s nice to finally meet you. 

Sam: You, as well. 

Lauren: It’s so nice to be in this space. And Peter, I don’t know that I have ever heard a better introduction or welcome to a meeting or a gathering than I just did from Sam. Sam, that was so lovely. 

Peter: I have to agree. I have to agree. 

Lauren: So nice. So nice. My name is Lauren. As explained before, I am deeply an ELA person. That is my heart and my spirit. Also, I am deeply a person who suffers from math anxiety and math trauma. So I am entering this meeting with you today, Peter, very curious. Sam has opened up my brain and my mind to the ways with which you are asking teachers and administrators to think about their classrooms, and I think that’s really lovely and very fascinating. And I picture myself in those spaces as a child and how that may have changed how I felt about math even today as a 42-year-old woman. So the thing I’m entering with curiosity today, I want you to share your knowledge with us. The very first thing I need to know is what were you seeing in these math classrooms that you were visiting that made you feel like something needed to change, and that was Building Thinking Classrooms? 

Peter: Well, I don’t think you have to be me to be in a math classroom to see that something needs to change, right? 

I was in classrooms yesterday. Anytime you’re in a classroom with students, you can sense that there is an unease. There is a disquiet, right? And there’s a discordance. There’s a discordance between the goals of the teacher and the actions of the students, right? The teacher has the best of intentions for the students. 

They really want these students to do well. The students maybe are not equally motivated to do well. But what I was seeing in particular wasn’t that students weren’t performing — and I mean on tests. It wasn’t that students were unhappy, or uncomfortable, or uneasy. 

That is almost a status quo around the world. It was that they weren’t thinking. Now that wasn’t something that became clear to me right away, right? Because there is a lot of noise in a classroom. And by noise, I mean noise that a researcher would notice, right? There’s a lot of movement,  there’s a lot of discordance between goals, there’s a lot of amotivation. 

There’s a lot of what I eventually came to call “studenting,” which is what students do to kind of get through the lesson. There’s a lot of that stuff that can really distract and draw your attention away from what’s going on. But it was when I finally noticed that what was missing for these students was thinking. 

They were engaged in lots of activity, and this activity was keeping them busy, but it wasn’t requiring them to think, at least not in ways we know students need to think in order to continue to be successful in mathematics. There was a lot of note-taking. There was some group work, but there was a huge emphasis on mimicking. 

And mimicking is that sort of, “I’m going to show you how to do it, now you just do it.” And what I actually found when I was engaging with these students who were engaged in mimicking was that mimicking is not really a thinking activity, right? It’s not a learning activity. It’s what I eventually came to call a production activity. 

Mimicking is what students do to produce for their teacher the things that the teacher wants in exchange for praise, gold stars, and grades, right? So that’s what I was seeing. I was seeing a lot of behaviors that were not thinking behaviors, and then I was seeing very little, if any, thinking. 

Lauren: I hear you make so many fascinating points. Mimicking is not truly learning; it’s performing and showing you what I know, or what you know that you have now imparted onto me that I’m mimicking back to you. 

So I’m thinking about this moment where you said that the classroom is kind of uncomfortable anyway. That’s the nature of learning and the nature of grappling with information. So my wonder is, sometimes we connect being anxious in the classroom to being uncomfortable in the classroom, and ultimately not wanting to be seen struggling in the classroom. 

So how does building a thinking classroom change what it feels like to struggle or grapple in front of others? 

Peter: So this is actually a really interesting question because some of the key features of a thinking classroom, for example, is you’re going to be put into random groups. So now you’re immediately thrust in front of peers. You’re going to be standing and working at a vertical whiteboard, so now you’re visible to everybody. And so you would think that this actually makes them feel more visible, which could increase anxiety, but it turned out it actually did the opposite. So first of all, when they’re standing at the whiteboards, everyone’s standing at the whiteboards, and everyone is focused on their work. No one’s really looking at how you’re doing. 

Now, that may not be something they’re aware of to begin with, but they certainly settle on that very quickly. And they start to realize that this whiteboard is an incredibly — although it is publicly available — private space, right? That we’re working here because everyone is working, and if I do need to tap into some knowledge that’s out there, I just have to look around the room, and I can grab some other ideas from other people. 

