Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What happens when an occupational therapist and a math coach collide? In this segment, Cheri Dotterer introduces her long-time collaborator, Jonily Zupancic, a math coach and former teacher who brings deep insight into why math instruction often misses the mark for students with learning differences. Together, they explore the interconnectedness of reading, writing, and math—and how Tier 1 strategies can realign instruction to support all learners.
Listeners will walk away with powerful insight into how educational silos (ELA vs. math) can be bridged using cognitive science, collaborative co-teaching, and practical classroom strategies. If you’ve ever wondered how dysgraphia and dyscalculia really show up in your students—and what to do about it—this segment is your wake-up call.
👉 Subscribe and share this with a fellow educator who needs a boost of inspiration!
***************************************************************************
BOOKS
Making Mathineers on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Mathineers-Transformational-Experiences-Conceptual-ebook/dp/B08NFCZ64K
Handwriting Brain Body DISconnect Digital Version: https://disabilitylabs.com/courses/hwbbd
Both books are also available in paperback and hardcover versions. All versions are available wherever books are sold.
Math DYSconnected - To be released in 2024.
***************************************************************************
TIME CODES
00:00 – Recap from Cheri: From dysgraphia to math challenges
00:10 – Personal reflection: Realizing the reading-writing disconnect
00:35 – The discovery: Even non-readers benefit from writing strategies
00:45 – Enter Jonily Zupancic: Math teacher turned coach
01:10 – How Cheri and Jonily’s worlds “collided” 4–5 years ago
01:30 – The “aha” moment: Linking writing challenges to math performance
01:55 – Why standard math teaching strategies fall short
02:20 – The power of co-designing interventions across subjects
02:45 – Introducing a new way of thinking about math as a language
***************************************************************************
SUBSCRIBE and LISTEN to the Audio version of the podcast here on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.
AMAZON MUSIC/AUDIBLE: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/89f67d1a-98b5-4592-a53c-8f4acb3d8029
This podcast is created from excerpts from the Tier 1 Interventions Workshop. To hear the full math intervention, subscribe to watch the event live monthly on the 3rd Saturday during the school year.
***************************************************************************
MISSION
Minds on Math, LLC: To provide engaging, high-quality professional development and instructional coaching for teachers to improve student achievement and understanding of mathematics.
Dotterer Educational Consulting, a Therapy Services, LLC company: To provide professional development to improve writing skills through efficient lesson planning for regular education classrooms.
***************************************************************************
FREE RESOURCES
***************************************************************************
Other ways to connect with Jonily and Cheri
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cheridotterer/
***************************************************************************
QUESTION
What is your biggest struggle in your classroom right now? Include grade level and your role. Share in the comments or email us at:
***************************************************************************
HASHTAGS
#jonily #cheri #Tier1Interventions #GeoboardMath #MathStrategies #OTinSchools #MathIntervention #Dyscalculia #NeuroscienceInEducation
Creators and Guests
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: jonily@mindsonmath.com
Reach out to Cheri: info@cheridotterer.com
Tier1Interventions.com
Math DisConnect Day 1 Segment 2
===
. [00:00:00] I am Cheri Dotterer. I am an occupational therapist for the last 30 years.
I had kids who were reading above grade level and couldn't write. Not only were there, was it happening at home, it was happening with my clients. And I started reflecting upon myself and realized, oh my, that's me too.
So needed to figure out how to help myself in the process, help my kids, and help my students that had this unique thing where they could read and couldn't write. And I realized that not only is what I'm teaching kids who can read, kids who can't read also are benefiting. And then I met Ms. Jonily, and she brought my light to math as well.
I'm gonna let Jonily introduce herself. Yeah, so Jonily Zupancic, I am from Ohio, and math teacher by trade, was with the school district for 15 years and for the past eight, nine-ish [00:01:00] years, I've been a math coach and consultant for Mines on Math. Cheri and I have our worlds collided about four or five years ago.
And what this collision has done is brought together the medical world, so students that are diagnosed with A DHD dyslexia, learning disabilities et cetera, et cetera. Cheri's approach to therapy with those students and then me as a classroom math teacher approach to trying to serve these students.
And the combination of those two worlds is what we're gonna bring you this week. In this challenge, we are going to focus specifically on mathematics. However, many students who struggle with mathematics also have a combination of other learning disabilities. So we are gonna talk about all of the learning disabilities.
With a quick dot, the way we facilitate is [00:02:00] exactly what Cheri did. How many dots do you see? Take a guess. One of the things that students with disabilities struggle with all students with disabilities is estimation. Being able to understand how to give an answer like you all did in the chat. You all are very good estimators because the numbers were all fairly close together in the chat.
