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Are you struggling with your student’s math retention or maybe you’re struggling to engage students who feel disconnected from math or battle math anxiety?

In this episode, Jon Orr and Yvette Lehman welcome back Juliana Tapper, an expert in supporting students who struggle with math, to explore impactful ways to address student engagement and math anxiety in grades 6-12. Drawing on insights from her new book and 2024 Make Math Moments Virtual Summit Session, Juliana shares practical strategies for educators dealing with retention issues and lack of student motivation.

• Discover brain science behind math anxiety and why some students struggle with recall and problem-solving.

• Learn four actionable strategies to create a supportive math classroom that builds confidence and collaboration.

• Gain insights into balancing grade-level content with the needs of students who feel disconnected from math.

Listen now to transform your classroom environment and help struggling math students thrive!

Resources:

• Register for the Make Math Moments Virtual Summit
• Make Math Moments Problem Based Lessons & Units

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jon Orr: Hey there, Juliana, welcome back to the Making Math Moments That Matter podcast. We are super excited to bring you back. You spoke with us back on episode 187, which is, this is gonna be like episode 300 and something. So it’s been a while that we’ve chatted officially here on the podcast. We just got back from the NCSM, NCTM conference in Chicago, we saw you there. It’s excited that we’re excited to kind of keep this conversation rolling. How you been? How you been?

Juliana Tapper: Yeah, I’m so excited to be back. I get so much amazing feedback on the first session. Everyone, you know, loves you guys and loves tuning in and then to meet you in person at NCSM and see your session like was incredible. So I’m feeling super pumped to be here today.

Jon Orr: Awesome, awesome. Well, do us a favor. We’re gonna talk all things about your upcoming virtual summit, your book that’s coming out. We’re gonna dig into those things, but do us a favor. Remind our listeners, whereabouts are you coming from and what’s your role in education? What are you up to these days?

Juliana Tapper: Yeah, so I am passionate about students who struggle with math. I have personally always taught the high school math intervention classes and high school algebra one. I started teaching in South Central Los Angeles, then East San Jose, and then Denver. We live here in Colorado now. I was a district math coach, a district TOSA. And then I have been doing my own consulting work for a number of years now since 2018 and just getting to support teachers all over the US, all over the world that are wanting to increase engagement, achievement, motivation of students who struggle and specifically really like sixth through 12th grade students who struggle. That is really, I really love supporting those teachers talking about how do we help increase that engagement among students that maybe we feel we have some students who are maybe apathetic or.

They are, you they’ve just been checked out of math for a very long time. They failed math for many, many years and here they are in our classroom. And, you know, how can we support them? And so I recently wrote a book, it is available for pre-order now called Teaching 612 Math Intervention. And it’s all about a practical framework to engage students who struggle with math. So I’m excited to kind of just have everything come together in that book. It’s like stories from my classroom, stories from the teachers who have implemented my strategies and the successes they’ve seen and then tangible, super practical, ready to use things to help us engage our students who struggle with math.

Yvette Lehman: So with that in mind, Julian, I know you’ve been on the show before, but is there a math moment lately that you would like to share with the community?

Juliana Tapper: Yeah, a math moment lately, I feel like, you know, especially just coming off of NCTM and NCSM, it’s always such great, just like fuel around the conceptual understanding of things. And I feel like, again, that really hit me, like even in your guys session, like, we even did a little math task in the NCSM session where we were thinking about, you know, proportion, like, all sorts of different fractions, proportion of that shape that you gave us. And just to like see those things modeled, I mean, I feel like sometimes I honestly forget about those things. 

And there’s a big debate, especially with fluency, especially for older grades, right? Like our students are really struggling with basic math facts. How do we support them in building these basic math facts while also holding high expectations of grade level content. And I love the idea of doing a task like you guys did, of doing like within your curriculum, within your academy, you guys have so many great tasks about those fluency subjects that so many of the older students are struggling with. And what if we did more of those instead of doing drill and kill worksheets, even with our older students who are struggling. We don’t have to pause you know, the Algebra 1 curriculum to do it. We can just do it, have a fluency Friday or something where we practice it more conceptually. 

I think that really just like stood out to me at the conference. I was in a middle school classroom on Tuesday. They were doing long division and like no one was doing it, you know, and like everyone was just confused. They all made the fractions, but no one wanted to actually do the long division. And I was just like, you know, how do we make this more interesting?

Jon Orr: And like, like fill us in, like what was your thoughts on how to, how to make say that interesting? Cause I think there’s a lot of listeners that just leaned in there a moment ago and said like, yeah, like I, I see this all the time. And if I’m a leader or I’m a coach or I’m a classroom teacher who’s teaching say, let’s say six to 12 or six, you know, even just middle school or, or higher elementary and are working in those zones and going like, how do I make?

