Math Therapy How to find the "why" in math class w/ Mike Flynn
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Sep 25, 2025 In this engaging discussion, Mike Flynn, an international math educator and founder of Flynn Education, shares his journey from hating math to advocating for deeper understanding. He emphasizes the importance of making mistakes and shifting focus from finding the right answer to fostering flexible thinking. Mike provides strategies to combat math anxiety and highlights how procedural teaching can create trauma. He encourages embracing math as a thinking process and suggests implementing Open Middle tasks to boost problem-solving skills.
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Shallow Teaching Creates Fragile Understanding
- Many teachers teach the shallow slice of math they learned, causing fragile student understanding.
- Deepening teachers' own math knowledge lets them create lessons that build durable sense-making.
Math Teaching Must Prioritize Reasoning
- The workforce needs reasoning, creativity, and problem solving more than manual computation speed.
- Teaching math for meaning prepares students for higher-level math and real-world problem solving.
Getting Lost Built Navigation Skill
- Mike learned to navigate Boston by studying maps and being allowed to make wrong turns with his brother.
- That productive struggle made him confident and is his metaphor for learning math conceptually.
