Why Math Instruction Isn’t Working for Many Students

Segment 4
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Hey everybody. It is Cheri Dotterer here at Tier One Interventions podcast. It's great to have you here with us while we talk about the core of the math classroom. Today we're gonna be talking more about. Pizzas, rectangles, lockers. Oh my.

Cedric:  Back on March 10th, 2026, we started a 10 segment series Here is segment 4 from our October Workshop. If you are enjoying what you are learning, please subscribe and leave a comment.

I think that was the right order. Over to Jonily.

Being able to be up, moving around doing what they were supposed to do, following those expect with a few exceptions. But mine would've been like half the class would be the exception. It just would've been, not organized chaos, but just chaos.

And they, it was chaotic. Like it was a lot, but it was so good and they were doing such good things minus the guy in the back. So I was just minus the adult in the room. [00:01:00] Yeah, the adult in the room. But so there's a great example, right? We schooled it out of them. So now I'm like, how do I get my sixth graders?

How do we get back to that? 'cause that's what. It's way more fun. We should be able to do that. So I was impressed. I was blown away just with I'm like, they're not so different. They're not scary little people and they actually function a whole lot better. They function a lot better. Like I was blown away.

So it was fun and they were adorable and said cute things and it was a good time. Good. Cheri and Kirk,

so I'm thinking about my comment about the 30-year-old and she's gonna shoot me after if she hears me talking about her. 'cause she's right down the street. Anyway. I would, I was the teacher, like the substitute teacher, even though I'm an ot and I know all those wrong when it was sitting downtime and it was my own child, it was [00:02:00] do it, get it done, do it right, and do it without mistake.

And she has said to me as an adult, you did this to me mom. You made me such a perfectionist. You played with my brain as a child.

Don't. And then she says and then she tries to say, and don't feel guilty about that. And I'm like, wait a minute. You just put the guilt trip here so that you did it wrong. You did it. You're wrong. You did it wrong. Adds this layer internally into the regulation system that messes up with the rhythm.

Just throwing that out there as food for thought. Okay. Kirk, before you go. Okay. First of all, does anyone listening right now understand how vulnerable Cheri just made herself? I want [00:03:00] you to feel this because the chaos in our school systems really stem from the home and parenting. We know this, but we as teachers cannot change that.

We can't control that. We can only control what we have in front of us. However, in this day and age, there is a generational transition of parenting, and Cheri makes a really good point. I applaud Sheri for her vulnerability. I applaud Sheri's daughter for her honesty, and I applaud Sheri for not taking that personally and using it as a conversation piece.

That is hard as a parent, you guys, but that is the parent [00:04:00] we need to be. To break these generational cycles. Let me give you an example. There are a lot of things that I can't tell my mom or my dad because I've tried to be honest and it's turned into my fault and I'm a 50-year-old woman. Okay? So from that, knowing that I can't be honest, and my parents are older now, so why I don't wanna rock that boat.

I don't want them in their last years of life for me to just be this daughter that's ungrateful. That's not what I want. And is it gonna change anything if they know what they did to me? No. But guess who I do have the conversation with my boys. I'm very honest with my boys who are 20 and 17 now, and I have been for the last few years.[00:05:00]

And I've said to them, look, these are the things I want to tell your grandmother. And here are the things I've tried to tell and here are her responses. And I say that because then I say to them, I know I made a lot of mistakes as a parent. But knowing some of the things that happened to me as a child, I had to bring the subconscious conscious and figure out what those things were that hurt me, become aware of it, and then get my kids' feedback.

So on the flip side of this, Cheri, I actually have opened myself up years ago to my kids probably four or five years ago when I began asking my kids, how do you want me to do that differently? Look, you made this mistake, you did this. That's on you. But what can I do [00:06:00] different so that you do better next time.

Now put the teacher hat on. And the only reason I was a better parent is because I studied being a better teacher. And I would do that with my kids in school. Look, you made this choice. I am irate with this choice. This mama ain't happy. What can I do as your teacher to make sure that this choice doesn't happen again?

So I, gosh, I know that was a big rabbit hole and I'm wait, making Kirk wait in the wings. But a big point is, Cheri, what you said was so vulnerable. But so necessary for the conversation and I'm experiencing the same thing and how to work through those things because we need some of these generational parenting [00:07:00] cycles to change.

Follow up, Cheri, or is Kirk ready to go?

Go ahead. Kirk. Kirk and then Sarah. Alright. I just wanted to say it makes sense that your sixth graders are unable to work in groups from a neuroscience point of view because they have toddler brains. Once, once kids hit adolescents, they're going through brain changes that are exactly the same as two year olds.

So that just makes sense.

