Math Teacher Lounge Podcast

Math Teacher Lounge is a biweekly podcast created specifically for K–12 math teachers. In each episode, co-hosts Bethany Lockhart Johnson (@lockhartedu) and Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) chat with expert guests, taking a deep dive into the math and educational topics you care about.

Looking for more free math content? Let student ideas take center stage with Amplify Classroom, a highly interactive teaching and learning platform with hundreds of free K–12 lessons, virtual manipulatives, and teaching tools.

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Meet our hosts: Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer

Bethany Lockhart Johnson is an elementary school educator and author. Prior to serving as a multiple-subject teacher, she taught theater and dance, and now loves incorporating movement and creative play into her classroom. Bethany is committed to helping students find joy in discovering their identities as mathematicians. In addition to her role as a full-time classroom teacher, Bethany is a Student Achievement Partners California Core Advocate and is active in national and local mathematics organizations. Bethany is a member of the Illustrative Mathematics Elementary Curriculum Steering Committee and serves as a consultant, creating materials to support families during distance learning.

Dan Meyer taught high school math to students who didn’t like high school math. He has advocated for better math instruction on CNN, Good Morning America, Everyday With Rachel Ray, and TED.com. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in math education and is currently the Dean of Research at Desmos, where he explores the future of math, technology, and learning. Dan has worked with teachers internationally and in all 50 United States and was named one of Tech & Learning’s 30 Leaders of the Future. To hear more from Dan, check out his blog.

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S6: Building math fluency

Tune in to Season 6 of Math Teacher Lounge! This season, we’re digging deep into math fluency—exploring what it is, looking into the research around it, and sharing practical tips for building it in math classrooms. Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer chat with leading experts to define what math fluency is, analyze how fluency benefits students, and explore how to engage students while continuing to build math fluency.

Listen to the final episode of Math Teacher Lounge! We’ll walk through the past 10 episodes on math fluency and pull out the key takeaways from our amazing hosts–such as tips on defining and assessing fluency, fluency development in a bilingual setting, and the potential pitfalls of relying too heavily on so-called fake fluency.

We’ll also talk about the future of the podcast and what’s next for us. Spanning six seasons, we’ve had the privilege of reaching thousands of educators while exploring a wide range of topics including the joy of math, math anxiety, and math fluency, featuring Amplify’s Jason Zimba, Sesame Workshop’s Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, Reach Capital’s Jennifer Carolan, and Baltimore County Public Schools’ John W. Staley Ph.D.

We can’t wait to continue working on a host of other exciting projects this year, including webinars, conference appearances, and the 2024 Math Symposium. Listen to the finale of the Math Teacher Lounge podcast today, and keep an eye out for more!

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Tune in to Episode 10 of Math Teacher Lounge with math teaching and learning specialist and friend of the podcast, Fawn Nguyen. Listen as Nguyen dives into the unique and powerful relationship between math fluency and problem-solving, and learn about how problem-solving activities can be leveraged to engage all students and fuel math fluency development.

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Join us for Episode 9, in which Bethany sits down with former classroom teacher Myuriel von Aspen to talk about the importance of a systematic approach to math fluency instruction. Listen as von Aspen discusses how effective fluency instruction takes students beyond fact memorization into deeper learning through mathematical discourse.

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Tune in to Episode 8, where we chat with guest and former grade 1 teacher, Jody Guarino, Ed.D., about how math teachers can collaborate to develop math fact fluency at the building level. Listen as Dr. Guarino talks about what it takes for schools to do this successfully, and her key takeaways from her own experience.

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Join Math Teacher Lounge as we continue our season-long discussion on math fluency with a special live recording at NCTM 2023. In this episode, our guest, Jennifer Bay-Williams, Ph.D., and Dan dive into math fluency games to discuss how we can bring joy into the classroom while building math fluency.

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Join us for Episode 6, where we discuss how to take an asset-based approach to building math fluency with John W. Staley, Ph.D., who has spent decades in math classrooms. In this episode Dr. Staley shares his experiences and research to provide strategies on how to utilize student strengths to encourage growth.