But not in that sort of sense that I’m being put on display, OK? And in fact, teachers have really commented on this, and students have commented on this as well, is that, you know, at first it felt like it was sort of I was being outed, but then I realized that, no, this is an incredibly safe space to work. 

In terms of working with others, so one of the things that sort of normative classrooms have done is that they’ve normalized this idea that you’re supposed to be getting it, right? So that the teacher’s going to tell kids how to do things, and the students are supposed to get it. And if you can’t get it, you are the outlier, right? 

So now here’s a student, and I always say one of the worst experiences a student can have is to be sitting in a classroom where they perceive that everybody else understands, and they’re the only one that isn’t understanding. Now, that’s rarely true, but truth, reality, and perception are very different, right? 

It’s what the student perceives that is their reality. So if they perceive that they’re the only one who’s not getting it, then that would be a horrible experience, right? And it would increase anxiety. But in a thinking classroom, what’s normalized is that we’re not getting it, right? 

We’re persevering, we’re persisting, we’re trying to figure it out. We’re working towards understanding. It’s not that understanding is just bestowed on us. So this is not to say that there’s an unleashed sort of exploratory space. It’s very directed, and it’s very controlled and guided. 

But the students aren’t… Really, what’s normal is that we don’t know what the answer is. And when students are in a space where everybody is working hard to understand, then all of a sudden what used to be an outlier becomes the normative structure. And one of the things I always say is that in a thinking classroom, what we want to create is a space where not knowing is a normal and an accepted state to be in, and then the students work towards getting out of that. 

And then they figure something out, and then here comes the next challenge, and it’s a little bit harder, and they’re working together. And it’s that togetherness that makes it safer. It’s that we are working towards this. I don’t own all of this myself.  

 So that’s just part of it. There’s so much more around that. But one of the things that students really talk about in these spaces is how safe they feel. 

Lauren: You really spoke to seven-year-old Lauren in that moment, who felt like the outlier, the only one in the room who wasn’t getting it, sitting in her seat in the row of her students, watching everybody scribble furiously when I wanted to lay my head down on the table and cry. 

Yeah. So I deeply hear… What a horrible experience. A terrible experience, truly, and not for my teacher’s lack of trying. She wanted to do the best by her students, but she taught the way she knew. 

So my wonder, Peter, is when students get to experience a thinking classroom that very first time, and those who are like me, who had that moment where they felt like they were alone and the only one not getting it, what emotional shift — what do you see happen in that room? 

Peter: So the very first time they experience a thinking classroom is a sort of cacophony of emotions, I would say. So for students who like math, this is exciting, right? 

This is, oh, this is going to be new. This is going to be interesting, right? For students who are really good at mimicking, and that’s how they actually get by, this could be a little uncomfortable, right? What do you mean you’re not going to show me how to do this first, right? For a student who is anxious, this could be really terrifying to begin with. 

And I’m not going to deny that, but I think that’s true of any time a student walks into a classroom that has an unpredictable environment, right? Because if they’re anxious, what’s triggering for them is, I’m going to be put in front of people. I’m not going to know what’s going on, and so on and so forth. 

Because what we have to understand is that seven-year-old Lauren’s experience has lodged itself in your memory and in your emotions. And what’s coming forward is that trauma, right? So when you’re told you’re going to take a card, and you’re going to go to a board, and you’re going to work with people, you’re imagining and remembering the worst collaborative experience you ever had. 

When I’m sending you to a whiteboard, what you’re not thinking about is the fact that everyone’s at the whiteboard. You’re thinking about that time that you had to go up and do something on the whiteboard in front of everybody else, and you got laughed at, right? These are triggers to begin with. 

I admit that. But what happens very quickly after that first moment is that the student starts to realize that this is not that. This is not that group experience that I had back in second grade. This is not that time in fifth grade where I had to stand in front of the whiteboard by myself. 

But these emotions can come forward, I’m not denying that. Which is why when we start to build a thinking classroom, we have to be super, super careful, right? Like, what a thinking classroom looks like on day one is very different from what it looks like on day ten, which is very different from what it looks like on day fifty, right? 

