Why Students Need to Struggle Before Learning Math

In this episode of Tier 1 Interventions, we explore one of the most misunderstood ideas in teaching: students often need to experience the struggle before the lesson in order for real learning to occur.

Too often, teachers step in too quickly to rescue students from mistakes. But when students are allowed to explore, experiment, and even get things wrong, they begin to build deeper understanding of numbers, measurement, and mathematical relationships.

In this session, we walk through a real classroom example where students collect data, measure, and begin to make sense of mathematical ideas through experience before direct instruction.

This approach helps students develop:
 • stronger number sense
 • deeper conceptual understanding
 • independence in problem solving
 • lasting math fluency

You’ll also hear about the four stages of effective lesson design, including the often-missing step of pre-planning before instruction begins.

This video is Session 2 of a 10-part series from our October Workshop focused on improving math instruction and helping students think more deeply about mathematics.

If you work with students in math classrooms, intervention programs, or special education services, this series will give you practical strategies to improve learning and engagement.

👍 Subscribe to Tier 1 Interventions for more strategies that improve math learning and student success.

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 Check the link in the show notes to join live sessions or access the full year of professional learning.

 Join one Mastery Math Method Workshop for just $47.

Contact [e-mail]

👇 Comment below: Where do you see kids getting stuck most often in math?

⏱ Timestamps

0:20 Review: Lockers, Rectangles, Pizzas Framework

0:50 The Two Data Points Activity

1:20 The “Five Pound” Story

2:00 Understanding Weight and Comparison

2:40 Difference as Distance on a Number Line

3:20 A Lesson That Changed Direction

4:05 The Importance of Pre-Planning

4:40 The Four Stages of Teaching

5:40 Why Most Teachers Skip Pre-Planning

6:15 Masterclass Overview and Teaching Structure

7:05 Returning to the Classroom Lesson

8:00 Introducing the Scale and Measurement Activity

8:50 Why Students Must Experience Before Instruction

9:40 Letting Students Struggle With the Task

10:25 Why We Often Save Students Too Quickly

11:10 Mini-Lesson After Experience

12:00 Reading the Scale and Number Patterns

13:00 Measuring With Meter Sticks

14:00 Confirming Facts vs Discovery Learning

15:00 When Teachers Should Tell Students the Answer

16:00 How Fact Fluency Fits Into Conceptual Learning

16:30 Workshop Invitation and Closing

🎯 Ready to Change Math Outcomes in 10 Days?

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🎙️ Credits:
Host: Cheri Dotterer
Co-Host: Jonily Zupancic
Production: Disability Labs Podcast Network

🧠 Resources Mentioned:

Mastery Math Method Level One (Lifetime Access): https://disabilitylabs.com/courses/mastery-math-bundle
Mastery Math Method Live sessions (Annual Subscription): https://disabilitylabs.com/courses/mastery-math-method-group-coaching

⚠️ Disclaimer: The content shared in this video is for educational purposes only and does not replace your district’s policies or individualized education plans. Always consult with your instructional team before implementing new strategies.

Keywords

Tier 1 math instruction, math achievement, math intervention, Algebra 1 instruction, brain-based math, math pacing guide, math scope and sequence, Novel Model, Mastery Math Method, math structure, K-12 math, math education reform, Tier 1 interventions, number sense, math retention

Creators and Guests

Host

Cheri Dotterer

Hacking barriers to writing success, dysgraphia No ✏️ Required. 30-sec@time Speaker | Podcast Host | Author | Consultanthttps://t.co/eM1CXSUIoZ

Host

Jonily Zupancic

Middle School Math Instructional Coach

What is Tier 1 Interventions?

Math intervention, writing intervention, neurobiology, and cognitive-based learning - Jonily Zupancic and Cheri Dotterer are sharing how to incorporate them into your classroom. Jonily is a secondary math teacher and instructional coach for math K-12. Cheri is an occupational therapist specializing in neurology-based treatment across the lifespan and a Strategy-based Interventionist. Jonily secretly calls Cheri her Lesson Plan Whisperer because Cheri is always in her head, reminding her of the foundations of development before academics begin.

They met in 2018 and have been talking ever since. Together, they have discovered the Miracle Math Classroom. This classroom embeds all math standards from Kindergarten to twelfth grade, plus neuro-based interventions that improve proficiency and boost student engagement. Both gifted and learning support students thrive using the interventions they share, plus all students in between. Using cognitive enhancing techniques strategically placed in the lesson plan, students learn more and enjoy school more, and fewer students get removed from critical instruction for Tier Three Interventions.

