This piece was developed using resources and voiceover shared during Lachanda Garrison’s session originally presented at the 2023 IES Math Summit.

As a math teacher, my top priority is building high-quality connections with my students so they can feel safe, seen, and valued as part of the mathematics community, right here and now. We know that when students’ stories are reflected and honored in our curriculum and our classroom environments, our students are more likely to connect with the material, see themselves as capable problem-solvers in the face of challenges and experience improved academic outcomes.

In addition to their multifaceted identities, the daily experiences – including the small joys and excited moments – that students bring into our classrooms are also part of their stories. By looking and listening for those moments, we can quickly, easily, and joyfully incorporate these aspects of our students’ stories into our daily curriculum. Here’s one example from my classroom:

After Christmas last year, one of my students came to class with all of these brand-new colored pencils – tons of them – and she was so proud and excited to use them and show them off. I saw the opportunity to bring in this student’s excitement, help her feel seen and included in all her excitement and create a community-building moment for our entire class. How? I created multi-step word problems that revolved around her colored pencils – and I included this student in the process of creating those word problems. I took a few minutes to talk with this student about her new pencils. We looked at all of them, we counted them, and then I said, “Okay, we’re going to make a new word problem, so you stand up and show everyone your beautiful new pencils.” She beamed having this story told about her and this special gift that she got for Christmas. 

You can do this for any student by listening, being observant and noticing these small opportunities when they arise. But you don’t have to wait for those moments to include more of your students’ identities in your curriculum; you can start by just using their names in your word problems. That’s a part of feeling seen and welcomed as part of our classroom community and as part of the math community. I’ve found that simply seeing their names lovingly represented in context of a math problem can begin providing an antidote to the messages our learners receive about who does or doesn’t belong in math. Despite those messages, if your name is right there, maybe you DO belong after all!

Another exercise I use to continue building high-quality connections is a problem solving routine I created call Rich Identity Tasks (#RIT). We know positive collaboration with peers is integral to students’ success, allowing them to develop their own sense of self-efficacy while learning to see their peers as effective and resourceful contributors to their community. Rich Identity Tasks engage learners in one another’s stories to foster mutual respect, empathy, and collaboration. I find this activity especially helpful for improving peer dynamics in my classroom.

You can download a copy of this activity to use in your own classroom here.

I usually start the Rich Identity Task with a photo of the student that they and their families have consented to share. For one student, it was a photo of him surrounded by family members all celebrating his brother’s birthday. At this stage, the only prompt is for students to see what they notice and share those observations with the group or with a partner. Then they share something they’re wondering about.

This process is from the heart of the NCTM Notice and Wonder routine, and in the context of this activity, it serves to humanize the student in focus. It invites their peers to exercise a generous and non-judgemental curiosity about their similarities and differences. Through a small glimpse into their lives outside the classroom, students can practice seeing one another as more wholly three-dimensional people and practice extending a greater level of regard and compassion toward them.  

From there, I share a story about the student in focus that draws on the experience in the photo but begins to incorporate the topics of our lesson. Again, with the consent of the student and their family, I can get a bit creative here. The key is to continue to humanize and affirm the student in focus while embedding their story as part of our growing math community. The student can both see themselves and experience their peers’ supportive attention, and our entire class can bring that positive reflection to bear on their engagement with our lesson for the day. 

As the activity moves from the photo to the story to our final math problem, I provide more inroads for student choice. Students can engage with the problem by acting it out, drawing it or any of the other options in our repertoire. This is the bridge between holding the student in focus with kind and compassionate attention and activating each student’s sense of efficacy and belonging as part of our classroom community. To close, students inventory the strategies and tools they can use to solve the problem and pick the ones they’d like to try on their own or with a classmate.

From including students’ names and their joys in word problems to engaging the class in Rich identity Tasks, we can creatively connect their stories and expand what it means to be a mathematician right here and now. The more we do that, the more we can build our capacity as educators to expand our view of what inclusion and equity can look like in our field – and the brighter all our futures become.