So yesterday, I was in classrooms with students. It’s the end of January. They’ve been in thinking classrooms since August, right? These students are not fazed by taking a card and going to a whiteboard and getting going on a difficult trig problem or an algebra problem, right? They are not fazed by that because this is a normal state for them. 

But on that first day, we have to be really, really careful. Now, one of the things that we learned in our research is that students don’t really listen to what we say as teachers, right? So, it doesn’t really matter what I say prior to this. You are being flooded by your emotions and your memories, and I’m not going to be able to talk you out of your emotions, right? 

So what we have to do is very quickly just get them into the experience, but the experience has to be really, really positive. So what we do is we are very careful in the tasks that we pick on those first few days. So we start with what’s called a non-curricular task. So a non-curricular task is clearly mathematics, but also clearly not what we’re teaching. 

And what that does is it really lowers the stakes of this experience, because now this is not something I have to learn. It’s not something I have to remember. It’s not something that is going to be on the test. So I can stop worrying about that. Now, that doesn’t solve all your anxieties, but it’s going to eliminate some. 

The task has to be fun, right? So it’s got to pull you in so it feels more playful than actual math, and it has to have a low floor. And what that means is that every single student in the room should feel like they can start, right? And if that happens, if we put all of those pieces together, then Lauren, who’s going to take that card and go to the board, is going to have an idea on how to start right away. 

The random groups have taken away the stigma that comes with that social interaction. I wasn’t excluded. I wasn’t included. It just is the way it is. 

Peter: So how we start is super, super important, right? 

We’re just starting to try to build a culture within the room, a culture of thinking. I’m normalizing this behavior and this experience without high stakes. Students by and large don’t dislike group work. They dislike being in a dysfunctional group. So we work a lot on trying to make sure that those groups are functional and that they’re positive experiences for the students. 

And we do this actually not just for one day. We do it for three to five days in a row because students can’t learn a pattern of behavior from one experience. They need to have repeated experiences like this. 

We have to be careful. If we have a really anxious student, we have to onboard them really gently. 

So one of the ways that I onboard a really anxious student — and let’s be clear, a highly anxious student is not always visible to us, right? Because in a very traditional teaching setting, that student who sits in the third desk in the fourth row, keeps their head down, takes really beautiful notes, does all their homework, never raises their hand but always seems to know what the answer is, keeps to themselves, may actually have an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. 

But regardless, when this student presents themselves as highly anxious, one of the ways that I onboard them is that I don’t force them to interact on that first day. I do require them to go to their group. They can stand like six feet back. And I actually give them a job. I say, “OK. Your job is to go spy on your group. 

You don’t have to contribute. You don’t have to hold a pen. But I want you to stay there for five minutes and then come and tell me what it is that they’re saying.” And then they come up to you, and they tap you on the shoulder, and you’re like, “OK, yeah, tell me.” And you have to be super interested in that moment. 

And then as they tell you what’s going on, you just have to be so fascinated by this. And like, “You’re kidding. What’s happening next? Oh, can you go give me another five minutes and come and tell me what happens next?” And you just keep doing this, right? And the second day you do the same thing, and the third day you do the same thing. 

And we’ve done this on a number of occasions, and our conversion rate on this is absolutely incredible. Within seven days, there’s a 95 percent chance that this student is going to say something to their group. Because what’s going to happen is there’s that perfect storm. That student hasn’t been pushed, but all of a sudden they’re in a group where they feel safe, and they know something, and then they’re going to say something. 

And the minute they say something, that bubble is burst, and within three days they’re holding the marker, and four weeks later you can’t tell the difference between this student and any other student in the room, right? We didn’t allow them to opt out, but we sort of gently enabled them to opt in. 

But that wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have that sort of warm demander requirement that they be at their board so that they can pay attention to what’s going on 

 Sam: Treating kids like people, giving them a space that is comfortable. You’re still asking them the same requirements, right? But you’re taking the task and making sure that they feel confident to at least begin the task. How does this model really support teachers through their discomfort and through their anxiety? 

Peter:  So Building Thinking Classrooms is a collection of 14 practices. And it’s a framework where it looks at those 14 practices. It turns out that those 14 practices self-organize into four toolkits. This is empirical. 

