Math Minds: It all adds up

Our experiences of learning mathematics stick with us — whether fun or frustrating. As teaching methods constantly shift, educators and students have long wrestled with the challenge of improving both the experience of math education and the results for students.

Today, through more than a decade-long process of research and practice, Math Minds, a professional community dedicated to the effective teaching of K-12 mathematics, brings new thinking to how students learn math and how the subject is taught. The program is showing consistent improvements across understanding, problem-solving, and proficiency. 

Find the common denominators in teaching and learning

Math Minds’ first phase was a funded project that ran from 2012 to 2017. Partnering with JUMP Math — a nonprofit organization that believes every child can achieve their full potential through an understanding and appreciation of math — the initial focus of the project was to improve mathematics teaching. Dr. Brent Davis, PhD, professor in the Werklund School of Education and a director of the Math Minds project, says JUMP Math proved to be the perfect partner to advance the research and pedagogy. 

Davis and the Math Minds team identified two key areas for improving school mathematics. First, there is the realization that the structure of mathematics itself actually provides guidance on how it should be taught. Second, the science of learning offers valuable insights into designing effective lessons and practice.

“JUMP Math heard the same thing,” says Davis. “They recognized that there’s a structure that needs to be present in each individual task, across every lesson, and through sequences of lessons and units.

“Our task (in Math Minds) was to define a pedagogy, a model of teaching that could bring JUMP Math’s resources to life,” he continues. Davis likens the thinking of the teaching and learning process to that of the composition of yarn. “We think of each critical observation as a fibre that’s necessary to develop a concept, or yarn. JUMP Math make those 'fibres' available, with the teacher’s task to ensure that each is noticed by the learner. 

“If a student has a shaky understanding at any point,” Davis explains, “more often than not, it’s because they missed just one feature or association.”

Using JUMP Math’s focused resources, Math Minds developed a model of teaching that showed a consistent, year-over-year increase of five to 10 percentiles in learning — with no plateau effect. “In other words, improvements in mathematics learning are consistent and cumulative.”

With this model of mathematics teaching in place, the second phase of the project, which unfolded from 2017-2022, brought the next set of challenges. There were two key questions to address in this stage as well: how might the model be effectively taught to teachers? And how could this be successfully executed, given time and funding constraints? 

Phase two: Teach the teachers

Ultimately, this second phase proved to be the catalyst for an online university-type course for teachers to learn to employ the new methods of learning. While taken by thousands of teachers around the world, however, not all found the course engaging or useful. 

Davis believes there were a few reasons for this. The level of rigour of the course was one element, as was the challenge to break the idea of what the Math Minds group calls “contemporary obsessions” — the tendency to be unable to break from “popular” practices that, although widespread, might not be as beneficial to learners as thought.   

“There are a half-dozen pervasive contemporary obsessions — practices that many teachers think are necessary and effective — with absolutely no research behind them.” In particular, some popular classroom strategies treat student busy work and group collaboration as appropriate methods for ensuring actual mathematics learning. 

Math Minds instead stresses the science of learning and evidence-based practice. For teachers in the Math Minds program, this involves what Davis calls “unlearning some and learning other principles of teaching.”

Final phase brings together teaching and learning

The current phase of Math Minds, funded through the TD Ready Challenge, has supported development of deeper partnerships in school districts in Alberta and three other provinces, with conversations taking place with international partners as well. Through careful use of the funding support, Math Minds has been able to move into a third year of work (originally a two-year funded project), refreshing the website with a focus on teacher accessibility (a beta version of the new site, MathMinds.ca, has just been launched). 

“We anticipate far more teachers will be coming to the new site,” Davis says. “It will be structured in a  manner we hope will be complementary to university courses.” 

And as the project transitions to its final phase, Math Minds aims to extend the model from elementary and middle school into secondary-school levels, in what Davis describes as a significant project that has and will continue to change the way math is taught.