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Advancing Equity in Math Classrooms: A Q&A with Jahneille Cunningham

Math teacher stands at the front of the room while elementary students raise their hands at desks

Jahneille Cunningham

In math classrooms, actively engaging with the subject matter is crucial to learning. However, not all students speak up, ask questions, or express their ideas. Understanding which students participate and which do not can help teachers get better at inviting students to participate in class, advancing equity in the classroom.

In this Q&A, Jahneille Cunningham, an Improvement Specialist at WestEd, discusses why participation matters in math education and shares best practices for utilizing a classroom observation tool called Equity Quantified In Participation, or EQUIP. EQUIP helps teachers identify and address inequities in classroom participation, ultimately supporting continuous improvement.

A recent WestEd report provides insights from educators using EQUIP in both elementary and college math classes. EQUIP is one of nearly 20 tools featured on WestEd’s Math Practical Measurement Repository, a hub for math teachers, coaches, leaders, and district administrators to identify easy-to-use measures that aid continuous improvement.

Read along for more about EQUIP and how to best use continuous improvement tools like it.

Why is understanding trends in student participation important for advancing equity?

JC: Classroom participation and conversations present the opportunity for students to build on each other’s ideas, learn from peers’ ideas, and dispel the notion that learning is just about getting the right answer.

For a long time, educators have focused on who’s getting the right answer the fastest. As we’re moving away from that and toward thinking about mathematics as being more about problem-solving and grappling with ideas, we know it might take some wrong answers before we get to the right answer, and that’s okay.

The equity issue is not all students have access to the really rich, deep, and rigorous mathematics thats full of discourse and playing with each others ideas—whether verbally, written, drawing, or any form of participation. Research shows that Black and Brown students, for example, are more likely to be in classrooms with more rote memorization, facts, and following procedures—not getting a chance to explore each others ideas and thinking as much. The same can be said for other groups. Some research shows that girls access to participation might differ from boys as well. So, there are a lot of equity issues that come up when we start to think about who has access to share their ideas and whos perceived as “good at math.”  

What does the EQUIP tool do, what type of classrooms is it appropriate for, and how do teachers use it?

JC: EQUIP is an app used to track classroom participation. The tool can be used to track all forms of participation whether it’s drawings or the use of manipulatives because there are many ways that students can show up and participate, especially in math class.

The user—whether it’s a teacher, a coach, or a researcher—prepopulates the app with the student roster and selects demographic information to track. For example, if you want to compare students by gender, you can see how boys are participating compared to girls or nonbinary students. You could do it by race or by disability status. You can focus on students who are emergent bilingual and learning English. There are many ways that you can use demographic data to see how equitable classroom participation is.

Once the app is prepopulated, the user can collect data in real-time or record instructions and then fill out the app. So, every time a student participates, the user clicks on that student’s name, and at the end, they’ll receive data analytics that populate when you use the tool. Users can see participation compared across groups.

EQUIP is most valuable for teachers to use with each other. It could be an entire math department or a few math teachers within or across grade levels or across grade levels who are interested. If there’s something that they want to improve on or if there’s a problem that they notice, they can share it with the group. Then, teachers can work together on solving the shared problem, informed by data.

Another cool thing about the tool is that it can be used in a variety of classrooms—from college classrooms to elementary or secondary classrooms. In the report, we highlight a first-grade classroom and a community college classroom. You can really see the range of uses there.

The report states, “The transformative power is not in the tool itself but in how it is used to enact change.” How do teachers use participation data to address inequities in their classrooms?

JC: I love this question—I’ll point to an example in the report. Sophia is a first-grade teacher and she noticed that the boys were participating more than the girls. So, seeing the data report brought back tangible information about her classroom’s baseline—as a teacher, you might have a hunch that there are imbalances, but you might not have evidence. When faced with this evidence, Sophia decided to think about some new strategies. She thought, “Well, I need to be more intentional about who I’m pairing together. What about conversation clubs or think-pair-share, different instructional activities that help students think about their ideas in smaller group settings before sharing with the larger class?” So just like that, ideas are sparked from making sense of data. That’s a powerful, transformative use of the tool.

With a tool like this—which utilizes sensitive student data and demographic information—it’s important to pay attention to how you’re using it and to be intentional about doing no harm. You don’t want to use it to make generalizations about students of a particular demographic or penalize teachers for implicit bias, which the data may reveal. If you think about Sophia’s example, imagine how hard it might be to realize that you are not being fair in the way you are calling on students. That’s hard to see when you see yourself as a well-meaning, caring teacher. While it may be tempting to dismiss this kind of data, Sophia confronted it thoughtfully, without blaming particular students or student groups. Instead, Sophia thought about how she as the teacher could better support students. So, when you are using EQUIP, you don’t want to blame students for their lack of participation, and you don’t want to blame teachers, either. The tool is not about whose fault it is, it’s about supporting teachers in reflecting, learning, and improving.