Four toolkits, and the idea is we start with the first toolkit, and we work with those practices. And then when we’re done in the first toolkit, we move to the second toolkit, and we work with those practices, and so on and so forth. So it’s developmental. Now, it turns out to be developmental for the students and the teachers. So it’s developmental for the students because, you know, this could be their very first experience in this sort of a setting. So it starts them off in a way that’s comfortable and easy to enter into, and then it demands more and more of them as we go, right? But not all at once. 

They have to become encultured into this system of thinking, and then to be learning through thinking, and then letting go of some of those anxieties and beliefs and shifting their identity. 

It’s developmental for teachers because we can’t take on that much change all at once. And even if we could, the kids would explode from too much change. So it’s developmental in the sense that we’re going to start off in the things that are good for the kids, and then we’re adding one practice at a time. 

And I like to think of it sort of as a replacement theory, in the sense that you don’t just throw out all of your practices and then implement Building Thinking Classrooms, right? You want to change the way you’re doing notes, for example, that’s not until toolkit number three. You can keep doing notes the way you’re currently doing, right? 

You’re not going to throw that out. Homework, same thing. That’s also toolkit three. The way we assess, that changes, but that’s not until toolkit four. Until then, you have to still assess the way you normally do. So you start with your current practice. You make a change for toolkit one, but you keep everything else going. 

You’re going to start to find incongruencies between your sort of older self and the newer self that’s emerging. And that sort of helps you move forward, that incongruency, because you’re feeling like, OK, there’s a tension here, and then you’re like, “Oh, now I get to replace that,” and that creates more synergy and so on and so forth. 

But it is developmental. But in terms of setup for toolkit number one is a thinking task. If you want students to think, you have to give them something to think about, so you have to start with a thinking task, right? So you have to have some of those. Good news: I have lots, and you can have them. 

They’re on my website. They’re in the books. There you go. Number two, you’re going to need random groups. That takes a deck of cards. It’s actually the easiest practice to implement. It’s the cheapest. It has the biggest impact. It’s also the one that scares us the most because it marks the biggest shift in control, right? 

We’re going to have to get the kids up to vertical whiteboards. Now, this seems like an expensive endeavor. It doesn’t have to be, right? It doesn’t have to be a whiteboard. It just has to be vertical and erasable. So writing on a window works. By the way, kids love that, right? And then you need to be willing to talk to them about what the difference is between turn-taking and collaborating and working on how do we actually get collaboration to be something that is integrated, where we’re talking to each other, we’re sharing the load, and so on and so forth. 

And then we just go for it, right? And we’re not going to be experts at it. The second time we do it is way better than the first, but not nearly as good as the third. And you are immediately going to see things in your students that you want more of. 

Sam: What led you to choose these four practices that make up Building Thinking Classrooms? And which do you think are the most influential when it comes to reducing math anxiety for students? 

Peter: OK. So the 14 are actually responses to 14 variables. So I actually spent a lot of time in classrooms, in normative classrooms, just watching what teachers do and just, kind of, cataloging what they do. 

And that catalog reduced down to 14 practices. These are the 14 things that everybody does, more or less. If you’re a kindergarten teacher, you’re not necessarily having your kids write notes, but for the most part, we’re doing these 14 practices, right? 

So, for example, every teacher uses tasks. I don’t care who you are, you use tasks. Every teacher uses collaborative groups to some extent, some more than others. We have to give students a workspace. We have to arrange the furniture in our room. We answer questions. We have students do homework, right? We launch tasks. We do all of these things, right? 

And so these 14 practices account for anywhere between 90 and 100 percent of what a teacher does on a day-to-day basis, right? So these became sort of what I call the central practices that every teacher does, and then that became a variable, right? 

So, for example, let’s take groups, right? Every teacher does collaborative groups to some extent. Well, so what are the most normative ways that teachers do that? Well, one is we create strategic groups, which is that I have a goal, and I’m going to use that goal to guide the formation of these groups, and I’m going to really carefully make these groups, right? 

So maybe I want to differentiate today, so I’m going to make ability groups. Or maybe I want to increase productivity, so I’ll make mixed-ability groups. Or maybe I just want peace and quiet, so I’m going to keep certain students apart, right? But whatever my goal is, I’m going to make the groups very carefully. This is a dominant grouping strategy of elementary teachers, right? 

