Why Productive Struggle Matters in Math

Segment 6
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[00:00:00] 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 6 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.

One of the things that is frustrating with these kids and achieving is as soon as they make a mistake, we basically are teaching them to stop. And what Jonily is doing is teaching them to persevere through the mistake, figure out what they did wrong and do it again, and [00:01:00] not teach them failure. Which if I go back to my 30-year-old, I was teaching her to stop at failure and we will get through that doc dissertation.

We will get through that dissertation, we will get it done. But that, Cheri makes a good point that. If we're not doing the right thing in schools, then by 30 years old when these graduate level students, PhD, doctoral student are trying to get through their dissertation, maybe they don't have the appropriate skills because we've done this.

Now, Cheri, I wanna say what you said, and then I wanna make two points on what Natalie said. So Cheri, exactly what you were talking about. It's not the kids that can't persevere. It's us adults that can't persevere, and then we just imprint that on the [00:02:00] kids. Because if you go back to babies learning to walk, and my good friend and amazing mentoring coach, Carrie over Brenner uses this example all the time.

Babies that are learning to walk when they fall the first time, are they done? The other example is Cheri, as a parent, are you still holding your 30 year old's, two hands to help her walk every day? Sometimes I feel that, you know what, that was a bad example for today. No no, I'm not. She walks just fine and she is. Writing a dissertation right now and she's getting it done. It's not going as quickly as I had hoped, but it's getting done. But we [00:03:00] have to parent and teach like we did when the kids were learning to walk. Guess what? They fell down. They got back up. They fell down.

They got back up. They, and what happened when they fell down? Oh, but then we have to stop ourselves. Don't save them. Let them pull themselves back up and then what do we do? Yay. Yay. Any little increment. They're not even fully walking and we're excited and having all of the family over because they took two freaking steps.

Like it's okay. We can celebrate those tiny little milestones because guess what? They're going to fall 10,000 times before they can walk alone. School is the exact opposite of that journey, and that's what has to change. What does that do? This was Natalie's two points. Number one, there was a word she said early on that is depth.[00:04:00]

We always complain a mile wide, inch deep. That has nothing to do with our standards and it has everything to do with our teaching practices. The other point Natalie made and many of you have made is. The amount of years that this journey is going to take us as adults, we are a product of our system.

We are actually reversing deep philosophies and beliefs. We're not just changing our practices, we are changing everything that we experienced in our lives. This is, they, this is the school and education version of breaking the cycle. So it is going to take years. I tell school districts that hire me for Consulting.

This is an eight to 10 year process. And if you are not committed to eight to 10 years, you will never break the cycle in your district. [00:05:00] But if you as adults can persevere through eight to 10 years of my coaching, if you give it eight to 10 years, you will see generational educational change. See there, Natalie, you haven't even gotten that far.

Neither have I. I haven't been around John and Lee more than 10 years and y'all, I'm getting older, so y'all need to get on board soon because if you wanna travel with me for eight to 10 years, this woman's 50, you gotta start today. Other thoughts, comments, questions?

Yep. Agreed. Sarah? Oh, look at Kirk. Kirk has flying. Happy clapping hands, but only because I was trying to raise my hands and I didn't hit the right [00:06:00] thing. Oh my gosh. I didn't know we could do that though. Go ahead, Kirk. I just wanted to say for all the podcast listeners, I've been following Jonily for five years now, and it's just now starting to actually all come together.

And the importance of seasons is something that, because of other reading that I'm doing at this time really speaks to me a lot the chronological school year, which is based on textbooks, which is, and then we end up repeating things every year. No, we should repeat things five times a year is what we should be doing.

And that is huge. And that ties into other things that are in my head right now, but that's all I wanted to say. Five. Say it again, Kurt. Say it again. If you start following Jonily today, stick with it for five years. 'cause in five years it really [00:07:00] becomes powerful and then in eight to 10 years you become a master.

But Kirk, you said something. I just got, I got it written down. Now this is quote Kirk. We repeat things every year, but what we should be doing is repeating them five times a year, unquote, Kirk's tutoring. We repeat things every year, but what we should be doing is repeating things five times a year, which is an example of the seasons approach, quote, Kirk's tutoring.

If you're going to quote me, put AKA Mr. Handsome, which is what the kids at the learning pod call me. I love it. Is there a story behind that? [00:08:00] Only that I bring chaos wherever I go. I love it. Kirk, you would've had a good time with me and Natalie yesterday. We brought chaos. I know I would have that. I would've been messing 'em up on purpose.

Uhhuh, Uhhuh. Make it more challenging for them. Make them, give them, put them in an impossible situation and let them figure their way out. That's what I do. Escape room. A daily escape room.

Some of my students feel that way, that's for sure. It was so nice to be in, I think two. 'cause I think your second grade teacher, she strikes me as class B or type B. Yeah. Yeah, she's type B. She's totally B. Yeah. I see two really awesome type B classrooms that make mine like look normal. So that was good.

So I'm gonna share my screen and I am going to [00:09:00] pull up our notes. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna practice a cognitive science approach right now with all of us that are on here live. And that is called retrieval practice. So the first thing I'm gonna show you is from two sessions ago. Then I want you to think about last session.

And what I wanna ask you now is in school, in the comments or unmute, I want you to, I'm gonna use my favorite three words. Tell me about, and this is how the sub yesterday could have done it if he was versed in this method. So if he would've noticed the kids weren't doing well, what a good pedagogy, what a good educator would do would say, Hey, what are you guys trying to do?

