Math is FigureOutAble Blog

A few years back, long enough ago that I didn’t have nearly as much figured out about teaching FigureOutAble math as I do now, I was working with some middle school teachers.

Things were generally great. They loved...

Number partners are pairs of numbers that add to a third number. Given the landmark quality of powers of ten in our counting system, partners of powers of ten(1.0, 10, 100, 1000, etc) are immensely useful tools. Mas...

I was recently at the Florida leadership conference, FAMS, working with leaders and ran into Howie Hua, and we had a great conversation. Fantastic guy. You can listen to Kim and I discussing it here.

In that conver...

Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms is full of fantastic work. So much so, I’ve got 4 podcast episodes talking about it. I don’t agree exactly with everything he says, but studying it was very much worth ...

A thing I get asked about is the difference between focusing questions and funneling questions.

You may have already noticed that there’s something off with what I just said.

That’s because when we’re talking abou...

Episode 147 of my podcast, Math is Figure-Out-Able with Pam Harris, is all about using area models to building intuition with the square unit of measurement for area.

I start off by modeling a problem string with m...

Throughout this series we have discussed each of the stages of the Development of Mathematical Reasoning. In order to identify where students are in their development and to nudge them to more sophisticated ways o...

Have you taken THE QUIZ?

We can only change what we know. 

In the quiz post, I make the case that our distortions of what mathematics is and what it means to teach mathematics influence the way that we teach. 

When I travel around the country and visit teachers in classrooms, one of the things I notice is that the word strategy and model are sometimes used interchangeably. 

What is the difference between a strategy and a...

Hey fellow mathematicians!

Many of you will be happy to know that what you have been asking for is now available - video of teachers in REAL classrooms with REAL students. We provide these to you for free, but tha...