Problem Solving Success: 3 Experts’ Ideas from the 2025 Virtual Math Summit

Transcript

Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to Episode 187: Problem Solving Success: 3 Experts’ Ideas from the 2025 Virtual Math Summit

If you haven’t registered for the FREE summit you can do that at VirtualMathSummit.com to get 10 days to watch all the sessions.  If you’ve already registered, but you are thinking you’d like more than 10 days to watch go to VirtualMathSummit.com/upgrade to see your options for extended access.

Today I’m excited to dive into a big challenge for elementary math teachers – helping our students become confident problem solvers. The 2025 Virtual Math Summit has four incredible sessions that directly address the common struggles we see in our classrooms when it comes to problem solving. One of them I actually talked about in episode 186 and that is one of our live sessions that Ann Elise Record will be doing.  The other 3 sessions are pre-recorded and so I get to share with you actual clips from each of their sessions in today’s episode.

First, let’s talk about what’s holding our students back when problem solving. We’ve all seen students who immediately ask “Is this addition or subtraction?” without really reading the problem. Or those who give up at the first sign of challenge. And how many times have we heard “I don’t know where to start” or watched students fixate on keywords instead of understanding the problem’s context?

John SanGiovanni will help you tackle one of our biggest hurdles – getting students to actually think about problems rather than just hunting for keywords or procedures. He’ll show you specific techniques to get students discussing and making sense of problems before diving into solutions. One routine that he shares helps you and the students to NOT focus on the answer here is his summary of the routine. 

“The point isn’t giving students problems and having them think about them followed by somebody else’s representation for solving them, it’s about making their own meaning, does that make sense? Because for far too long problem solving, among many other things, was about mimicking rules, as opposed to making sense. On that note, one last one. This is a routine that I love to do with my kids.  It took me a long time to practice and learn how to do it. But to stop chasing the answers, I had to stop actually talking about them.  This next instruction routine is just about summarization. Starting with a picture, What do you notice? and What do you wonder? yeah those are great… So how this works is I’m going to have kids either decide what they want to talk about, or in other words, (A)what is the problem talking about? (B) what’s happening in the problem? (C) what are you trying to figure out in the problem? or (D) what will my answer tell me? I want you to just try and practice it in a moment, okay? So I’ll take away the black box in a moment and you’ll see a word problem and I want you to think about like A, B, C, or D. and like how you would restate it. You press pause to do it okay? So pause and then do A, B, C, or D in your head… The problem is about Bree and her phone and she got a new phone and her old phone had 2500 minutes but this new one is 3250 and so she’s trying to figure out how much more it can hold. Not verbatim what the problem is but like practicing restating a problem is really important and really hard. If you talked about C, as in cat, I’m trying to figure out how many more minutes her new phone has than her old phone. We were talking about D, you would say to somebody else “my answer is going to tell me how many more minutes.” Like it’s just a practice of posing a problem and then giving it some things to talk about, restating it, talking about the question/answer, whatever. The moral of the story is, we’re not going to actually solve the problem, just a discussion about a problem. It only takes three/four minutes and then tomorrow maybe we could solve it.”

Then we have Danielle Moore, who will take us deep into Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI). If you’ve ever wondered why some students seem stuck using basic strategies while others race ahead, this session is for you. Danielle will show you how to recognize and support the natural progression of student strategies – from direct modeling with manipulatives through to more sophisticated approaches. What I love about her session is how she helps teachers understand that it’s okay for students to be at different levels, while giving us tools to help move them forward. Danielle Moore also shares ideas on how to foster students’ independence when problem solving and here’s a small clip with just one idea she shares.

“So sequencing problems over the course of the week and also offering up number choices. I like to think about some of my students, you know, they need to review. Some of my students need a little more practice with like where they are right now. And some of my students need an extension, a little bit more rigor. That’s a way of thinking about these number choices. So that’s one way to foster independence in a CGI classroom. Another way, and this is huge for me, is to ensure comprehension, we need to go beyond “do I add or do I subtract?”  That’s not helping students in the long run. What can help students in the long run is giving them different comprehension strategies that they can tap into. So one of my favorite, my go-to, is Stop & Jot. I would watch kids read through a whole entire word problem, they get to the end and they said “What do I do? Do I add or subtract?”  So with Stop & Jot my rule is we’re going to read a sentence when we get to the period or punctuation we’re going to stop and we’re going to draw a quick picture or two words. Quick picture meaning stick figure or two words. Now the reason being is that sometimes kids want to copy down the entire problem. No. It’s already written down, don’t copy the whole problem.  We want to zoom in on the most important information in each sentence or phrase so this gets kids to stop, think, and identify what’s important. So by the time they get to the end of that problem they’ve got all of that information they needed annotated along the side.”