'cause he missed the introduction. Tell me about this. Tell me about, oh, tell me about that. Tell me about what you're [00:10:00] doing. If he just repeated my favorite three words, tell me about, and had the kids tell him, he would've started to understand and they would've talked themselves into correcting their errors, which is exactly how Natalie worked with her groups yesterday 'cause she's a rock star.

But I'm gonna ask all of you this. Tell me about what we did the first session, which is this picture of the locker game board and all of these numbers. And then tell me about what we did last session, which was not this picture, but we extended, we changed it and did something else to then go back and make the connection, which we didn't make the connection yet that we're going to today.

But I want you to tell me about your experiences in the previous two sessions this year.

So what do you remember [00:11:00] We're, this is called retrieval practice. We're trying to retrieve, you're gonna forget your brain is swimming now because forgetting is necessary. We wanna celebrate forgetting jazz hands. Okay. Tell me about anything, Amy. We were documenting lockers as we opened them, like when we counted by each number.

Beautiful. Oh, counting. There's that counting. What else can you tell me, Sarah? I was not here and but I will tell you, you put this up and what I couldn't help thinking is, first of all, locker problem is not as familiar to me and it's one I've avoided 'cause it seems a little overwhelming personally.

It's a complicated, but I'm looking at this and now I'm seeing missed opportunity for myself because of working recently with the sixth graders on greatest common factor. And while we did something worthwhile, we were looking [00:12:00] at one 20 chart, we were doing skip counting. I look at this and I'm like there is all of it all together, exactly what we wanted to do.

And that's the perfect representation and activity. And so that's a learning experience for me right now. Said. What else can you all tell me about this? I love that the 11 is circled in green to remind us about prime numbers, but the connection to last time was that X and how you used an X, you called it a diamond program, but to me it's still an X.

You use that X to also reinforce add-ins and factors and. I had to go back and try one or two myself to try and figure out how to use that tool [00:13:00] to help me understand what you were trying to say. 'cause it was going over my head. Yeah. But I gotta confess, I got on the phone with Amy and I'm going, I'm not sure what she's talking about.

How do I figure out how to create these myself? And we worked through how to create them so that we can utilize 'em with the students we were on with Beth Cunningham. And that was part of the instigation behind and trying to problem solve them. She was totally lost. And Amy, I think with your guidance and our conversation, she was able then to take the locker problem board, take the exes, and come up with some lesson plans that were able, that were helping her students understand factors.

So I wanna dig a little [00:14:00] more into what you guys did. Here's the essential question here. Now notice I wanna back up for a minute because yes, you're engaged in this group today, but I always like to go back to the other agenda. I like to pull the curtain on what I just did to you. I just did retrieval practice, which is what I want you to do to your kids.

You've done something a while ago, you come back to it. You don't tell them. You let them tell you what they remember. Okay, so tell me about, and then I prompted that a couple different ways to get some more discussion. A couple of you shared Cheri then shared a specific example. Now I'm going to facilitate and I'm going to level up the question that I'm asking when we level up our questions based on student responses.

Y'all, this is important. This is the pedagogy of the achievement formula of math mastery math method. So we start with a, tell me about what do you see? What do you [00:15:00] notice? We get student perspective. This is the process. Tell me about somebody. Type this into school. We start with the process. Number one, you start with retrieval practice.

And the way that you do this is you use my favorite three words. Tell me about number two, you gain student perspective. This is how we become a responsive teacher. Responsive teaching means that we teach on the student perspective. We teach from where the student is. We can't do that without knowing their perspective.

And you cannot get perspective from students from a pretest. Stop it. Just stop it right now. Okay. Given a paper, pencil, pretest is not what I mean about getting student perspective. Okay? So just stop. Don't stop doing it. Fine. Give your pretest. The goal is different is my point. Okay? So number one, you do that.

Number two, we gain the student perspective. Once students are sharing their perspective, I am responding in my head and as the facilitator right away, [00:16:00] and as I'm responding and collecting all of their perspectives, I have to lead us into the next level of learning. The best way to do that is to ask another question, and the better way to do that is to start your question with how does or how do.

Now, I've taught all of you on this before, but not in this streamlined way. I'm very deliberate and intentional today about unveiling the process that I keep teaching on that you all have heard dozens and hundreds of times, but I'm trying to make it very explicit, deliberate, and intentional today. So you start with it.

Tell me about number two, you gain the student perspective. Number three, you uplevel with another prompt. The prompt should be a question, and the question should start with how does, how do, so here's my question now let's get back to engaging and back to Cheri's story. How do we create diamond [00:17:00] problems

to help us understand diamond problems?

Or the X.

So that's what I want us to engage in right now. But before we do Cheri and or Amy, what did you do? What was your process? Because everybody else has this question, how do, now Jonily could give you a bunch of diamond problems, but how do you create diamond problems with all of this pre-planning strategy and the goals in mind?

What did you guys do? What did Amy help? Cheri? What did, what? What'd you guys start with? We started with the pizza problem. Oh, I was not expecting that answer. [00:18:00] Son of a gun. Okay. That is not what I was expecting you to say. Because Beth wanted to work on fluency and different things. So we talked about how she could use the cubes to set up different ways to make I think we talked about 16, 24.

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. [00:19:00] 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 $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.