Establishing and maintaining an equitable math learning community requires explicit attention, careful planning, and hard work, from the beginning of the school year.
A critical component of a community where every student feels like they belong is the development of classroom agreements.
How can the design of a room promote the distribution of math authority, equitable participation, and respect for different learners? How can it ensure that students see themselves, feel welcome, and understand that this will be a joint undertaking?
Students investigate features of shape as they learn about quilts and quilters and as they make their own paper quilts.
Excursions are deep and rigorous math activities that support all students in making meaningful connections between the mathematics they are learning, their interests, their communities, and the world. They support the development of a vibrant mathematics classroom in which all students feel that their identities are welcomed and engage actively and joyfully in learning.
Math Workshop can foster the development of an equitable learning community. When it is structured to foster independence and encourage students in taking responsibility for their own learning and the learning of others, it can also the development of mathematical identity and agency.
Since its launch in Fall 2023, the Forum for Equity in Elementary Mathematics has pursued our goal of providing resources, publications, and professional learning opportunities to broaden and deepen perspectives and to open up discussions among educators about equitable math learning communities. Check out our resources.
Whole-class discussions are an essential feature of the elementary math classroom [and so] it is important to think about and plan for how to make participation in such discussions equitable and how to establish an environment where students share their thinking and listen thoughtfully to the ideas of others.
“Understanding what it means to ‘be a good partner,’ and how to make space for each person’s ideas, are important aspects of an equitable learning community.” … But how to ensure that all students are positioned and seen as thinkers and doers of math during partner work?
Partner work is a structure that offers critical opportunities to promote equity in the mathematics classroom and support the identity and agency of all students, especially those who have been historically marginalized in mathematics.