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Tune in to Episode 5 of this season, where we dive back into our season-long discussion of math fluency with classroom teacher Lauren Carr. Listen as Lauren shares how she allows her students to approach mathematical thinking and learning with joy and fun to foster the development of math fluency.

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Join us for a special episode of Math Teacher Lounge where we take a break from our focus on math fluency to talk with scholar and author Nicole M. Joseph, Ph.D. Tune in to this important conversation where Dr. Joseph shares her research and discusses how we can begin to uplift Black girls and empower them in our math classrooms.

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Tune in to the latest episode of Math Teacher Lounge where we learn how to intentionally foster fluency with Art Baroody, Ph.D. Listen as Baroody shares strategies on how to utilize a student’s natural problem-solving skills and desire to learn to build fluency.

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Join Math Teacher Lounge as we continue our season-long deep dive into math fluency. Tune in to our latest episode where we sat down with Valerie Henry, Ed.D. to discuss how we can redesign assessments of math fluency to provide teachers with better data and students with better learning.

Listen today and don’t forget to grab your MTL study guide to track key strategies and make the most of this episode!

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Season 6 of Math Teacher Lounge is here!

This season, we’ll be digging deep into math fluency—exploring what it is, looking into the research around it, and sharing practical tips for building it in math classrooms. Join us as we kick things off this week with Jason Zimba, Amplify’s chief academic officer of STEM!

In our first episode, we sat down with Jason to get a clear understanding of what math fluency is and what we really mean when we talk about it. As a prominent math advocate with many years of experience, he can also help us learn just how important fluency is and how it fits into the standards.

Listen today and don’t forget to grab your MTL study guide to track your learning and make the most of this episode!

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S5: Tackling Math Anxiety

For the fifth season of Math Teacher Lounge, we’re exploring math anxiety—what it is, what causes it, and what we can do to prevent it. Hosts Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer will talk to experts and researchers about this important issue that affects both students and adults, and how to find ways to work together to create a more positive narrative around math and increase student engagement and understanding in class.

Join Math Teacher Lounge as we continue our summer mini-series where we discuss how to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) as a teaching tool. In this episode, we sat down with educator Kristen Moore to discuss how she is using Chat GPT as a tool to revolutionize student learning and streamline lesson planning.

Listen today and don’t forget to grab your MTL study guide to track your learning and make the most of this episode!

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Join us for our summer mini-series where we’ll be talking about artificial intelligence (AI): what it is, how it is already being used in education, and how it will continue to transform education in the future. In this kickoff episode, we sat down with Jennifer Carolan, general partner at Reach Capital, to chat about the current state of AI in education technology.
As a former teacher and current leading-edge education technology entrepreneur, Jennifer has so much to share on how, if done correctly, AI will become a partner with educators and a tool for fostering social learning opportunities.

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As we wrap up this season of Math Teacher Lounge, we’re sharing our biggest takeaways from our incredible discussions around tackling math anxiety.

We’ve been able to speak to five great thinkers on math and the anxieties that can affect students, teachers, and even caregivers. From acknowledging math anxiety and finding ways to immediately start relieving the pressure, to redefining math and establishing positive math routines in and out of the classroom, we’ve learned so much with every single episode. Listen now to hear our season highlights, as well as some of our favorite responses from listeners!

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We’ve been very lucky to have so many prolific and brilliant researchers on this season of Math Teacher Lounge, and our next guest is no exception.

Listen as we sit down with Dr. Marjorie Schaeffer to discuss what causes math anxiety, math hacks, and how the right math technology can make an incredible impact in children and caregivers coping with math anxiety.

Listen today and don’t forget to grab your MTL study guide to track your learning and make the most of this episode!

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So far this season, we’ve investigated math anxiety in students and its causes with passionate researchers and curriculum experts, including one from Sesame Workshop! Now we hear from Dr. Heidi Sabnani, consultant, coach, and co-host of Math 4 All, as she gives us research-based tips for teachers who are facing math anxiety themselves! Listen as we discuss Heidi’s own math anxiety and journey through math, the effects teacher math anxiety can have on instruction, and practices educators can implement right away for overcoming math anxiety.