Jonily has discovered how to teach all Kindergarten through algebra math standards using twelve, that’s right, twelve Reference Tasks. They include the Pizza Problem, 120-Chart, Paper Folding, Making Rectangles, Quick Dots, Locker Problem, Jesse and Kay, Geoboard, Candy Problem, Paint Problem, Staircase, and the Function Machine.

Cheri uses Body-Brain Anchors to ignite the flame inside everyone’s brain for learning. Whether a person is five or 90, her strategy-based interventions will ignite that flame. These Brain-Body Anchors include the Handstand Flip, Interlaced Bilateral Integration, and the Body Sentence Alphabet.

Together, they connect the puzzle behind math instruction and instructional delivery alongside these cognitive-enhancing activities to maximize math education for all students.

Join us live on the third Saturday of the month, sans July, for the math behind the Reference Task. Every live event is approximately 2.5 contact hours. The first 30-ish minutes become this podcast. To hear the entire training, join our membership program.

Please note: we will not record on holiday weekends. Join our mailing list for updates on dates.

To join us live, register at Tier1interventions.com. The 2.5-hour sessions include the PowerPoint slides, additional audio files of Jonily teaching the Reference Task, resources from Cheri, and much more. A subscription to these 2.5-hour Workshops is $97/month or $947/year.

Membership includes:
*Approximately 27.5 hours of direct training per year
*Audio files of Jonily's Hear Me Teach segments - complete
*PowerPoint Slides to grab and use in your Magic Math Classroom
*Resources from Jonily and Cheri for you and your students
*A copy of Math DYSconnected when released.

Or, you can listen to the first segment on your favorite podcast app for free; no membership is required. No matter how you listen, you will come away with golden nuggets that will transform your classroom.

Reach out to Jonily: [e-mail]
Reach out to Cheri: [e-mail]

Tier1Interventions.com

Segment 2
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[00:00:00] Hey everybody. It is Cheri Dotterer here at Tier One Interventions podcast. It's great to have you here with us while we talk about the core of the math classroom. Today we're gonna be talking more about. Pizzas, rectangles, lockers. Oh my.

Cedric:  Last week, we started a 10 segment series Here is segment 2 from our October Workshop. If you are enjoying what you are learning, please subscribe and leave a comment.

I think that was the right order. Over to Jonily.

That was my intention going into yesterday. So when I went into the class yesterday, I said to the kids, we're gonna do an exercise today. You're gonna be up and moving, you're gonna be collecting data numbers. Each of you are gonna end up with two numbers today. That's it. Now, ironically, this connects to another story.[00:01:00]

A couple of months ago I was in this same classroom and they were looking at subtraction and difference. And I'm not even sure how it came up, but I was coming in to actually do the locker problem with this group of students. And when I heard what they were doing in math classes, I walked in, I said, you know what?

I said to the teacher, we're gonna scrap. We're not gonna do the task I was gonna do with them today because I wanna extend on what you have just been doing with them. So I'm gonna teach just very on a whim, impromptu. And it was all about like measurements and difference in measurements. And there was something about weight.

And I said, do any of you know how much you weigh? Just random question. And this little teeny weenie girl says, oh, I do. I said, oh, how much do you weigh? She said, five pounds. [00:02:00] I said, come on up here. Come on up here. My sweet thing. I said, what do you all think? She says, she weighs five pounds. What do yeah.

Another little boy in the room said that doesn't make any sense if she weighs five pounds. He says, because I weigh 98 pounds, but with my football gear I weigh 106 pounds. And I'm like, Ooh, this is interesting. I said to the class, would that make sense by looking at these two? I said, come on up here.

So then we talked about more and less who weighs more? Oh, The boy. Definitely by looking weighs more. Now we can do this exercise in second grade. I wouldn't recommend doing this exercise in like eighth grade. Okay. Just, I'm gonna just gonna put that disclaimer out there. Things get a little sensitive.

Second graders, they don't care. [00:03:00] So in looking at this, I was going to go through with. A difference activity with their two weights and have them look on a number line because difference is subtraction. Subtraction is distance. So I was gonna have them look at the girls' weight and the boys' weight on a number line and we were gonna find the difference, the distance, and create the subtraction problem that showed that subtraction is their distance from her weight to his weight.

So I scrapped that and I said to the little girl, when you go home this weekend, I want you to ask how much you weigh. And then the next time I come back and tell me she actually did. When I came back the next time, she said, my mom says I weigh 35 pounds. I said, that sounds so much better.

