Every other week, our founder and CEO, John Tapper, will share what's on his mind, from his thoughts on math education to what's been inspiring him lately. This is your chance to hear directly from the person who started it all. We believe great ideas are worth sharing, and Founder's Corner is our way of bringing you closer to the heart of All Learners Network (ALN) and the passion that drives everything we do.
He was anxious and skeptical. That’s how I’d describe Tom the morning I walked into his sixth-grade classroom to watch him run his first Math Menu.
We had just done a full-day workshop on Math Menu the day before, and he invited me to join him that day to observe his class. Tom had done the work. He’d built the menu carefully with two different games related to fractions – one digital and one using cards. There were a couple of explorations of surface area using objects, practice work from the district’s digital workbook, and a paper-and-pencil assignment.
But standing at the front of his classroom, about to hand control to thirty-odd sixth graders, he looked like a man who had made a terrible mistake.
He explained the menu to his students, set boundaries, and turned the students loose. I could see the apprehension on his face as he did.
Students moved around the room measuring, working on computers, playing fraction games with cards, and talking to each other. Tom stood at the front watching. After a few minutes, I walked over.
"They're all working," he said, with a little awe. "They're all doing math."
"This isn't how it always goes," I told him. "But you made them a really good menu."
He was quiet for a moment, then added, "I don't think I've had a time with this class when they were all doing math."
As we looked around the room, we noticed students deeply engaged in mathematical thinking and working naturally and productively. This was something new.
That moment — a good teacher, a skeptical classroom, and thirty students all doing math at the same time — is what learning math differently looks like in practice.
It doesn't look like a quiet room of students completing worksheets. It isn’t one student at the board while the rest wait. It’s a room where students have choice, where the work is genuinely theirs, and where the conditions have been built carefully enough that real learning can happen for everyone, not just the students who were already going to succeed.
Math Menu is one of the first approaches we teach when working with teachers at All Learners Network. The structure is straightforward: to create a block of time in every lesson for “just right” learning, where students have a variety of activities to choose from. Some activities connect to current topics. Some address unfinished learning things that students haven’t entirely mastered or understood yet. Some offer deeper or specialized activities for students who are ready for them.
It’s also when students who need extra assistance can be supported. Math interventionists and special educators often “push in” during the menu portion of the lesson to work with their struggling students. This often involves working with their peers as well. A student receiving math intervention might, for example, play a math game with the interventionist that includes a couple of their peers. During Math Menu, the line between support and participation blurs, taking the sting out of getting extra support and making it more fun for everyone.
Teachers often fear the chaos. Tom did. Most do. When they've built the menu well and trusted the structure, what they discover isn't chaos. It's engagement. The animated conversation is mathematical. The movement is purposeful. The room has energy because the students in it are actually thinking.
Tom was a good teacher who had given up on this class a little. Not because he didn’t care, but because nothing had worked. What he saw that day wasn’t a miracle. It was just what learning looks like when the conditions are right.
That phrase, "when the conditions are right," is at the heart of what we mean by learning math differently. It's not a different curriculum. It's not a new set of standards. It's a shift in what we believe is possible, and a commitment to building the structures that make it real.
The hard part, as Tom knew that morning, is believing it's possible before you've seen it. That's what All Learners Network is here for — to help teachers see it, believe it, and build it. Because when a teacher knows how to create those conditions, something changes. Not just for one classroom, on one good day. For every student, in every lesson, from that point on.
That's learning math differently. And it starts with the teacher.
All Learners Network is committed to supporting pedagogy so that all students can access quality math instruction. We do this through our online platform, free resources, events, and embedded professional development. Learn more about how we work with schools and districts here.