BONUS: Why Every Student IS a Math Person

In this S5E11 Schoolutions Teaching Strategies BONUS, I unpack game-changing insights from math expert Mona Iehl about why student engagement and student motivation actually INCREASE when we give kids harder problems. This counterintuitive approach transforms classroom behavior and builds true classroom belonging through mathematical struggle.

💡 What You'll Discover:

• Why rescuing kids from struggle hurts their mathematical identity
• The 2 magic phrases that revolutionize student participation and attention in class
• How to plan a week of transformative math lessons in ONE prep period
• Why wrong answers are actually windows into understanding
• The simple shift from math as performance to math as conversation

 🌟 Key Takeaways:
This episode challenges traditional instructional strategies and offers practical education strategies for creating inclusive classrooms where every child discovers they ARE a math person. Learn how active learning through productive struggle creates thriving students and inspired teaching.

📚 Resources Mentioned:

• Word Problem Workshop by Mona Iehl

📖 CHAPTERS:
0:00 Why We're Hurting Kids By Helping Too Much
1:30 The Math Identity Crisis in Our Classrooms 
3:00 Choosing Problems That Challenge Your Top Students
4:00 John Dewey: Learning Through Reflection
4:30 The Forecasting Guide Secret
5:30 Math Narration at Home
6:30 When Kids Rise to Hard Problems
7:00 From Silent Pencils to Mathematical Discourse
8:00 The Two Magic Phrases
9:00 Math as Conversation, Not Performance
10:00 Your Monday Morning Challenge

🚀📚 Watch the full S5E11 interview here (https://youtu.be/HO0l_eyKZPw)

Join our community of educators committed to cultivating student success, inspired teaching, and creating inclusive classrooms with a pro-kid mindset focused on the whole child. When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

📧 Connect: schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com
🎵 Music: Benjamin Wahl

Don't forget to 🔔SUBSCRIBE for more teaching tips, and 
💬SHARE with fellow educators! 

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When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

Transcript

Welcome back to Schoolutions Teaching Strategies. This is your Friday bonus episode. It's an accompaniment to my conversation with Mona Iehl, season 5, episode 11, 5 Steps to Creating a Classroom of Problem Solvers. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, pause this content. Listen to the episode right below this, and then come back.

My conversation with Mona made me think a lot about all of the ways we think we're helping our kids as mathematicians, but a lot of those ways could actually be hurting them or even holding them back. So in the next 10 minutes, I will share why giving kids harder problems actually builds confidence. How you can plan a week of transformative math lessons in just one prep period. And the two magic phrases that will change everything about how kids see themselves as [00:01:00] mathematicians. 

This is Schoolutions Teaching Strategies, the podcast that extends education beyond the classroom. A show that isn't just theory, but practical try-it-tomorrow approaches for educators and caregivers to ensure every student finds their spark and receives the support they need to thrive.

I am so happy to have you joining me for another Friday bonus episode. I'm still thinking about my conversation with Mona Iehl, and I wanted to come back to share something that has been keeping me up at night because it's something that reframes how we think about teaching math. And when I was talking with Mona, it's about minute 27 of our conversation. Mona said something that should really make us all stop in our tracks. She said, “To intentionally give kids a problem they will struggle with, almost goes against our [00:02:00] identity.” 

So think about that. We became teachers to help. It's literally who we are. And yet, here's the paradox. By making math too easy, or by rescuing kids from struggle, we're actually stealing their mathematical identity. Mona highlights what most of us tend to do as math teachers. If we choose problems that are not challenging enough, within two minutes, half of the class will be done. We'll try to force a discussion that could last too long where the kids really aren't discussing anything meaty because there was nothing to discuss. There wasn't a journey, there wasn't discovery. There really wasn't a math identity being built. 

But here's what Mona's proposing, and I think we need to embrace it. Choose word problems that challenge our most thriving mathematicians then support everyone during the grapple phase in the workshop. And the [00:03:00] thinking behind this is when kids solve hard problems, something inside of them shifts. They stop saying, I'm not a math person, and they start saying, I figured it out. 

And I really appreciate Mona's alignment with the word workshop itself. Many of us use workshop as a structure for writing all the time. Kids draft, revise, share, celebrate. It's messy, it's iterative, it's unfinished. And as Mona put it? Some days you just put it back in your folder and think about it tomorrow. But math, math feels like it's always been binary. Right or wrong. Done or not done. What if we're teaching kids that math is a performance when it really needs to be a process? One of my favorite quotes that Mona shared of John Dewey's is “We do not learn from experience, we learn from the reflection of the experience.”