Listen today and don’t forget to grab your MTL study guide to track your learning and make the most of this episode!

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Listen as we chat with Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president of curriculum and content for Sesame Workshop! Continuing our theme of math anxiety this season, we sat down with Dr. Truglio to chat about Sesame Street and her thoughts on how to spread a growth mindset to young children and put them on course to academic achievement and long-term success. Listen today and don’t forget to grab your MTL study guide to track your learning and make the most of this episode!

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We’re continuing our season theme of math anxiety, going beyond the basics, diving deeper into what causes it, and how we can help students move forward. In this episode, we talk to Dr. Erin Maloney from the University of Ottawa to better understand what’s actually happening in the brain when a person experiences math anxiety, and how we can take steps to shift student mindsets in a positive direction. Listen now and don’t forget to grab your MTL study guide to track your learning and make the most of this episode!

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Season 5 is here! This season, we’ll be talking all about math anxiety: what it is, what causes it, and what we can do to prevent or ease this anxiety in the math classroom. To launch this very important theme, we sat down with Dr. Gerardo Ramirez, associate professor of educational psychology at Ball State University. As someone who’s been studying math anxiety for more than a decade, he had some interesting research and advice to share on why math anxiety affects so many students (and adults), and tips for how to start reducing it. Listen now and don’t forget to grab your MTL study guide to track your learning and make the most of this episode!

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Winter Wrap-up: Catch Up on Our Most Popular Episodes!

While we prepped for season 5 of Math Teacher Lounge, we revisited past episodes and pulled out some of our favorite conversations for a special Winter Wrap-up. Check out some of our most popular episodes about problem-solving and facilitating classroom discussions, mathematizing children’s literature, and building math fluency.

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

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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, 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!

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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 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.

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S4: Discovering the Joy of Math

Listen to season 4 to discover the joy of math! Over the course of this season, we spoke to many educators and experts about finding joy in learning and teaching math. Episodes followed topics like investing in instruction and students, why kids hate math and what teachers can do about it, and cultivating mathematical joy. Bethany and Dan also discussed their own experiences, shared their math biographies, and facilitated a live podcast discussion at NCTM—all with the goal of showing the joy of math and finding ways to cultivate that joy in the classroom.

In this episode, Bethany and Dan explore mathematical joy while visiting a math teacher conference in Southern California. During this program, Dan describes his attempts to cultivate mathematical joy in his own school-aged kids.

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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 experiences with finding joy in math, and how their passion helped them tell the stories of other students’ journeys to find (or not find!) joy in math.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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S3: Building Your Math Instruction Skillset

Listen to season 3 of Math Teacher Lounge! As we made the transition from video series to fully fledged podcast, we sat down with experts, educators, and even TikTok star Howie Hua to discuss the latest hot topics in math. Hear about ways to make math viral, mathematize children’s literature, build math fluency, and look at teaching as a collaborative professional learning experience.

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.

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In this 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.

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Fluency in math can oftentimes be associated with negative experiences with its development— timed worksheets, for example. Bethany and Dan are joined by three guests to better understand fluency and how to make its approach fun. Dr. Val Henry shares her three-part definition of fluency and her five principles for developing it. Additionally, Tracy Zager and Graham Fletcher join Bethany and Dan to better understand fluency through a lens of equity and using multimedia as a tool.

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How do we continue to grow and be more reflective about our own teaching? In this episode, Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer chat with Elham Kazemi to explore how to look at teaching as a collaborative experiment. Moving more toward analyzing student thinking and how that contributes to teaching itself, leaves more space for one’s own understanding of math to grow throughout your career. When one revises their teaching based on the data we’re collecting from students and peers, this allows us to be both teachers and learners forever.

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In this episode, Mathematizing Children’s Literature authors Allison Hintz and Antony Smith join Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer to discuss what would happen if we were to approach children’s literature, and life, through a math lens – and how we can apply those techniques to classroom teaching.

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In this episode, Howie Hua (you may know him from his viral TikTok videos) joins Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer to discuss making math accessible for students through multiple social media platforms, creating an engaging space for students to share their ideas.

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A smiling Asian man in a suit and tie, framed by a circle with a background of colorful geometric shapes, solves a viral math problem.

