Tim O’Brien understands that math is more than numbers and equations—it’s a conversation. As Math Department Head and a Middle School Math teacher, O’Brien encourages collaboration and inquiry, allowing students to work together to break down problems and compare solutions. His teaching focuses not only on critical thinking and communication skills but also real-world applications of math, ensuring that students are prepared to apply concepts beyond the classroom.
O’Brien leans on his 20 years of experience and background in both math and English to blend logical reasoning with emotional understanding. Making math more relatable and accessible isn’t always easy, so O’Brien frequently collaborates across divisions to find ways to innovate the teaching process.
In the interview below, Tim O’Brien discusses Beaver’s approach to math.
How would you describe Beaver’s approach to teaching math?
We see math as more than a list of skills and aim for much more than traditional approaches that focus on presenting and drilling procedures for manual calculations. This means we instead place our focus on developing students in three key areas:
- Mathematical ways of knowing, thinking, and reasoning. This includes developing strategic and systematic problem-solving and computational thinking processes.
- Communicating complex mathematical ideas in written, verbal, and visual forms. We want our students to develop logical arguments and conjectures, analyze the same from others, and learn how to justify their conclusions with precision and clear evidence.
- Abstracting real scenarios and problems into mathematical models to make sense of them.
How do you expand learning outside of the classroom?
Our approach to teaching is guided by the goal of highlighting math’s place outside the classroom. School math–this traditional list of skills–has little place outside the classroom. This has been obvious to every student who has asked, “Why do I need to learn this?” Our perspective gives students readiness for real ways that math is applied in the world.
This also means we interact with real problems and place them at the center of our lessons. We invite resources from outside the classroom, including community members, or take our classes beyond Beaver’s campus to see math in action. Students quickly see that the math happening in their world is not something like polynomial division, but the kind of thinking they are working on every day in our math classes.
Beaver’s objective is to teach students to think about and do things in a mathematical way.
Tim O'Brien, Math Department Head, Middle School Math
Are there any assignments or projects that highlight your approach to teaching?
Even something as specific as the procedure for dividing fractions is learned as a part of the future-focused goal of reasoning through, making sense of, visualizing, and communicating about how division works. What is the problem 3/4 ÷ 2/3 asking us? If division is breaking things up into equal groups, how do you break something up into less than one group?
To begin, we start with the real situation before a division problem is even presented. A recipe calls for 3/4 cup of sugar. Unfortunately, your kitchen drawers are a mess, and all you can find is the 1/3-size measuring cup. How can you use the 1/3 measuring cup to scoop out the needed 3/4 cup of sugar for the recipe? How many 1/3s are in 3/4?
Students think through and answer this question with their prior knowledge and understanding, often relying on common denominators and diagrams. This is how we make it obvious that we are confronted with mathematical thinking outside the classroom regularly and how we develop our students as thinkers and doers of mathematics, not as calculators.
[In math,] students are often told to follow their teacher blindly. We want to hear the students’ voices.
Tim O'Brien, Math Department Head, Middle School Math