For many students, math anxiety doesn’t begin with numbers, it begins with adults.
A growing body of research suggests that teachers’ and caregivers’ attitudes toward math can significantly shape how children experience the subject. When adults feel anxious, uncertain, or uncomfortable with math, those feelings can unintentionally transfer to students through tone, language, and classroom practices. Over time, this can impact students’ confidence, persistence, and willingness to engage with mathematical thinking.
For school and district leaders, this has an important implication: one of the most effective ways to improve students’ experiences with math is to support teachers in rebuilding their own relationship with it.
Reducing teacher math anxiety is not about fixing gaps in content knowledge alone. It’s about creating opportunities for teachers to experience math as playful, meaningful, and intellectually satisfying, often in ways they never experienced as students themselves.
How Tile Farm supports joyful, confidence-building math PD
Tile Farm’s professional learning experiences are designed specifically to address teacher mindset and mathematical identity, alongside instructional practice.
We offer:
- Online and in-person professional development workshops for schools and districts, focused on joyful, conceptually rich math experiences that teachers can immediately bring back to their classrooms
- Asynchronous professional development options, including self-paced online courses for individual teachers and facilitation-ready materials that schools, districts, and PD providers can use to run their own multi-session professional learning on their own schedule
- The Tile Farm Teacher Fellowship, a PD experience centered on playful exploration, reflection, and helping teachers reconnect with math as learners themselves
- Collaborations with math education researchers exploring how joyful mathematical experiences can support pre-service teachers in reducing math anxiety before it impacts their students.
- Free facilitation-ready resources, including Tile Talk, that instructional coaches, PD providers, and school leaders can use in their own professional learning sessions to spark low-pressure, high-impact math conversations
Across all of this work, the goal is the same: help teachers feel energized, capable, and excited about teaching math in ways that will impact their students immediately.
Ready to support teachers and students at the same time?
If you’re looking for professional development that leaves teachers energized and creates immediate, positive changes in how math is experienced across classrooms, we’d love to talk.
Contact us to learn more about Tile Farm professional development.