'cause I told the kids, look, when my baby boy was born, first day of his life, he weighed eight pounds. So you can't weigh five pounds. And I'm telling the class this and they're [00:04:00] like, really? There was no concept here. So I knew I wanted to come back to this. So in that lesson that day, we took his 98 pounds without his football gear, 106 pounds with his football gear.

And we were, I was able to teach the lesson I wanted to with that difference. Now this is turning into a long story, but it's important to hear all of it. You gotta hear like how it all got set up. What is all the background, what is all of my pre-planning knowledge? Because if you come to Cheri and I'S Masterclass once a month, this is important.

And Cheri, if you wanna say something about this, I think this is a good time to do that. But if you come to Cheri and I's Masterclass once a month, one of the things in our lesson delivery that is totally left off, even when we teach with a textbook, is a [00:05:00] pre-planning before our planning. So all of us plan for lessons and we deliver lessons.

But there's two other parts of teaching that is missing in that. The first part that's the most important that almost nobody does is a pre-planning, which is that CES, that culture, that non-academic and academic essentials and the idea of seasons. So there's an entire pre-planning that I have to have in my mind before I plan, do my regular planning of every lesson or every week's lesson.

Then I have my presentation, which is the delivery, the actual, I'm doing this in the classroom with students. And then the other part that's missing is the post-planning. And in Cheri and I's masterclass. Each month we go through this process of how to set up a good structure for planning long-term and short term.

[00:06:00] Cheri, any follow up on the masterclass that you wanna share?

I'm just trying to set it up in in the system 'cause I forgot to do that. The next one, oh, no problem, will be the next one depending on when you hear this episode, but is usually the second to Wednesday of the month. But if this is aired after the next one in November, think about the second Wednesday at 7:00 PM Look in school, look in the schoolhouse.

It is a free masterclass. The link will be in the schoolhouse. Awesome. Awesome. I was just thinking about that promotion, Cheri and I wanted to make sure that we had that catch for people because that's really a big part of this story. [00:07:00] I wouldn't have been able to teach this second grade lesson.

Without all four of the planning stages, without all four of those stages. And in the masterclass we teach those stages and how to think in teaching through those stages so that the outcomes can be similar to what I'm gonna share with you today. Anybody have any thoughts, questions, or comments before I then tell you about the experience?

And I'm not sure, Natalie, if you've had something to say or you wanna, and if nobody has any, that's fine. I'm gonna continue. But any thoughts, questions, or comments about the setup going into yesterday's lesson before I, I go into that part of the story?

You just need to know that this little five pound girl is the cutest little thing you've ever seen in your whole entire life. Like adorable. [00:08:00] Just that's important. It is so important because she really could be five pounds. If we just put that out there now I knew she would. So sweet. Natalie just wanted to pick this girl up and hold her in one palm of her hand.

She's just the most precious thing. Sweetest little girl.

So backing up. Yesterday, Natalie and I go in, we tell the kids, you're gonna get two data points. I brought a scale that they could step on. I gave some preview to that scale because I knew these kids were not gonna know how to read a scale and not gonna know how to measure. I knew this and I'm not gonna do this big like whole class lesson on how to do these things.

This is where achievement formula comes into play. Mini lesson after experience, mini lesson after experience. [00:09:00] We have to,

I want, I don't wanna say eliminate, but we have to more often than not, let kids swim in the struggle, swim in the experience incorrectly before we mini lesson as much as we can. Because how often do you hear the phrase We need to learn from our mistakes? We are universally not allowing students to make enough mistakes in their experiences, and then when they do, we are too often saving them.

Explicit example from yesterday. Ooh, can you repeat? The classroom teacher is, oh, go ahead Kirk. I want you just to repeat the last two sentences that you said that's important. They were huge. It may not be exactly what I [00:10:00] said, but Kirk, I allow you to say them in your own words when I finish. Number one, we must let kids experience before we tell them through a mini lesson because we often hear the phrase, we learn through our mistakes.

And too often all the time in traditional math classrooms, we don't let students experience mistakes. And when we do give them that opportunity, we save them from their struggle way too soon. That may not be exactly what I said. So anyone else want to reiterate in your own words? Because I agree with the importance of those statements.

Put them in the school room. Look in the school room for them. Yes. Kirk, Natalie, anybody? If you can [00:11:00] type that for me so that I don't have to pause and do it, that would be amazing. But there it is. So that was another one of my goals yesterday. So the only thing I did to prompt these students and the classroom teacher was there, Natalie was there, I was there.