So I started with the core routines that every teacher does and then made that a variable, looked at the status quo, then iterated to improve. Almost every single time, the practice that emerged as the most effective for getting students to think was radically different from the sort of normative routines that we tend to use. 

Now, which one actually has the biggest impact on reducing anxiety? 

Ironically, I think it’s random groups. It makes a really safe space, but it can’t just be random groups on its own. It has to be random groups coupled with the teacher’s work to make sure that the groups are functional and that there is respect and empathy and so on and so forth. 

And to that end, we also work on these things called empathy boosters. So none of these things just work out of the package, right? You still have to bring all your teacherly craft to it. 

I think another one that actually works well at reducing anxiety is chapter nine, which is what’s called thin slicing. So thin slicing is how I start with a task that every single student can do, right? So that when they’re walking away from the launch, they’re already feeling like, “I got this.” 

And then we work our way… The task gets a little bit harder and a little bit harder, and they’re still feeling in control. “Yeah, this is good. I got this. I got this. I got this.” And then on question number six or seven, they’re kind of like, “OK, here it is.” 

And it’s like you hear it in the student. And then they enter into a state that we call productive struggle. Now, everybody talks about productive struggle, but one of the things that we really learned about productive struggle is if all we do is challenge our students, they’re more likely to give up than to enter into a state of productive struggle. 

But if we challenge our students on the heels of success, then they’re more likely to go into a state of productive struggle. So it’s not challenge them. It’s I’m going to have you have some success, success, success, success, here comes a challenge. 

And in that guided way, they’re feeling really safe, so that by the time they’re actually working hard and actually thinking and collaborating because they need each other, they are so full of confidence. 

We’re not just throwing these kids to the wolves. We are completely present, making sure that these experiences are positive. 

But the best thing that we could ever achieve in a classroom is when the students have walked out, and they feel like they succeeded, and they figured it out on their own. And our fingerprints are all over that, right? 

Like, we manufactured this completely, but they feel like they’re on top of the world because they did it. 

Sam: I absolutely love that because you really hit a couple of things really hard. It’s not just about making sure that the kids are thinking but really changing how they feel about mathematics. I love that. I love how we also talked about teachers and their role and responsibility. 

What about school leaders or administrators observing a thinking classroom? What should they be looking for maybe at the beginning of just starting Building Thinking Classrooms with some of the practices the teachers will be engaging with versus the end? 

Peter: Well, first of all, an administrator should know enough about Building Thinking Classrooms to know what to look for. They don’t have to be the expert. The classroom teacher can be the expert. But they can provide that sort of guidance and that feedback as to what they’re seeing. 

Early on, what they should see the teacher doing is having the courage to try these things, right? And to become comfortable with their imperfections around this. And the teacher and the administrator can provide the feedback for that. 

And it’s really a sandbox, right? The teacher’s trying to find that space. One of the things the administrator can help them do is to stay focused on the original Building Thinking Classroom practices. 

So Building Thinking Classrooms is 14 macro moves, right? It’s 14 practices, but each one comes with dozens of micro moves, these little nuances that make it go better. And teachers are going to want to bring their own in, and I think that’s really important. But they should at least try some of the things that are in the book so they’ve got a baseline data, right? 

Like, try this. Do it this way. Do it like that for a while. Get a baseline. How well is this working? Now, if you want to iterate on that, if you want to innovate, you can do that. But now you can actually have something to measure as to whether or not that’s actually better or not. 

What it looks like three months later: the teacher should be more confident, the students should be more comfortable, and the teacher should be able to be much more focused on curriculum. They’re still using the curriculum to guide what it is they have to teach, but they’re not being controlled by the pacing guide anymore. 

So that’s the sort of thing they should be looking for because that is going to allow the teacher to respond best to what the needs of the students are, right? 

We’re saving time in some places, and we’re using that time in other places. 

Lauren: I want to know, Peter, your last thoughts. We have run the gamut. We have talked about every possible thing and person that could have their hands on and in a math classroom. So what do you want to leave us with today? What do you want us to walk away with or know or… 

Peter: It’s really important to remember that Building Thinking Classrooms is a framework, right? It’s a collection of 14 practices that are meant to guide teachers in creating thinking classrooms. It is not some sort of choreographed dance that only I hold the choreography to, right? 

