For over a decade, Which One Doesn't Belong? (WODB; Danielson, 2016) has been a beloved classroom routine that invites students to engage in mathematical decision-making and justification. In the WODB routine, four related figures are shown to students, and they are asked to decide which of them doesn't belong with the other three. The beauty of…

When examining students' participation in these mathematics discussions, the focus is on their verbal contributions. However, students' nonverbal contributions--such as pointing, drawings, and models-- can be crucial resources for advancing the mathematical thinking and the collective activity of a classroom community (Johnson et al., 2023; Webb…

The lesson described in this article was developed and taught by a team of mathematics educators and physical therapists, with the shared goal of broadening students' perception of how mathematics concepts are applied in the real world. This lesson gives students authentic experience with the Gait Speed Test as a physical therapist would…

Teachers can make number talks more ambitious and increase learning opportunities for students by debugging errors, promoting multi-student thinking, and orienting to make connections. This article describes the basic number talks routine and examines some common tendencies, such as "Serial Sharing." It concludes with a vignette to…

In this article, the authors introduce and illustrate a new activity that involves "follow-up equations," which are equations that follow up on ideas children have already expressed when solving fraction story problems. Specifically, teachers pose story problems and purposely attend to fraction ideas that arise in children's strategies…

In this article, the authors (a mathematics educator and a literacy educator) offer a framework to engage students with mathematics and children's literature through a read-aloud experience in which teacher and students engage with the text while problem solving. The authors describe the narrative-first approach as a strategy during which the…

Positioning students as competent is a teaching practice that uses specific, explicit affirmations to note that students have contributed something meaningful to the community of learners. It supports student agency in the mathematics classroom and contributes to the development of a positive mathematics identity. In this article, the authors…

Productive talk is structured talk designed to support students in developing a deep understanding of the content (Michaels et al., 2008): a characteristic of high-quality mathematics instruction (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2014). Students who engage in talk during mathematics class have opportunities to make sense of the…

The mathematics education community has affirmed the importance of writing in the mathematics classroom for a long time (e.g., National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 2000, 2014), and many examples exist of writing strategies or activities in mathematics learning (e.g., Altieri, 2009; Bixby, 2018; Carter, 2009; Gunter, 2016; Linhart,…

Stories live within us and shape our identities. What opportunities do students have to share their stories during the learning of mathematics? How can storytelling enhance the development of mathematical identities? In this article, the author shares reasons for and examples of ways that storytelling in mathematics can support the development of…

Students at the elementary level should have opportunities to critique the world through mathematics and to see themselves as capable doers of mathematics. The lesson described in this article prompted students to consider how to use mathematics to organize an emergency evacuation. In this article, the authors show how small changes to a task…

Digital curricula can constrain teachers with ready-made instructional materials. The authors used Mathematics Teaching Practices (MTPs) to modify a digital curriculum to engage students in more thoughtful and meaningful lessons. In this article, the authors visit one of their third-grade classrooms, in which they used the prescriptive digital…

Mathematics educators and researchers have increasingly integrated social justice-oriented tasks into their classrooms. Teaching mathematics for social justice (TMfSJ) aims to help students develop mathematical knowledge in ways that promote students' abilities to critique the communities of which they are members (Ellis & Malloy, 2007;…

Open tasks are mathematical problems "that promote mathematical reasoning and problem solving and allow multiple entry points and varied solution strategies" (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 2014, p. 17). Open tasks can have more than one right answer, solution, or outcome. Facilitation of open tasks offers learning…

Children need support in the early elementary grades to construct a deep, formal understanding of foundational prealgebraic concepts. In this article, the authors share recommendations for teaching one such foundational concept--mathematical equivalence. First, they define mathematical equivalence and discuss research supporting the benefits of…