So that makes me think about in traditional math, where's the reflection? Where's the community? Where's the celebration [00:04:00] of different thinking? How are we celebrating that? All of our children are thinking mathematically just differently. I've had lots of teachers reach out since my episode released on Monday with Mona, and a lot of them appreciated Mona's breakdown of how to actually plan for Word Problem Workshop. Mona breaks down how we can plan a week's worth of instruction in one prep period. Here's her secret. Stop planning what the kids will do. Start planning how kids will think. She used a brilliant tool called a forecasting guide. It's in her book basically anticipating six different ways kids might solve the problem.

And here's the best part. Do this work with your grade level colleagues or with your coach. Sit together and do the math. When was the last time you actually solve math [00:05:00] problems? You're giving kids, not just check the answer key, but really worked through them using different strategies. 

Remember when Mona said she learned more math by doing this than all of her years of schooling? And I believe her because when we solve multiplication problems by drawing circles, by skip counting, by using the distributive property, by decomposing numbers, suddenly we can see connections. And it empowers us to support all of our students, no matter their approach to solving the problems. 

I also wanna revisit a part of our conversation around the home connection. For caregivers listening, Mona reminded me of something that felt so obvious, and yet I wasn't doing. We read to our kids every night, right? We narrate everything. We talk about what's happening in the stories, we wonder aloud, but with math, I don't think we do that same thing. [00:06:00]

Mona gave examples like, Hmm, three toothbrushes in the jar, I wonder where the fourth one is? Or five plates, but only four forks we're missing one. We're already narrating our kids' worlds. We just forgot to include the math.

And here's what really stayed with me. Mona talked about seeing the coach try this approach with her students. She thought it would be a disaster - crying, bathroom escapes, paper crumbling. But instead the kids rose to the occasion because here's what we forget, kids feel when we believe in them, they know it. And when we give them problems that are too simple for them, when we give them a compliment sandwiches, we're telling them subtly, but clearly that we don't think they can handle the real stuff. I propose that we stop trying to [00:07:00] prevent mistakes, and we start getting curious about what kids are thinking. What if wrong answers could become windows into our students' understanding? 

At the end of our conversation, Mona painted such a beautiful picture of what's possible. She hopes that classrooms could shift from silent pencil scratching to buzzing with mathematical discourse. Kids asking, are we doing Word Problem Workshop today with excitement instead of dread? And here's my favorite part, when the growth mindset language teacher's model starts coming out of children's mouths naturally, when they start telling each other, oh, I see how you thought about that differently. 

This isn't just about math scores, it's about math identity. Mona reminds us, it's about community. It's about kids discovering they are math people. They just needed the space to prove it to themselves. [00:08:00] Thank you for joining me for this Friday bonus episode. If this resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. That teacher who dreads the math block, that caregiver who says, I'm not a math person in front of their kids. We can change this narrative one problem, one grapple, one reflection at a time. I cannot wait to see you Monday for another conversation with the wonderful Gravity Goldberg. She challenges everything we think we know about the body, brain, connections, and education. Until then, get curious about the math hiding in plain sight. Take care. 

Schoolutions Teaching Strategies is created, produced, and edited by me. Olivia Wahl. Thank you to my older son Benjamin, who created the music playing in the background. You can follow and listen to Schoolutions wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe to never miss an episode and watch on YouTube. 

Here is my challenge and an [00:09:00] invitation: Monday morning when you're planning math, choose one problem, just one. Make it harder than you think you should make it a challenge for your most thriving mathematician. Then instead of teaching the method, try Mona’s two, two magic phrases: Tell me about that, and what are you thinking? Because here's the truth, Mona helped me see. We've been approaching math like it's a performance, when it should be a conversation. We've been teaching answers when we should really be cultivating curiosity. 

The math revolution, Mona, is sparking isn't new curriculum or fancy technology. It's believing kids can grapple with hard things and trusting that in the struggle, they'll discover that they were mathematicians all along. And caregivers this weekend, narrate the math in your world. Count the stairs, notice the patterns, [00:10:00] wonder aloud about quantities, and tell me how it went at schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com. What's shifting your thinking? What's your next step after that?

Don't forget to tune in every Monday for the best research-backed coaching and teaching strategies you can apply right away to better the lives of the children in your care. And stay tuned for my bonus episodes every Friday where I'll reflect and share connections to what I learned from the guest that week. See you [00:11:00] then.