You know, that more interesting. Like what are some of your tip suggestions? I know that’s gonna be part of, you know, the work that you’re gonna be doing in the summit and part of your book anyway. So let’s dive in there a little bit.

Juliana Tapper: Yeah, I was personally like, I’ve never seen like the the long division situation. And so I would invite coaching from you guys right now to help me with what what how do you think I should approach this teacher, she is very traditional. And so I’m actually going to go back next week and model a number talk as a way she’s never done a number talk in her class. So I’m bringing I’m starting with number talks next week, I’m going to model a number talk for her as a way to just kind of help her see like I immediately like logged into the academy and like tried to start like finding like long division type tasks that you guys have already created.

And I was just like, you know, what can I what can I find? Like I’m in the middle of this right now. This literally happened like two days ago. So I would invite coaching from you guys about maybe what I should do next, because I feel like I see a lot of, you know, struggles with multiplication, positive, negative with, you know, adding and subtracting positive and negative integers and things like that. But the long division threw me a little bit because I feel like in high school, I would honestly just be like, let’s use a calculator and keep moving on and not really focus as much on that. So I would invite some coaching from you guys.

Yvette Lehman: So you just happened to bring up my favorite topic in the elementary curriculum. I love division. We actually just ran a four part series on early division and we’re doing a series on dividing with fractions coming up next month. And honestly, this is one of the concepts that I always say is probably one of the most complex and misunderstood concepts of the elementary curriculum. But if we could actually teach division well.

It unlocks not only students’ ability to divide, but also so many relationships with fractions and proportional reasoning. So thank you for the opportunity to get on my soapbox right now and tell you that I really think that it starts with understanding division with friendly whole numbers, like two digit by one digit. And if we can actually understand what division is.

Juliana Tapper: Yes. Just screwed you right up.

Yvette Lehman: So in simplest terms, division is one of two things. It’s either splitting into a known number of groups, right? So if I have 10 divided by two, I could say that I’m putting 10 into two groups. Or division is taking a whole and splitting it into a size of a group and figuring out how many. So that would be, for example, 10. And I’m saying, you know, I need to put two in a group.

How many groups can I make? So at the root of division, we have to understand these two behaviors so that when students come across at any division scenario, they understand right away their strategic competence is already enhanced because they can look at a naked problem and say to themselves, do I want to look at this as splitting it into that number of groups or groups of that size? 

So right off the hop, like they already have something in their back pocket, that’s a choice. And then from there, like from unpacking the behavior of division, we can get into the world of partial products, for example, or skip counting. and really like the one that lends itself super well to that, rather than long division is just the flexible algorithm for division, which is essentially a partial quotient strategy where they just take amounts that they’re comfortable with facts that they’re familiar with.

But I would really caution anybody not to jump into computational strategies because there are many for division if we don’t understand what division does. Like if we actually don’t understand how it behaves, it gets very muddy and very confusing very quickly. So I would say like, roll it back.

Juliana Tapper: Yes, It was like a cool activity where they were counting &Ms. And so was like, you know, four out of 26 &Ms were orange. And then they needed to make the fraction, do the division to find the decimal and then convert it to a percent is what they were doing. And like, it was 100 % algorithm based and a kid had that like the the decimal was like 1.0 1.04.

You know, and so I was trying to encourage some more thinking around if that were the percent, how much percent would that be? And is that possible to have one, one and four? And like we were working through that because he was not understanding the algorithm at all.

Yvette Lehman: Mm-hmm. So that one’s really layered because you’re dealing with not only division, but division with fractional amounts. And so what I would again kind of challenge, you know, to all educators listening is that conceptually, we need to understand what division does so that we can judge the reasonableness of our answer. Like if we have no idea what the role of division is, how do we determine whether or not our answer is even remotely correct?

And then we have to understand relationships between quantities. So if I’m dividing by a quantity that’s greater, like if the divisor is greater than the dividend, can we already anticipate the magnitude of the answer? And if we are in a space where we can understand relationships between numbers and understand the behavior of division,

I can maybe possibly blindly follow the steps of a procedure, but I have no concept if my answer is even in the realm of correct.

Jon Orr: Now, my biggest takeaway from our session in September, the four part series in September, and I know it’s gonna be another takeaway for our October sessions on division in your session in the summit, which is coming was because you were talking about the algorithm, like the standard algorithm, the long division standard algorithm. Like when you say, hey, how many times does three go into 198? Like you’re forcing the goes into, which is like how many, you know, how many of those pieces are fitting in there instead of saying, you know what, I could take the 198 and divide it into three sections or three pieces. Like you’re forcing students by always resorting to the.

