Foundations of our learning paradigm
MathTrack Institute and the founding insight behind Intangled Learning
Where the whole thesis began. MathTrack isn't a closed chapter — it's the foundation the rest of the work stands on.
Where we were before
Before Intangled Learning existed, there was a narrower problem: school districts across the country couldn't find enough qualified math teachers, and the people willing to step into that vacancy needed a path to licensure that didn't assume they already had a traditional education degree. We started as a math department as a service — hiring, training, and supporting math teachers remotely, district by district.
That constraint — working remotely rather than in the building — turned out to be the most important theoretical problem we needed to address. It has shaped our work ever since.
Our ambition
We didn't want to just place bodies in vacant classrooms. We tried to develop and provide our own curriculum and practices for the teachers we trained. What we found was that if our approach didn't align with the culture of practice at the school, it wasn't well received. We could write the best curriculum in the world — but we couldn't direct how a school actually practiced teaching.
If we couldn't bring the practice to the teacher, we had to provide a different kind of development: the kind that helps adults connect more closely to the practices already happening inside their school. This led us to apprenticeship over other direct-training models. Apprenticeship is about situated learning — less a "teaching curriculum" and more a "learning curriculum," accessing learning through the social practices of the organization itself rather than instruction handed down from outside it. We first applied this with fidelity in mathematics.
How we built it
We built our own structure for this rather than retrofit someone else's. That meant stepping into higher education ourselves, not just partnering with it — forming credit-bearing apprenticeship pathways in partnership with accredited institutions, including Purdue Global and Indiana Wesleyan University, so the apprenticeship we believed in could lead to a concrete outcome: an accredited degree and a teaching license.
Outcomes
Through MathTrack Institute, we built:
- 30+ math teachers trained, licensed, and placed into classrooms
- Credit-bearing apprenticeship pathways built in partnership with accredited institutions, including Purdue Global and Indiana Wesleyan University
- 9 apprentice educators who completed the undergraduate apprenticeship pathway and graduated
- A working model for crediting practice-based learning that didn't exist in math education before this
What's next
MathTrack Institute is still active and still licensing teachers, but its real legacy is what it proved was possible: that adults could develop as practitioners inside the culture of their own organization rather than through curriculum imposed from outside, and that accredited institutions would partner around that model.
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