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S2: Encouraging Classroom Collaboration

Check out season two of Math Teacher Lounge to get tips and strategies for elevating instruction and encouraging classroom collaboration. Find ideas for facilitating student conversations, good problem-solving problems, and a cornucopia of other ideas and practices to bring to your classroom.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer are hosting a Math Teacher Lounge potluck. Instead of bringing a casserole (or a store-bought item passed off as homemade), Bethany and Dan are bringing you a cornucopia of math topics. Looking for more free math content? Let student ideas take center stage with Amplify Classroom, a highly interactive teaching and learning platform with hundreds of free K–12 lessons, virtual manipulatives, and teaching tools.

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Rio School District Teacher on Special Assignment and Amplify Math advisor Fawn Nguyen joins Bethany and Dan to discuss the power of problem solving. Hear from Fawn about:

Her five criteria for good problem solving problems.
How problem solving should involve all students.
The power of exposing all students to problem solving.
And much more!

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Authors Christy Hermann Thompson and Kassia Omohundro Wedekind chat with Bethany and Dan about facilitating student conversations in the math and literacy classrooms. Watch the video to learn how hands down conversations allow students to become better listeners and learn about steps you can take to implement hands down conversations in your classroom.

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A lot of great learning occurred over the last school year. Watch Bethany and Dan’s conversation with math educators (Zak Champagne, Natali I. Gaxiola, Howie Hua, Janaki Nagarajan, Brian Shay, and Dolores Torres) to hear what learning, practices, and ideas they want to bring with them to the 2021-2022 school year.

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S1: Bringing Math Out of the Classroom (Distance learning, math in public, and more!)

Watch the inaugural season of Math Teacher Lounge! See how what started as a video series turned into a podcast, as we discuss distance learning, technology in the math classroom, the power of data science, and what wrong versus brilliant answers can reveal about student understanding. Hear from professors, authors, researchers, and teachers as we delve into these important math topics.

MathTalk’s CEO Omo Moses enters the Math Teacher Lounge to chat with Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer. Watch their conversation to learn about how communities can create positive math experiences for all.

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Molly Daley and Chris Nho are back in the lounge to answer this question. In this segment they join Bethany and Dan for a mathematizing public places game. Watch the video to join in the game and see how you can spot and make sense of math in public spaces.

Learn more about Public Math by visiting public-math.org.

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Where is the most unusual place you have seen math in the last year? In this segment of Math Teacher Lounge, Public Math’s Molly Daley (@mdaley15) and Chris Nho (@nhoskee) join Bethany Lockhart and Dan Meyer to discuss all the unique places one can find math, including a laundromat, to elicit and invite math conversations.

Learn more about Public Math by visiting public-math.org.

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In the latest segment of the Math Teacher Lounge series, Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) substitute teaches an 8th grade class. Students interact with a few activities authored by Dan using the slow reveal described first in the Power of Data Science segment.

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The conversation around wrong and brilliant in the classroom concludes with UCLA Professor Megan Franke (@meganlfranke). Professor Franke discusses with Bethany (@lockhartedu) and Dan (@ddmeyer) the amazing things students are doing in math (in a pandemic!) and more.

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University of Delaware professor and author Mandy Jansen (@mandymathed) joins Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer to continue the discussion around wrong and brilliant and the idea of rough draft math.

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Is there a different and better way to teach rightness and wrongness in math class? In this segment, Bethany and Dan use a Desmos activity to discuss how wrong and brilliant answers can reveal student understanding and inform your instruction.

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Curious how data science can reveal profound noticings in your math class? Special guest Jenna Laib joins Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer to discuss this and the power of data science in the classroom.

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Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer discuss technology in the math classroom with the following special guests: Idil Abdulkadir, Robert Berry, Lauren Carr, Steve Leinwand, Francis Su, and Theresa Wills.

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In this episode, Bethany and Dan talk distance learning. You’ll learn a little about what’s in store for series subscribers, listen to your hosts figure out the topic du jour by playing a game, and hear from Idil Abdulkadir as the group discusses real vs. fake Zoom norms.

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Meet our hosts: Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer

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