Culturally sustaining pedagogy validates students' identities and fosters a sense of belonging and empowerment. Educators attending this session will explore methods for creating a more inclusive learning environment by integrating students' diverse experiences into the math classroom. Through the lens of multiple free desmos classroom lessons, participants will learn how to use a problem-based approach to intentionally increase curiosity and build upon students’ ideas in an effort to provide all learners with access to on-grade-level mathematics.
In today's diverse classrooms, multilingual students bring a wealth of linguistic and cultural perspectives that can enrich learning experiences. However, they also face unique challenges in mastering mathematical concepts while simultaneously developing language proficiency. This session will explore practical strategies for creating an inclusive mathematics classroom that supports the needs of multilingual learners. Participants will discover instructional techniques that integrate language development with mathematical reasoning, including the use of visual aids and language scaffolding. Attendees will leave with ready-to-implement strategies that promote equity, enhance student understanding, and cultivate a supportive learning space for multilingual students in mathematics. This session is ideal for educators, instructional coaches, and administrators seeking to ensure all students can thrive in the math classroom.
A critical aspect of culturally responsive learning is selecting tasks that invite students to share their own ideas. In this session, we will determine what makes a task relevant and meaningful as well as use a framework to create culturally relevant tasks that allow teachers to actively respond to different student cultures, backgrounds, and ideas to drive instruction.
Students come to school with valuable experiences and immense potential. To meet this potential, teachers need to attend to relationships with students and their mathematical thinking as a basis for instructional change to not only work with and from students’ thinking but support their growth and connections over time. In this session, we will unpack three core practices and ideas to create asset-based learning environments to support students’ mathematical brilliance. Specifically, we will discuss listening, centering, and building as foundational, high-leverage teaching practices. We will offer practical ways that teachers can enact these practices within both the whole class and small learning environments.