To the long division algorithm to only think about division in one way when there are those other ways to kind of flexibly think about and solve that problem in those different ways. that was my big takeaway when I first, you told me all about this, that was like when I learned about it too, just being like how flexible it can be, but we’re forcing the one type if we always say this is the way you always divide.

Alright, so we just went down a little bit of a rabbit hole. Yeah, you’re Pebble.

Juliana Tapper: That was my pebble. essentially just gave you my pebble, my coaching pebble. So thank you. I’m taking notes over here.

Jon Orr: For sure, I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it. And let’s give the listener here, like maybe we’ll answer a little pebble that the listener has as well. Like your session, Juliana, in the summit coming up is all around, you know, six to 12 students struggling, tension, recall, problem solving.

and how we can assist that in our classrooms. Give us a sneak peek. You’re gonna talk about brain science in this session. Fill us in. What do we need to know about the session and then also what do we need to know about the brain science here so that we can help our students best in those classrooms?

Juliana Tapper: Yes. So when I was writing my book, Teaching 612 Math Intervention, I really took a deep dive in the brain science and I’ve known that math anxiety is a thing, math trauma is a thing. And so I really dug into how is this actually manifesting in our classroom? Because a lot of times when I tell teachers, math anxiety is real, they have a sense of relief.

Of like, you finally like named something that I thought my kids were struggling with, but you’ve given a name to it. And is that real? Is that a real thing? And so there is science. You know, there have been lots of studies on math anxiety. There is a math anxiety scale that researchers have developed to measure math anxiety in students. And there’s one study in particular that I found really interesting that kind of connected it all together for me that.

When students have math anxiety, when they see numbers, it’s actually shown they did functional MRIs of students’ brains and they have hyperactivity in their amygdala. And amygdala, our amygdala is what is associated with our fight or flight response or our trauma response, our primal brain. And now researchers are actually saying it’s fight, flight, freeze or fawn. There’s actually four responses that students have.

And so like that is really interesting for us to think about. So like when students are always asking to go to the bathroom, when students are ditching our class, that is the flight response. When they are combative, when we’re feeling like they’re apathetic, when we’re feeling like they are just crumpling up their paper and throwing it in the trash can, that is their fight response. You perhaps they are, you feel like students are disrespectful or something like that. That is their fight response. And so that is their brain reacting to perhaps it’s

math anxiety, perhaps it’s math trauma. Perhaps they are dealing with a larger, you know, actual, a bigger trauma in their life, but either way, their amygdala is hijacked. And then what they also found is that when that amygdala is hijacked, that impacts working memory. So their ability to recall, their ability to retain, and it actually, they proved that it actually impacted the problem-solving centers of the brain.

Juliana Tapper: And so all these things that so many teachers are having a hard time with right now, my students can’t remember their multiplication facts, my students can’t remember things from day to day. I thought the lesson went well, they came back the next day, it’s like nothing stuck. My students can’t persevere through problem solving. Sometimes, I’m not saying all the time, but sometimes that could be because a student is struggling with math anxiety and that amygdala is hijacked. so…

What I find really interesting, I like presented this to a group of teachers at our beginning of year PD session that I’m working with, actually the same school that I was at on Tuesday. And they came out of that part saying, so how can I calm down the amygdala? How can and that that really needs to be an essential first step in our classrooms with a lot of students who struggle who might be experiencing math anxiety.

Our number one thing that we have to do is learn how to calm down their amygdala because if we don’t help their amygdala calm down, they are gonna continue struggling with retention, recall and problem solving. And so in the session, we will dig into that study, but we will also dig into the strategies to calm down the amygdala. How do we do this? And it’s so important.

Jon Orr: Love it. Yeah, I totally agree. in when I because that whole fighter or flight response like I, I totally have queued into that in my classrooms when when we when we think about what they’re what they’re doing in, you know, on a regular basis, because the way I approached it, because I would I would have this discussion with my students on day one of our math class to come in because we always used to unpack

pillars of our math class. Like what is it that we really value here in math education? And one of the pillars that I used to bring up and have our students bring up was about collaboration. Because kids will walk in and go, well, why am I getting a car to go sit at a table? And am I going to get another car tomorrow and sit with different students tomorrow like we were doing random grouping? Because students will ask, can I sit with my friend? Can I do this? And it’s the pillar that

I was using in that classroom, in all my classrooms, to help them explain why we do what we do in our classroom in terms of seating was about collaboration, but was about comfort and feeling safe. Because, you you said like math anxiety, the way I was approaching the Omega and also like the fight or flight response was like, you’ve got a lot of social pressure, you know, in our classroom from other students you do not know.

