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Designing Math Learning That Sticks: Big Ideas, Lasting Impact
Tuesday, September 30, 2025 @ 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm EDT
Presented by Duane Habecker, Director of Continuous Improvement, Merced County Office of Education; and Brandon Smith, Former Educator, Current Director of Outreach Mathematics, MIND Education
Sponsored by MIND Education
Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.
Too often, math instruction focuses on isolated skills that fade quickly, leaving students without the deeper understanding they need to apply math in new contexts. Lasting learning happens when instruction is built around big ideas—the conceptual anchors that help students connect new knowledge to prior understanding.
Grounded in neuroscience, this edWebinar explores how cognitive schemas serve as the brain’s framework for organizing information, and how leveraging these structures makes math learning more connected, durable, and transferable. Viewers learn how interactive digital tools can strengthen schema development by creating visual, problem-solving experiences that engage students in productive struggle and ensure access for every learner.
Learning objectives include:
- Understand how big ideas and schemas anchor long-term math learning
- Apply schema-based strategies to make math concepts more connected and meaningful
- Explore how interactive tools reinforce conceptual understanding through visual problem solving
- Recognize how schema-driven instruction fosters equity, persistence, and problem-solving skills
Viewers leave with both a theoretical foundation and practical strategies for transforming math instruction into experiences that align with how the brain learns best. This recorded edWebinar benefits K-8 teachers, instructional leaders, and administrators ready to make math learning truly stick.
About the Presenters
Duane Habecker is the Director of Continuous Improvement at the Merced County Office of Education, where he supports districts, schools, and teachers in strengthening teaching and learning across all content areas, including mathematics, English language arts, science, digital literacy, and the arts. Before stepping into this role, Duane spent eight years as MCOE’s Coordinator of Mathematics—his professional passion—and nearly 30 years as a TK–5 mathematics instructional coach and middle school math teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a recipient of the national GTE Growth Initiatives for Teachers Award and the Merced County Excellence in Education Award. Duane also serves as President of the California Mathematics Council’s Central Region. When not working with educators, he can often be found playing guitar and holding onto his dream of becoming a rock star.
Brandon Smith is the Director of Outreach Mathematics at MIND Education, where he creates experiential learning programs for people of all ages, both in and out of the classroom—including two that are patent-pending. Over the past several years, he has focused on developing innovative projects to close what he calls the math “experience gap,” where children have insufficient exposure to math in their daily lives. These projects include interactive exhibits and games for math fairs, math camps, and family math nights. Early in his career at MIND, he designed mathematical requirements for the game-based ST Math® software and led the national roll-out of the sixth-grade ST Math curriculum. Brandon co-authored a paper in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications and has written for the Huffington Post and presented at ISTE. Prior to joining MIND, Brandon was a college instructor, where he won an outstanding teacher award and was an educational liaison for the City of Costa Mesa to Windham, Australia. Brandon has a bachelor’s in math and two master’s degrees in pure and applied mathematics. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys piloting planes.
Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.
Join the Math the Way the Brain Learns community to network with educators, participate in online discussions, and receive invitations to upcoming edWebinars.
MIND Education’s math curriculum solutions build conceptual understanding—at scale. Designed to meet students where they are, these programs invite all learners into math in a way that feels natural, intuitive, and empowering—while delivering results proven in classrooms across the country.