From our, especially our young students, that might give us an answer of 973 or 3000 just because they like saying that phrase. We know that they don't have any kind of sense of number And you're probably like Jonily. Yep. We knew that before we gave it to them. However, I want you to have a grab and go tonight.
A quick takeaway. Once you show an image, take it away. Have them estimate what is the [00:03:00] intervention, what is the gap filler? This is what I want all of you to walk away with at the end of this week. What is the grab and go teacher move facilitation language that we need to use to fix these deficits and.
You can correct me if I'm wrong. I get pretty opinionated here, but there is not any intervention program that I know of that I've seen that helps fill the estimation gap. Meaning if a student doesn't know how to estimate, it is true that with interactions over time, they can get better by hearing other students' answers, by counting, figuring out however the exact intervention is what I'm calling a too high, too low.
So if I asked you think about the number of dots that you saw, how many dots would [00:04:00] be too high? 3000 would be too high. How many dots would be a too low estimate? Seven would be too low. 10 would be too low. But the instructional strategy. This is important to understand the difference between a rich mathematical experience, an exercise that we give students, an intervention and the instructional strategy.
But the exact instructional strategy on how I facilitate getting better estimation is not just with the two high, two low, but what I call a risky too high and a risky too low. So let me have you put in the chat right now. What would be a risky too high for the purple dot image that you saw? A number that would be too high, but not too high, that it might actually be pretty close to how many dots there actually are.
Go ahead and type. [00:05:00] That's excellent. This is excellent. And again, one of our estimates, one of our guesses that you had was a hundred. So maybe a hundred wouldn't be the two risky, but maybe it would be one 20. By having students give a too high and too low, and a risky too high and too low, it forces their brain to work on how to estimate, not just, I'm just gonna give them a bunch of estimation over and over again all year long and hope it gets better.
Just like with fact fluency, whether you give time tests or believe in time tests, what? It doesn't matter. Here's my point. In giving students time tests like single digit multiplication or single digit edition timed test where we time, how long it takes to answer so many, or recall so many. By giving those over and over again, we can constantly assess what they know and don't know.[00:06:00]
But that in and of itself is not the intervention. It's not the instructional strategy like a two high or too low. So what we're gonna do this week is be very deliberate and intentional about the actual instructional strategy that's going to make a difference. And again, go grab your intervention resources tomorrow.
And when you come back tomorrow night, correct me if I'm wrong, but I do not know any intervention resource or program that's actually going to give us a plethora of the exact instructional strategies. It's gonna give us a lot of exercises and experiences and tasks and things like that, but it's not gonna give us the exact instructional strategies.
That's what Cheri and I have developed for all of you this week. So give me a risky, too low. I think you guys have the point of this, but I think it's [00:07:00] important to make your brains think about it. A risky, too low. A risky too. Oh, now the, okay, now these are good. Okay. Some risky too. Lows here. 65. 75. 25.
70. 75. 70. These are pretty risky, my friends. Okay. I like them. I like the risky two lows. These are really excellent. Now, we're not going to show you the image again tonight. I don't think we are, Cheri. I'm thinking Yeah, we are. We are. We are. All right. See it is. Okay. All right. We are gonna show you the image again tonight.
But before we do, because I like to build this sense of the, of wonder and curiosity. Remember those emotions at the beginning where our students and ourselves felt sad and frustrated and helpless and stupid and worthless? And [00:08:00] not only does quick dots level the playing field for all students, I use quick dots from kindergarten all the way through high school.
I also use quick dots in classrooms where we have brought, in some cases, resource rooms where we have students that have developmental disabilities that are not in the regular classroom for one reason or another. We've brought those students into the regular classroom. We've brought some of the pullout gifted students into the regular classroom.
We've brought all ability levels of students together, and quick dots is one of the only mathematical experiences that levels the playing field, honestly, because it doesn't matter what your estimate is through the too high, too low, everyone is learning how to better work your brain no matter what the ability level is.
And we can all have fun and be [00:09:00] joyful about mathematics. Now, when I don't show kids the image for a little while, the curiosity, the debate, the. Reasoning, the sense making. It's ongoing. When I don't finalize and let them count. Cheri says, we're gonna show you the image though again tonight. That's okay.
We won't let you got, we won't make you wait until tomorrow night. But you can see how quick dots not only has an effect on the deficits that students have and exactly how we fill those deficits, but we also want to be intentional this week about how we can have a positive effect on student emotion and confidence and also decrease their anxiety.
Cedric: This episode is part of our Quick Dots series. You can find the complete five day series inside disabilitylabs.com. Look for The Purple X or The Claw to get all the details of each Quick Dot pattern.
Next week, we will dig deeper into this [00:10:00] topic of making dot patterns to support kids in mathematics with and without disabilities.