and you don’t want to engage. so right now, you’re sitting in a room looking around going, I may feel threatened if I say something out loud right now, or if I offer my opinion on this math problem, or even share to the next person next to me. And I don’t know them. I might get attacked, or I might get made fun of. And that emotional response goes back to that kind of primitive brain of ours, just to say like, I

won’t do that and then I can’t think and I can’t problem solve. And so the way we attacked it on say day one was to say this is the reason we’re going to randomize our grouping every day is because you need to feel comfortable here and get to know people and what better way to get to know people than to work with them over time. Like it’s going to be a progress for us to strengthen this community so that that part of our brain doesn’t affect our math learning.

You’re playing right into like what I used to do in my classrooms, but I like that you’re coming at it from the math anxiety point of view. So I’m excited for that session to dig in for sure. What would you say is one other big nugget, other than say the brain science you’re going to say give a teacher who joins that session in November?

Juliana Tapper: I think it’s gonna be, I’m gonna go through four activities that we can actually, know, use. You’re gonna walk away with like the copies. You can just run them through the copy machine that helped to cultivate that intentional community. literally bringing in a lot of the things you just said. One of the activities is called respect circles. And it’s about defining the word respect in our classroom, which is, you know, sometimes we say co-defining norms or co-creating norms, but sometimes in like, you know, ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th grade, that can feel a little cheesy. Sometimes some of my students haven’t wanted to engage in the idea of co-creating norms. So framing it around the word respect can be really powerful. And what does it look like and sound like to be respectful while we do math in this classroom? So, you know, we’re going to walk away with like four activities that will help calm down that amygdala that will help.

Build that community and just help students if they are struggling with math anxiety or if they’ve experienced a math trauma, helping them to voice that to you and then helping them to overcome it and build a new relationship with math in your class. Because that’s really what we want. We want students to be able to have a positive experience with us. We’re working so hard to bring in more conceptual understanding, do more

tasks that get us thinking all these things, we have to have that community first. Like we can’t just jump in there. So it’s going to be like really that first step. And I do have like a five step framework that I talk about in the book, teaching 612 math intervention. And so that is step one is build community. And so we’re really digging in there, but the rest of it is continued in the book.

Yvette Lehman: Looking ahead to your session, Juliana, if there was one big idea that people were to walk away with at the end of your session, what would it be? What do hope they’ll take away?

Juliana Tapper: It would be developing their own empathy for reasons why students are struggling in our class, why they’re struggling with retention, why they’re struggling with recall, why they’re struggling with problem solving, developing a little bit of that empathy within us as educators and also having the tools to then move forward and move forward with our students.

Jon Orr: Love it. Love it. think empathy is one of the skills that we don’t think about when we get into teaching. we think about like, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t think about it that way for a long time. I used to focus on the math, you know, like I knew best and I knew exactly and I treated everyone the same instead of actually kind of trying to understand what my students were going through and use that in my classroom to help them on their learning journey.

And I think we need to do that more. I think, you your session and unpacking the brain science around, you know, what’s what’s happening in our classrooms and how our students are thinking about math, but also how how they’re struggling and also how interventions can help. I think it’s going to be a huge, huge, huge addition to any teacher’s kind of playbook, but also kind of a tool set that they’re going to be using in their classroom. So we’re excited in November.

that you’re going to be presenting on that November 15th, 16th, 17th is the virtual summit. is completely free to register. Head on over to summit.makemathmoments.com. Get yourself registered. If you have not yet done so already at the time of this recording, there’s almost 6,000 people registered already. So we’re excited there. We’re hoping for 20,000 this year. had close to that last year. So we’re aiming for a little higher this year. Juliana, where can people find more about you and specifically?

Where are they gonna get this book that comes out on intervention?

Juliana Tapper: Yes. Yes, so I am most active on Instagram. I’m collaborated dot with dot Juliana. And you can get the book at any fine retailer. You can find it on Amazon. You can find it on Barnes and Noble bookshop.org. You can also head to my website gate breaker book.com because in the book, we’re going to teach teachers how to be gate breakers of the gatekeeping cycles of mathematics. So gate

Breakerbook.com has all the bonuses that I’m offering for teachers that do decide to trust me with a pre-order of the book and wait until December 30th. like over $450 of like workshops from me available for teachers who pre-order the book at Gatebreakerbook.com.

Jon Orr: Awesome, we’ll throw all of that in the show notes and we’re excited to kind of dig in there and also see you in the summit.

Juliana Tapper: I’m so excited to be a part of it again this year. Thank you so much.

Jon Orr: Thanks Juliano, take care.

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