And Kirk, profound point, which means even more often than not as middle school teachers, we cannot have the expectation that they already know how to do this. We have to teach them just the [00:08:00] kindergarten teacher did, Sarah. Okay. I am gonna try to remember, I have my. Three thinkers to remember the three things I wanted to say.

But first, like Kirk said, I remember my mom used to say there were three of us, and she's I don't know what it is. But when you guys walk in the doors of the middle school, it's like there's a machine that like sucks your brain out of your head and then like on your last day of eighth grade when you're ready to go to high school, all of a sudden it like plops it back in.

And that's when, that's what I'm thinking about with Kirk's comment that, that is definitely a different stage of your life. But the measuring task you were describing made me think of teaching in a cyber environment. We don't get to do a lot of those kinds of things with our students, but we do host pie day activities and one of the ones that I've been able to facilitate with kids before is where they.

They roll a hula hoop as if it's like a bike wheel. And we measure the distance of a rotation for different [00:09:00] sized wheels. And to do this, we have tape measures that I place on the floor and kind of taped together because we're obviously like going further. And some of the questions that I ask, it just was so revealing your little girl who was like, I'm five pounds.

I remember asking kids we're standing at a piece of tape and we like have the tape measure laid out. And I asked them like, how far away do you think that end line is that finish line? And some kids were like, a mile and like 500, 500 feet or, whatever. And it just made me realize, okay, do we understand measurement, like how big a mile is in comparison to a few feet or whatever.

So that, that experience made me think of that the. See, I'm gonna forget now, but oh, I know. Okay. Second thing was with the teacher in the room had a similar experience. This week I've been working with a teacher to plan some lesson activities to encourage student modeling.

[00:10:00] And I didn't know when we had the conversation that his student teacher was going to lead the activity, not him. And the student teacher was not part of our conversation. So I go into the lesson to observe and I'm like it's very much like calling on the same person doing the modeling for them.

A lot of things that, like I'm chatting to the teacher and then I'm like, oh, it's that person who's, leading. And so then it was like an afterthought of we do really need to have those conversations with anyone that's in the room when we do an activity like that to talk about with all the adults that, there's a purpose to why we are not showing them or not answering questions or whatever.

And then the third thing I was gonna say is that we just had a a little mini coach conversation yesterday about productive struggle. I had given a short video to teachers to watch before the conversation in which students were working [00:11:00] through a problem discussing with people at their table justifying, and we were talking about like barriers to maybe some of the tasks that they avoid with their students.

And they were like I don't know that my students could do that. I don't know, blah, blah, blah. And I was like what do you think? What do you think they would do if you showed them this video? Like of students in a room writing things down, talking with each other, having conversation as a class, like maybe students need to see it modeled for them, or triggered as like you said, you know what?

You did this in elementary school. I know you did but here's an example just to refresh, like what this looks like and this is what we're aiming for. So beautifully said Sarah, and you connected to a couple things that were put in our Zoom comments, and that is, I'm gonna rephrase it, but when we have paraprofessionals in the room, when we have [00:12:00] intervention specialists in the room, if we do not have these same essential pedagogy approaches, especially our special ed teachers that are in our tier one regular classrooms.

Because they their heart is in it. They want these kids to succeed, but the belief of succeeding without struggle is irreversible. The only way to truly succeed long term, we might get short term success without struggle guaranteed, and that's what some of us are aiming for. But then they're moving into the next grade level and the next grade level, and they're worse off than what they were if we would have not stolen their struggle.

The only way to achieve long-term success is to go [00:13:00] through the struggle. That's it. If you take away their struggle long-term, they will not be achieving because they're not. We have evidence of that right now in every single school in this country. We're stealing their struggle. They're not achieving in math.

We're stealing their struggle. They're not achieving in math. We're stealing their struggle. They're not achieving in math. The opposite of that is. We're telling them everything. They're mimicking, they're memorizing, they're not achieving. We're telling them everything. They're mimicking, they're memorizing.

They're not achieving. We're telling them everything. They're mimicking, they're memorizing. We're not achieving. I'm not sure how much more data and evidence we need to tell us what's not working and what we need to do to get it to work. Jonily, [00:14:00] your strategies are good and everything, but I have all my content to teach.

Jonily, I wanna close out Tier One Interventions podcast, and that is, if you are listening to this podcast and you are thinking, how do I get involved, you wanna head over to your show notes and click on the link. We are offering you to come to a session like this where you get all two and a half hours at one shot for $47.

You can then join another session for another $47. Or you can buy the whole year for $497 plus you have to buy the. When if you're going to go buy the whole year, you're gonna have to buy level one as well. But the coaching and these conversations that we're having are [00:15:00] $497. That sounds to me like a really good deal for to, to really think the way you're thinking about not just mathematics, but occupational therapist delivery, speech therapy, delivery, special ed delivery, and how we're helping these kids rethink, reregulate, relearn and think about life as whole.