 I’m helping you get in the sandbox. I’m helping you get in there. I’m giving you tools to help you get students thinking, and as a byproduct of that, reduce anxiety and change their experiences and change their beliefs about what math is and who their future self is within mathematics. 

Sam: Well, as an educator, I’m always willing to learn new things and try new things. I would just like to say thank you, because what this book provided for me, reflecting back on everything that I’ve done and tried in the classroom, you know, people would ask me all the time, “Why does this work? What are you doing?” And I couldn’t name it, and you brought the names to what I was doing. 

But I could never describe or tell people what I was doing, or if I did, they told me I was crazy, right, for trying something completely non-traditional, but it made my students love coming to my classroom. So it really validated the work that I have done, even though I think sometimes as a teacher when we look back, you’re like, “Ah, I should’ve done this differently. I should’ve done this differently.” But you really validated some of the things that I was willing to try for my students to make sure that everybody was successful. 

Peter: One of the things that you said there really kind of encapsulates this whole conversation because we’ve been talking about students and student, right? 

So we’ve been talking about students as a whole, like what is the best thing we can do as a teacher for our class as a whole, while at the same time being mindful of those individuals who may need a little bit more care and attention, right? 

And that is also Building Thinking Classrooms, right? It is not something that is applied blindly to all our students. We apply that sort of holistic method, and then we make adaptations and modifications for certain students to help them get on the train and start to have these positive experiences as well. 

Lauren: And I think that’s where my gratitude comes from today, Peter. Going back to being seven-year-old Lauren, I’m just so grateful for the work that you’re doing in stripping away the shame of struggle for children in classrooms. I’m just so grateful that that work is happening and encouraged. 

Peter: My pleasure. It’s one of the things that drives me forward every day. 

Sam: That was phenomenal and amazing. 

Yeah. Well, I’m curious, like if you, going all those years back in school, even seven-year-old little Lauren, what’s one of his practices that would’ve changed maybe the way you felt about mathematics? 

Lauren: He said it so many times, but just that collaborative grouping and front-of-the-room struggle. 

So it truly did reach deep down inside of my spirit when he was talking about the child sitting in the third seat in the fourth row who did her homework, who knew the answers. I could answer the questions, but I never felt successful. I was never confident in being right. And because at that time in education, we were doing our work alone at our desks, or any time that we walked up to the board to use chalk, in my day, to use chalk on the chalkboard was for a timed experience. 

So I was racing against another child to answer a multiplication question or a division question or an addition or subtraction question, even for seven-year-old me. And there’s a lot of stress and anxiety in that simply because I knew that I didn’t know the answer right away. 

So that’s a long way, a long road to get to using that collaborative grouping, removing the shame of individual struggle, and inviting students to work together and recognize that we’re all figuring it out. 

Somebody may know the right answer, but their ability to share how they got there with me could open it up. 

Sam: Yes. And reflecting on that, you know what’s so fascinating is all of those teaching principles within his book, Building Thinking Classrooms, those are things we do as adults when we work in groups to solve problems anyway, right? 

And maybe they’re not these high-leverage math tasks. But working in these collaborative groups, and you might be pulling people from different departments. You always have that whiteboard in your conference room when you come together and work. And so these are things that we do naturally as adults that now we’re pushing into the classroom, which really, I guess, humanizes the math experience. 

Lauren: You know, that’s a beautiful point. And the other practice that he talked about that — I love that phrase, “humanizes the math experience” — the other practice that he spoke about that I think, one, would have impacted my own classroom but also me as a student is doing something fun. Math was never fun, ever. At least in my memory. Somebody may have been having fun, but it was not me. 

Sam: Oh, I wish you were in my math class. 

Lauren: Me too, Sam. Actually, can I come to your math class? Would you teach, would you do a math class for me? 

Sam: That is my favorite thing, yes. It’s the light bulb moments that really make me keep wanting to teach people. 

Lauren: We may have to go back to seven-year-old-style math. I think we should do it. 

Sam: Would love to. I think it would be such a fun time. 

 This episode of Heart Work is produced and edited by Danny McPadden, 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. Special thanks to Peter Liljedahl and my colleague, Sam Murro Shea. Heart Work is brought to you by Imagine Learning.