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Helping teachers break barriers in math
Explore strategies, frameworks, resources, and tools to help secondary math teachers become gatebreakers - supporting students who struggle with confidence, clarity, and ease.


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How to Structure Math Intervention When Your Roster is Constantly Changing
It is so common for Math Intervention rosters to feel like a revolving door. To help you navigate this transition, here are two simple recommendations for building a community in an ever changing math intervention classroom.

Team Gatebreaker
Feb 63 min read


Making Inequalities Math Accessible: 3 Activities Your Students Will Actually Love
If you’ve taught a lesson on math inequalities to a room full of intervention students, you know the exact moment the collective shutdown happens. Check out these 3 activities that your students will actually love.

Team Gatebreaker
Jan 163 min read


Disengaged students? Boosting Motivation in Math
If you’re a 6-12th grade math teacher feeling like the disengagement, laziness, complacency, and apathy is just too much to bear… you’re in the right place. First, you are doing an amazing job. I just know it. Don’t beat yourself up or feel like you have to find a new career path. You can overcome this. Next, let's talk about the importance of motivating disengaged students in math, why so many students are struggling with math, and then discover some tips to boost motivation

Juliana Tapper
Mar 10, 20236 min read


Just In Time Math Intervention
Maybe you’ve been asked to teach a middle school math intervention or RTI class or an intervention math class for high school. Maybe you’re teaching a regular math class, but so many of your students have so many gaps in their math skills that you’re not able to get through the amount of content that you need to. Maybe you’ve been given resources or maybe you’ve been given the freedom to find your own (a blessing and a curse). I’ve been right where you are and this blog post

Juliana Tapper
Feb 10, 20236 min read


How To Have High Expectations Of Students Who Are Multiple Grade Levels Behind In Math
I think most of us remember learning about the Pygmalion Effect in our teacher education classes. Here’s a refresher in case you need it… Rosenthal and Jacobson originally described the Pygmalion Effect as the following: “When we expect certain behaviors of others, we are likely to act in ways that make the expected behavior more likely to occur.” (Rosenthal and Babad, 1985) In terms of teaching students who are multiple grade levels behind, I take this to mean: When we pass

Juliana Tapper
Sep 19, 20225 min read


Effective Weekly Formative Assessment in Math
My first year of teaching went a little like this… Direct instruction, worksheet, homework. Students off task during worksheet time. No one did homework. Students continued failing district benchmark exams. I felt frustrated and over worked. My second year of teaching was a little different. My principal made all of us switch to rubric grading. It was almost standards based grading, but we could still use it with our unit assessments and then convert grades into percentages f

Juliana Tapper
Sep 7, 20212 min read


Why Classroom Culture Matters For Students Who Struggle With Math
I personally feel the first week of school is the most important week of teaching. The community you create your first week will impact how students feel in your classroom all year long. This is especially true if you teach students with learning disabilities in math or students who struggle with math. We cannot use math strategies for struggling learners until our classroom community has been intentionally created first. Continue reading to find four reasons why classroom cu

Juliana Tapper
Aug 16, 20213 min read
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