As educators, we know that one of the keys to promoting student growth is making learning feel accessible and meaningful for our students. That process can look different across subjects and classes, and in math classrooms, we’ve learned that making math feel empowering for students, particularly students of color, means finding ways to humanize the experience of learning math. As a math coach and former classroom teacher, I know exactly what it’s like to want to make math feel truly accessible and attainable for all my students, but to feel unsure about what resources to use or what strategies to start with. That’s why I collaborated with classroom teachers and SHIFT to create a series of quick practice guides you can use to make some simple, impactful shifts in your practice. I’m proud of the resources we’ve created to support our students, and I’m excited to share them with you.

As lifelong learners, we educators know the value of tackling new challenges and embracing productive struggle, for ourselves and for our students – but we also know how important it is to lay the groundwork first, because that’s how we make sure the struggle is productive. No matter where you are in your learning journey, this toolkit offers some effective instructional shifts that you can bring into your classroom right now. Here are two strategies I recommend for bringing culturally responsive practices into your math classroom:

1. Providing Student Choice Options

If you don’t often use choice boards to teach math, you might be surprised by how straightforward it can feel to build one into a lesson plan – or how powerful it can be to deepen student engagement. To get started, I’d recommend setting a learning goal for your students to work toward and creating a choice board that allows students to choose three activities to work toward that learning goal. You can include time-tested activities that you usually rely on as well as resources from high-quality sources like Desmos or Illustrative Math. Just by offering students a choice board and putting them in charge of completing a certain number of activities by the end of the week, we can shift the way they experience math learning. For example, students might choose to work on math equations one day, build a model on another day and read about the history or theory behind a math concept on a third day. Choice boards also offer a way to make math feel relevant to our students’ lives and goals: By providing activities that reflect students’ interests or connect with important topics outside the classroom, we can make learning math feel personally meaningful for each student.

Students often come into our classrooms with the idea that learning math means trying to follow one preset path that’s very hard to navigate. A choice board can replace that path with a whole collection of math experiences that they’re in charge of exploring. By providing those experiences, we can create a math classroom that validates all of the ways our students learn – and that empower them to learn much more deeply. For more tips on bringing this strategy into your classroom, click here and choose the pdf resource titled Student Choice.

2. Promoting “My Favorite Mistake”

In math class, it’s easy for students to internalize the idea that mistakes are embarrassing or disappointing. This activity can guide students to realize that the opposite is true: Their mistakes showcase the brilliant, creative, persistent thinking that they’re bringing to each math problem, and that’s exactly what they should be doing. That’s why, from my very first year of teaching, this was one of my favorite activities for promoting a growth mindset culture for my students. I like to recommend this strategy to support the choice board strategy above, because as we encourage students to embrace mistake-making, we can empower them to feel confident about exploring choice boards and taking risks with new activities. For example, if you create a choice board that includes activities students have never tried before in math class, such as drawing a representation of a math relationship instead of solving an equation, some students may worry about drawing “the wrong way.” But if you also create space to celebrate mistake-making, you can encourage students to shift their focus from avoiding mistakes to embracing new activities and new ways of thinking about math.

To try this activity in your classroom, I recommend being intentional about involving students in choosing a “favorite mistake” to discuss, so that you can promote a sense of shared growth, not individual errors. For example, you might ask students to share which math problems felt most challenging to them, then zero in on a mistake that a number of students made. Next, you could write the problem on the board, invite students to recreate the mistake and then guide them to rework the problem and arrive at the correct answer. Throughout the process, you can highlight the learning that the mistake brings into the room: Maybe it shows some really intricate thinking; maybe it illustrates why a math principle can or can’t be true; maybe it builds a bridge to the next math concept you’re about to start studying. This activity can really empower students not just to accept mistake-making, but to embrace it in order to keep learning. Over time, this activity can encourage students to shift from worrying about mistakes to eagerly growing from them. It’s exciting to hear students shout out, “I made that mistake, too!” For more details, click here and select the pdf resource titled My Favorite Mistake.

As you try these two strategies with your students, I want to share one final encouragement to support your work: I encourage you to create opportunities to get your students’ feedback on these practice shifts! For example, at the the week or the end of a unit, you might build in some time to ask students questions like: “How do you feel about the way I taught you this week? Did you get what you need to move forward in math? What can I provide you with to make you feel supported and confident for next week or our next unit?” By asking these questions, you can reinforce the supportive, collaborative culture you’re already building for your students by using choice boards and embracing favorite mistakes. And by listening to their replies, you can reinforce the message that in your classroom, learning math is personal – and powerful.