The only thing I did to prompt these students was I showed them the scale that they were gonna step on. Many of them had seen a scale and some of the kids were like, oh, in West in wrestling, we do our weights. I'm like, that's exactly what you're gonna do. That's gonna be one of your numbers you're gonna collect today.

And other students are like, oh, I have one of those at home. Beautiful. So I didn't do a lot of teaching on the scale, but on the scale, the only numbers that were listed were even multiples of 10. So it was 10, no, it was 20, 40, 60, 80, a hundred. So the big line in the middle of 40 and 60 was 50. And I knew this was gonna happen.

I didn't point it out in a mini lesson before I released the kids. I [00:12:00] knew I was going to facilitate the kids coming back and stepping on the scale. So I was gonna mini lesson when I brought the table group back for, I would have four or five kids, and then I would say, what's the exact number between 40 and 60?

So I didn't mini lessen that before I was gonna mini lessen that as the kids came back and looked at it, this is important to understand, this was, this is what I mean by mini lesson after they experience. The second thing I did to prompt them was I brought meter sticks. I also brought tape measures, but I like to use meter sticks better because they're more difficult for kids to use than a tape measure.

That's why I do it. So I brought meter sticks and they were actually meter sticks and the classroom teacher said, this is so exciting because the kids have measured themselves this year, but they measured themselves in centimeters. I knew I was coming in to measure for them to measure in inches, so this was gonna be perfect.

I didn't know the kids had measured themselves [00:13:00] already this year. It didn't matter. It wasn't, here nor there, air because it's all chicken and egg when we do these lessons. So I said, that's awesome. So I go to the centimeter side and I ask kids, what are these numbers? They knew centimeters.

Some of them knew that the whole stick was a hundred centimeters. They struggled to get that a hundred centimeters, that this was a meter. This is a meter stick. But I got a couple of them to say that. So I confirmed all that. 'cause these are facts I wanted to confirm. This wasn't the discovery part. So I said this is a meter stick.

What is it? A meter stick. There are a hundred centimeters in a meter, a hundred centimeters in a meter. All these little tick marks are centimeters. Look, Kirk's got a visual. That's exactly what I showed them. Okay? So I'm showing them this. You've got centimeters, the numbers are close together. You guys, when you measured yourself, you measured a centimeter.

So that was my preview, showed it. That was it. Then I [00:14:00] flipped it to the other side and I said, does anybody know what these numbers are? These numbers are further apart. There aren't as many, there aren't a hundred of these numbers on the other side. One kid finally said inches. I'm like, that is correct. So this is a perfect example of confirm.

Confirm right away. This is a fact. I want them to know. I'm confirming these are inches. How many inches do you see? There were a little more than 39 inches. I said to them, does anybody know how many inches are in a foot? Nobody did. I said, tell me how many inches are in a foot on three. 1, 2, 3. I'm like, that's not a problem.

I'm just going to tell you. Okay? I'm just gonna tell you, this is another thing that I don't want kids to discover, like we're missing the boat on like fact fluency and number sense, or knowing. Just knowing things and discovering things. Long division is a procedure. I don't [00:15:00] want kids to discover. When I want kids to know the procedure of long division.

We're not gonna do an experience and a discovery activity. This is the time where I do a lesson. I tell you, and you mimic and model. Okay, so however, if that is more than 50% of what I'm doing in my math classroom, that is a disservice. That is why kids are not achieving. So I'm not telling you not to tell, but we need to know when the appropriate time is to just tell and not tell.

And there are two examples. When I want these kids to know how many inches are in a foot, I'm just going to tell 'em. I'm gonna tell 'em. I'm gonna tell 'em. I'm gonna tell 'em. And then they're gonna tell me. They're gonna tell me. They're gonna tell me, and I'm gonna constantly be bringing this fact fluency into the classroom as much as possible.

Jonily, I wanna close out Tier One Interventions podcast, and that is, [00:16:00] if you are listening to this podcast and you are thinking, how do I get involved, you wanna head over to your show notes and click on the link. We are offering you to come to a session like this where you get all two and a half hours at one shot for $47.

You can then join another session for another $47. Or you can buy the whole year for $497 plus you have to buy the. When if you're going to go buy the whole year, you're gonna have to buy level one as well. But the coaching and these conversations that we're having are $497. That sounds to me like a really good deal for to, to really think the way you're thinking about not just mathematics, [00:17:00] but occupational therapist delivery, speech therapy, delivery, special ed delivery, and how we're helping these kids rethink, reregulate, relearn and think about life as whole.