Ch.

1: Shifting Expectations

• Teachers need to create environments that foster student participation

o Asking thoughtful, rich questions
o Pair students
o Student explanations
o Having students come to the board and work things out
o Work as the scribe and have students share their ideas without the pressure of
coming to the board
o Cold call as a norm (pairs with normalizing mistakes)
o Focusing on participation in the classroom and taking advantage of what students
already know, making them active participants

Chapter 2: Equitable Mathematics Teaching

• Mathematically literate students

o Apply their mathematical knowledge as students, workers, citizens, and
consumers (this is what guides the principles)
o Meaningful way to engage with and interpret the world

• Teaching practices that influence equitable mathematics

o What counts as math
§ Deepen ideas about math and what it is
§ Develops procedural fluency, conceptual understanding, and problem-
solving skills
§ Distinguish between doing math and doing school
§ Connections and prior knowledge
o Pedagogical practices
§ Normalization of mistakes
o Relational practices
§ Let students know you care by getting to know them as people
§ Student-student relationships

• Principles:
o 1àLearning is not the same as achievement
o 2àAchievement gaps often reflect gaps in opportunities to learn
o 3àall students can be pushed to learn mathematics more deeply
o 4àStudents need to see themselves in mathematics
§ Idea of drawing a mathematician
• Alienated from mathematics (old white male)
§ Didactic vs. discussion-based teaching
• Didactic = traditional/lecture
o Students feel like their job is to receive preexisting
mathematical knowledge
• Discussion = connections between subject and their lives
o Intellectual diversity
 o Applying it to their lives, engaging, interpreting,
discussing, exploring discovering

Ch. 3: Mathematical Competence and Status: What “Being Smart” Means

• What being smart means

• Understanding vs. doing well in the class or achievement
• Quiet are often seen as not being smart because they are not answering the questions,
but oftentimes they understand better because they are digesting or taking notes
• Organization of class materials (how you present them to your class)
o Good way to differentiate
• Finishing quickly is often seen as smart—NOT correct

Ch. 4: Providing Access to Meaningful Mathematics: Group-worthy Tasks

• Build from conceptual understanding
• Developing procedural fluency
• Strategic competence
• Adaptive reasoning
• Justify, generalize, evaluate
• Seeing mathematics as logical and worthwhile
• Being able to see themselves as successful or able to be successful in mathematics
• Important to start with a challenging task vs. an easy task
o Opportunities to have multiple perspectives or ideas
o Allows all members to help one another
o Value comes from seeing the different perspectives
• 6 Common Features of a Group Worthy Task
o Focus on the central mathematical concept or idea
o Require some interpretation
o Provide multiple ways of being competent in problem solving
o Be done in a group which bolsters students’ interdependence
o Be designed in a way that provides individual and group accountability
o Have clear evaluation criteria

NOTES:
• Complex Instruction
o Multiple ability treatment
§ Convince the students many different smarts are necessary in completing
the task
§ Discuss specific abilities that are helpful/necessary
§ Emphasize that all abilities are important
§ Can’t be a simple task for group work—must be challenging and require
multiple entry points to solve and different thinking tasks
• Ex: Is this answer reasonable? Detail-oriented, visual…
o Assignment of competence (Status treatments)
 § The praise must be public, specific, and intellectually meaningful
§ Low status students often are left out of discussion and therefore have less
opportunity to learn, so we assign competence to change that assumption
§ Power of teacher evaluation—students take teacher evaluation to heart—
ex: “I think you would be really good at __________.” “That’s a very
good observation/way of thinking that will help your group.”
• Boosts participation of low-status student
o Instructional strategies
§ Teaching productive group behaviors
§ Building positive interdependence