Kerri Zitar

I have exciting news!

Starting July 1st I will be joining Tempe Elementary School District as a Math Project Manager!

This role is brand new, and I get to be part of an amazing team (Karen Brooks, Chrissy DeBono and Dana Knoebel I’m talking about you!)
building it from the ground up, with K-8 math students at the center of every decision we make. We had the opportunity to spend the day together today getting to know one another and thinking about what math learning experiences look like in TD3. It was fabulous!

Most of my career has been in the classroom. I’ve spent years teaching, and just as many years of informally helping my friends and colleagues figure things out together. More recently I stepped into formal academic coaching at the district level. I even started my own consulting work. All of this has led me to where I am today.

If you’ve read any of my posts on this platform then you know how strongly I believe that every child is a math person. Now I get to carry that belief into a new district, with people who believe it too.

Here’s to July 1.

Started my morning with coffee and a session that got my brain going. ☕

I tuned into James O'Neal, Jr.'s session at the Math Intervention Summit this morning. "Before You Release, Make Sure They're Ready." If you work in math intervention, this one is worth your time.

So much resonated, but one piece really stuck with me. Strategizing against barriers.

I've been doing a lot of work with UDL lately. At its core, UDL is about identifying barriers before they become roadblocks for kids.

So when James named strategizing against barriers as a critical planning step, I felt that immediately.

Here's what hit me. You can only strategize against barriers if you've actually done the math yourself first. That's the whole point of anchoring in the math. You have to know where the hard parts are before you can plan around them.

He also asked us to investigate our own mindset. Do we truly believe in our students? Not as a talking point. As a real, honest question.

CGI. UDL. Building Thinking Classrooms. I keep coming back to the same thread running through all of it. What do we actually believe about kids and their capacity?

Grateful for sessions that push my thinking and sharpen my practice.

Thank you James O'Neal - Keynote Speaker, NBCT Math Teacher, Equity Champion and CollaboratEd with Juliana for making this kind of learning accessible!
Off to pour that second cup. ☕

Day 2 of the Math Intervention Summit (hosted by CollaboratEd with Juliana) and Liesl McConchie already has me in my feelings. 🧠💛

"A student's emotional relationship with math is foundational to their cognitive relationship to math."

This one hits different when you've lived it.

When a student is anxious, frustrated, or doubting themselves in a math space, their brain simply is not available to learn. Full stop.

Our job is to help them recognize that state and shift it.

Walk it out. Breathe through it. Take a break. Jump around.

Give them the tools. Remind them of the tools. Be the person who does not let them sit alone in that moment.

Frustration and failure are part of the process. Every child belongs in math spaces.

Let me repeat that - Every child belongs in math spaces. It is up to us to believe in them and help them believe in themselves. 💛

Sometimes you have to pause the webinar to let the math sink in. 🧠✨

I’ve been a huge fan of Open Middle for a long time. My perspective on how to solve these problems has evolved over the years, thanks to Pamela Harris ( ) and Kim Montague. They’ve fundamentally changed how I approach problems like this. I find myself moving away from rote computation, calculators, or simple rounding, and leaning instead into deep, flexible mathematical reasoning.

During ’s session at the Math Intervention Summit on "Building Thinking Classrooms with Engaging Open Middle Problems," he posed the challenge: Using digits 1-9, create a fraction as close to 1 as possible.

When I paused the video to work through it, my first instinct was to analyze the relationship between 79 and 81, so I sketched out a number line to visualize the distance. Imagine my absolute delight when Robert used that exact same strategy!

Watching him use those number lines to illustrate why it is so important that we anticipate student reasoning and solutions was even more powerful seeing his use of 360-degree videos, which captured the raw, collaborative energy of students building their own understanding together.

This is the heart of what we do: prioritizing student agency and building classrooms where thinking is the primary activity.

Huge thanks to Robert, Pam, and Kim for keeping the focus on conceptual brilliance.

And huge thanks to .with.juliana for hosting this conference!

Just finished Vanessa Vakharia’s () session at the Math Intervention Summit (CollaboratEd with Juliana) and even though I have read her book and listen to her podcast, it still landed like brand new.

Believe. Behave. Become.

We can have the best content and pedagogy in the world, but if a student is mentally hyperventilating into a paper bag, we will never reach them.

Every child is a math person. And that starts with belief.

What are you doing to tend to the belief side before you ever get to the math?

Day 1 of the Math Intervention Summit and I am already pausing my screen every two minutes to catch up on notes.

This FREE three-day virtual conference hosted by is for every educator who has ever looked at a struggling student and wondered how to do better by them.

And honestly? This quote from the opening keynote stopped me:
"Our expectations of what our students who struggle can do, matters more than the content we teach."

The makeover framework covers Community, Purpose, and Structure. Not surface level fixes. A real rethinking of what intervention can look like.

Plus the speaker lineup includes Vanessa Vakharia, Liesl McConchie, Robert Kaplinsky, Ann Elise Record, and James ONeal Jr. Just to name a few.

Link below. It is free. Do not miss it.
🔗 collaboratedwithjuliana.com/summit