How you use the tool is important. It’s not like you suddenly achieve equity in your classroom just by using the tool. It’s more like, “I’m using this tool, and when I see undesirable results reported by the tool, I’m motivated to better support my students. I’m motivated to really reflect on, do I have some internal biases as a teacher that might be impacting who I’m calling on?” That sort of data-informed reckoning can be sensitive and vulnerable.

When teachers and schools use this tool, they must be in a state of being ready and willing to see some information that might be scary or disappointing. It’s important to not be judgmental of yourself or students, but focus on how you can use the information to do better.

Teachers who want to use this kind of tool to address inequities in their classrooms should start with a clear goal. It might be tempting to say, “Let me just collect the data and see how it is,” and then stop there because it was too scary or too vulnerable. It’s easy to notice a trend in the data, and say, “I’m just going to pretend like I didn’t see that information,” or “Okay, this is bad, but what do I do about it?” Be clear in what you want to do with the information.

Then, use that data to take action. That’s why it’s important to work with others when looking at data to hold each other accountable. When you’re working with others, you might have routines or structures that help hold each other accountable, whether that’s a professional learning community or just you and a teacher buddy who review and talk about data every month. That way, you make sure that you’re making the data actionable and not just collecting data for the sake of collecting data.

The report recognizes existing constraints on teachers’ time, making it important for teachers to have broader support when using EQUIP. How can school leaders and coaches support teachers with implementing the tool?

JC: It can be hard for teachers to step away from instruction and track the data. So, if coaches can collect the data on behalf of teachers, that’s one burden lifted. Research–school partnerships, where researchers support with data collection, sense-making, and regular conversations with teachers, can be helpful.

But you don’t have to have a research partnership to do this well. Instructional aids or assistant principals can be part of data collection. Really draw on the school staff that you have. It’s a big lift from teachers’ shoulders to know that someone else is handling the data in the first place.

It’s also important for school leaders to establish a culture of inquiry, curiosity, and collaboration. There are often many rules and policies for evaluating teachers, which can create an environment where it can feel too scary to learn or to try something new and different. Tools like EQUIP collect vulnerable data that can be scary to show other people in an environment where teachers are penalized or judged. It’s up to school leaders, and even district leaders, to create an environment where it’s okay to make mistakes. We learn from those mistakes to make improvements. Setting up that culture is crucial.

There are a few ways to start creating a culture where teachers feel safe and comfortable. First, give teachers time to look at the data individually before looking at it in a group setting. Email the data reports, let teachers look at their reports individually, process their feelings, and then have teachers come together to share what they feel comfortable sharing.

Make sure that all along the way, leadership is emphasizing and prioritizing learning—not shaming, not punishing. You can’t learn when you’re not feeling safe enough to admit that you have something to learn.

Professional development is key. We have a lot of teachers who may be new to talking about issues of race in the classroom. For example, for teachers who have a hard time even using terms like “my Black students” or “my white students,” it’s especially uncomfortable to collect data related to race. Having systems put in place that include anti-bias trainings and regular discussions about culturally responsive education helps teachers to learn and talk about issues of equity, access, and justice, and then, reflect upon how those issues show up in mathematics education.

How do practical measures, like the EQUIP tool, support continuous improvement in math education?

JC: In improvement science, we talk a lot about systems and place emphasis on learning, particularly learning from failures. I think learning from mistakes is especially important. Many people used to think—and some still do—of math education as abstract, meaning it’s race and culture-free. Yet at the same time, many students have been denied a rich math education because they were presumed to be unable and incapable of doing certain levels of mathematics, often because of racist or sexist beliefs, policies, and practices.

More people now recognize these inequities occur at a system level, not just in individual interactions. If we see the same thing happen over and over again, the problem is not one student, one teacher, [or] one principal. The system was designed to work this way. There are a lot of deep-seated and systemic racist, sexist, and ableist practices and policies that have been present in education for decades, if not centuries. As we push back on those things, we must take a systems approach to looking at it, beyond one classroom or one teacher.

Practical measures—like EQUIP—are tools that facilitate intentional and regular data collection and analysis for the distinct purpose of improving a system by testing changes. You might not know how to improve, but you know improvement is needed. These tools help to understand the problem and surface some of those issues that we might not have been paying attention to, or we might be blind to because we’re used to doing things the way we’ve always done them. Once we know our baseline, we can say “This is where we are, this is the problem but this is where we want to be, and how do we get there?” And these tools can help measure our progress to getting there.

Interested in learning more about the EQUIP tool and other practical measures for advancing equity in math classrooms? Download the full report and explore WestEd’s Math Practical Measurement Repository.

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