Math Teacher Lounge

Join us for the third episode in our Winter Wrap-Up! In this re-run from season 3 of Math Teacher Lounge: The Podcast, we sit down with Valerie Henry, Ed.D, to talk about math fluency and what that means for students. Listen as we dig into the research, hear Dr. Val’s three-part definition of math fluency, and explore her five principles for developing it.

While we’re hard at work producing the exciting fifth season of Math Teacher Lounge: The Podcast, we’re continuing to share some of our favorite conversations from our first four seasons. This time around, we’re revisiting our popular episode that connected literacy and math!

In this episode from season 3, we sit down with Allison Hintz and Antony Smith, authors of Mathematizing Children’s Literature, to talk about what would happen if we were to approach children’s literature, and life, through a math lens–and how we can apply those same techniques to classroom teaching!

As we prep for an exciting new season of Math Teacher Lounge: The Podcast, hosts Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer are looking back at the amazing speakers and conversations from past episodes and sharing some of their favorites!

First up: A season 2 double feature of The Power of Problem-Solving with Fawn Nguyen and Facilitating Classroom Discussions with authors Christy Hermann Thompson and Kassia Omohundro Wedekind.

Fawn is a specialist on Amplify’s advanced math team, and is a former math teacher and math coach—so she knows her stuff! You'll hear about her five criteria for good problem-solving problems, and the power and importance of exposing all students to problem-solving.

Then, we'll move into Bethany and Dan's conversation with Christy and Kassia to learn how hands-down conversations allow students to become better listeners and the steps you can take to implement hands-down conversations in your classroom.

In this episode, Bethany and Dan explore mathematical joy by visiting a math teacher conference in Southern California and Dan shares recent experiences on how he tried to cultivate mathematical joy in his own school-aged kids.

In this episode, Bethany and Dan chat with Sarah Strong and Gigi Butterfield, authors of Dear Math: Why Kids Hate Math and What Teachers Can Do About It. Listen in as they chat about their experience with finding joy in math, and how their passion helped tell the story of other students' journeys to find, or not find, joy in math.

In this episode, co-hosts Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer are LIVE with more than one hundred Math Teacher Lounge listeners at the recent National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference. Listen in as they answer the pressing question: Who is the best teacher in film or television?

In this episode, co-hosts Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer get personal and share their “math bios”—their early experiences with math and how those experiences turned them into the educators they are today. 

This season on the Math Teacher Lounge podcast, we follow the theme “joyful math” and uncover its meaning.

In this episode, Kanchan Kant joins Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer to discuss the key, early investment she makes at the start of the school year to ensure her math teaching will be joyful for herself and for her students for the rest of the year.

In this episode, Bethany and Dan take a look at several tweets that caught the most fire on Twitter during the 2021-2022 school year. The pair answer questions about viral teaching methods, the best teaching advice you can give in three words, and if students should use pencils or pens in class. Join them as they take on those questions and several others in a fast-paced episode.

Math education professor Lani Horn shares with us what it means to have an asset orientation towards students, contrasting it with a deficit orientation, and helping Bethany and Dan understand the many ways students experience one or the other. Their conversation hit both high notes and low notes and included a challenge that Bethany and Dan both found extremely valuable for helping a teacher develop an asset orientation towards their students.