Christine Riad rounds out our problem-solving focus with an incredibly important perspective on math identity and confidence. We all know students who shut down as soon as they see a word problem. Christine’s session is actually for math coaches and we get to watch a coaching session she is having with teachers.  Throughout her session, she shares specific strategies for creating a classroom culture where students feel safe taking risks and trying different approaches.

“{Christine} Thank you, Cheniece, you bring up a fabulous point. My math identity, the way I feel about mathematics, the way I’m positioned in this classroom, is going to depict how often I take that risk and my confidence in approaching a problem, right? Notice that as a facilitator, Jada wasn’t really interrupted she wasn’t ‘wait, wait, wait! Explain why did you do that?’ There was no real interruption coming from the adults. And so she did, she had a confidence, Cheniece, that was like ‘come on, this is easy, I’ve got this, just give me a minute,’ right?  There was a real confidence in her ability and she didn’t know the answer right away. It wasn’t about getting the answer because did we ever hear her say ‘oh there are blank people in three seats and there are blank seats with this many people’? She didn’t care and who put this, somebody put this in the chat; ‘she didn’t worry about the right way to do it.’ Thank you Vicky, you took the words right out of my mouth. She didn’t worry about, what does this adult in front of me want me to perform? How do they want me to use this particular piece of information? And so, Sarah also talks about losing the willingness to problem solve because of that chance of being wrong. And so they’re wondering what procedure does Miss Riad want me to use, because I wish I could read her mind. And instead it was just really curious and just jumping in and excited to really dive in. So Angela, I’m going to ask you what does this implicate for our secondary teachers? How does this impact cuz I think you’re in secondary right? And then maybe Amanda, you can share afterwards. Angela what are your thoughts? {Angela} Well I want to highlight, I thumbs up this idea that said we can teach thinking out of kids by teaching or valuing procedures too early. That was shared by Matt. And I so agree with that because I feel like visuals are so important and I think when kids, you know, don’t have that visual stuff because they’re not using some sort of maybe manipulative or drawing or illustration it does make a difference and they do lose confidence.  If they don’t know it this way, have you tried a visual? You know cuz what are they seeing in their mind? Cuz I feel like and maybe because I’m a visual person I feel like it just helps with the foundation. So I’m all about the visuals. I think it’s important to have some other kind of way. {Christine} Yeah absolutely and Angela the research shows that we’re all visual. 100% of us are visual, right? And so what happens when we get to the secondary world, and I can speak to this from experience, is that we’re trying to create these scenarios in which it’s more efficient. It’s more effective, right? And somehow visualization became less effective and that’s the kind of myth we need to undo.  And that’s what the Framework is setting us up for.  It’s really setting up the classroom where we’re breaking down these four walls and inviting the world into the classroom, where the scenarios are real to our kiddos and the kiddos can identify, right? And so when they lose access to these tools, we are really doing them a disservice. We really want to make sure that these tools are available to them at all times, that they can go to the back of the room or the middle of the table and they have these stations. They know that they’re available to them. And when the tools are no longer necessary, and they’ve figured out a different way, again it’s not the ceiling. It just means that there’s plenty of ways for us to represent our thinking and that’s why it’s been so important that we have time to look at each other’s way of thinking, right, and to really discuss some of the differences. So I would really love to tap into how does this implicate our work specifically for those of us who serve in the secondary world? Or if you’re in the elementary world, what do you want to scream to the mountain tops to those of us in the secondary world? What does this mean for us in the secondary world? Does anybody want to speak to that?”

What makes these sessions so valuable is that they complement each other perfectly. John helps us set up routines that get students thinking deeply about problems. Danielle shows us how to recognize and build on students’ natural problem-solving progression. And Christine helps us create the supportive environment where this can all flourish.

So make sure you are registered for this year’s summit happening February 22nd & 23rd. Remember, if you can’t watch when the sessions get released, summit recordings are available for 10 days afterward, or longer with our upgrade options. Go to VirtualMathSummit.com/upgrade to see those.

Registration is open now at VirtualMathSummit.com. I honestly can’t think of a better investment in your teaching practice than learning from these amazing educators who are tackling one of our biggest challenges in elementary math….especially because there is no cost for this investment, just your time, which is actually a really big investment.  So for those of you who have already registered for the summit, thank you for committing to invest your time at the 2025 Virtual Math Summit.

Until next week, my fellow Recovering Traditionalists, keep letting your students explore math, keep questioning, and most importantly, keep Building Math Minds.