As a math teacher, I know how important it is to empower students to experience their own agency. That’s why I created the I.C.U.C.A.R.E. Framework to help myself and fellow educators redirect common mistakes into practices that transform our instruction and center students’ agency in our classrooms. Each letter represents one thing we can do to help every student experience their math potential and access challenging and inspiring content.

1. Include Others As Experts 

Sometimes, in an effort to try to make sure that our students understand and master the standards, we can over-direct lessons to the point of taking over their learning process and dampening their ability to think about what they can do. Instead of developing their own sense of efficacy, students come to see their teacher as the person in the room who owns mathematics. 

We can avoid this misstep – or course-correct! – by including others as experts. That means creating classroom environments where one individual teacher is not the sole authority. Instead, the environment calls on multiple experts, including the students themselves! That looks like using instructional routines and techniques that help build that expertise, such as posing students’ questions back to the class as a whole, and encouraging students to explain their thinking to one another. I enjoy strategies like Kagan’s cooperative structures for this purpose.

2. Be Critically Conscious

When we don’t actively engage with our students’ identities, we inadvertently ignore how negative stereotypes impact their experience and impede their potential for excellence. We aren’t individually responsible for creating these stereotypes, but if we want to help our students succeed, then we must choose to acknowledge their impact and act in ways that counter the consequences. 

To begin implementing critically conscious strategies, incorporate opportunities to ask students about any stereotypes they have encountered. Then use your position as a strong influence in the room to counter those messages by refocusing on students’ strengths and capabilities.

3. Understand Our Students Well

As teachers, we’re compelled to figure out where our students are academically. But we can miss how their experiences outside the classroom can impact their experiences inside the classroom. Be mindful of assumptions here. Students may be doing academically well but craving your support as a trusted adult, while students experiencing academic challenges might have more external support than you anticipate.  

4. Use Culturally Relevant Curriculum 

When students don’t see themselves or their community reflected, students learn to think that math is not for people like them. When that happens, all of our communities miss out on our students’ potential and the brilliant contributions they might have made. 

That’s why it’s so important for us to use instructional materials in ways that help students see themselves as doers of mathematics and help them overcome the negative stereotypes and messages regarding who is and who isn’t adept at learning and using math. 

5. Assess, Activate and Build on Their Prior Knowledge

Students don’t come to us as blank slates. No matter what, we can value the prior knowledge that students bring to the classroom, both personal and cultural, and leverage that knowledge as a resource for creating new understanding. 

Avoid commenting on gaps in students’ learning. Even unintentionally, comments like, “Didn’t you learn this in fourth grade?” or “Don’t you remember how to do this from middle school?” can have a detrimental impact. Instead, normalize addressing those gaps with just-in-time activations of that prior knowledge. For example: Rather than attempting to reteach curriculum at the beginning of the school year, identify the essential pieces and activate them in context of the next skill.

6. Release Control

To develop mathematical thinking, students need opportunities to make sense and to make choices. Many of us are familiar with “I do, we do, you do” structures and use those frequently in our instruction. This model follows a gradual release of responsibility from teacher to student, but we can actually start the process with students themselves – by providing sense-making opportunities first. This might look like activating students’ prior knowledge around a topic before beginning a lesson on it. I might show a video of a real-world context that uses the math principles in our lesson, or I might share a visual representation of those principles.

From there, I ask students what they notice. That allows students to begin grappling with the mathematical principles before I introduce any of the math vocabulary or procedures. They do, then I do. 

Exercising choice helps students develop a sense of persistence in the face of challenges and satisfaction in their work. I started introducing more opportunities for choice by allowing my students to choose which reflection question they wanted to complete as an exit ticket. Questions like, “What did you do that made you proud today?”, “Who did you help today and how did it help them?” and “What mistake did you make today and how did you correct it?” By allowing them to choose one of the questions, they were much more engaged and gave me more insightful answers.

I also started building in opportunities for students to choose how they wanted to show their mastery. That might look like inviting students to design their own assessments or select options from our choice board.

7. Expect more

In the words of  educator Ken Williams, “Life doesn’t level down for you.” So, we shouldn’t level down for our students by lowering our expectations for them. It does them a disservice in the immediate moment and in the long run. We have to hold high expectations for all our students, and that means supporting them in developing genuine number sense – not just the ability to copy and mimic mathematical procedures. 

That’s why I encourage my students to not let anyone “GPS” them – including me! A GPS system can get you where you’re going, but it can be hugely difficult to find your way back to your destination without it. So when I tell my students, “Don’t let anybody GPS you,” that means, “Only move forward with this procedure if it makes sense to you. Rely on YOUR sense-making. If this procedure doesn’t make sense to you, then continue to ask questions and use the resources in our classroom to get clarity.”

As educators, we have the opportunity to activate students’ curiosity and passion so that they can truly see themselves as capable of excellence. While our classrooms will necessarily look and sound different in the specifics, these principles and the strategies they inspire can help open more doors for all our students. What could the I-C-U-C-A-R-E framework look like in your classroom?