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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

For example, we describe "Hannah," who developed their conception of "math for real-life" at the start of the semester into a more robust into a centering of Rehumanizing math, which she also saw connected to dimensions of power & participation. See other TC examples in article! 8/10

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

What did we find? Well...TCs were all over the place! Different people found different activities as most impactful around their thinking regarding EMT. This told us that a variety of exposure/experience activities may benefit TCs who hold a variety of backgrounds/identities. 7/10

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Activities focused on experience/exposure, with students moving from emerging -> refined perspectives on particular aspects of equity in math as the course progressed. We also emphasized the CRMT2 framework - each student chose a "deep dive" dimension for the semester 5/10

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Next, we focused our course activities around students' EXPOSURE to equity (framing and situating it theoretically in the classroom) and EXPERIENCES with these ideas (applying aspects of equity beyond the confines of the university classroom). 4/10

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Finally, MW genres may be positioned to promote inclusive language. It may stand that, since you are being asked to explain ideas or construct arguments, you may also be situated as having a more active role in the activity of mathematics compared to just rehashing procedures

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

We found that teachers tended to maintain their linguistic choices that they started with, but also we saw that most of our inclusive language drifts happened when teachers (re)focused students on informative or argumentative goals of the tasks.

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

But did the expectations "drift" at all? Yes! About 60% (20) of our coded lessons showed a drift in the discursive focus of the task. We actually saw a lot of drift toward informative/argumentative foci when a task started as procedural, for instance!

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

But when we ALSO include how teachers (re)focused students on tasks throughout the groupwork, the picture is more complicated. There's a lot more informative or argumentative focus (but still a lot of exclusive language with procedural writing expectations)

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

When we JUST looked at how teachers initially setup tasks during groupwork, we saw a lot of exclusive language, and a lot of focus on procedures. Most inclusive framing happened with (relatively few) informative or argumentative tasks.

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

What did we find? First, a lot of writing students were being asked to do during these tasks was procedural rather than mathematical writing. Many expectations were also ambiguous about whether students were to produce written work, or primarily engage in spoken discourse

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

For initial task setup and then implementation, we considered the genre of task (symbolic/procedural, informative/explanatory, or argumentative), the expectations for student participation (writing, speaking, ambiguous), and whether teachers used inclusive or exclusive framing...

Flowchart of the coding processes for this study.

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

#mathedresearch #mtbos I'm excited to share a new article from me and Bea Ellis, titled Discursive Drift in the Enactment of Small Group Elementary Mathematical Writing Tasks, out now in Investigations in Mathematics Learning! doi.org/10.1080/1947...

The abstract of the article, Discursive Drift in the Enactment of Small Group Elementary Mathematical Writing Tasks

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

We recognize the present political climate is explicitly hostile toward equity & cultural responsiveness. This sort of investigation not only calls attention to the current desultory approach to CRMT in curricula, but also provides tools for stakeholders to advocate for CRMT. (7/8)

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

What does this tell us? Well...these materials are presenting SOME opportunities to attend to culturally responsive math teaching (CRMT), but their sporadic and siloed attention toward CRM suggests the need to adapt and supplement such materials to support CRMT. (5/8)

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

There was greater attention toward promoting high cognitive demand, but CRM aspects such as disrupting status issues or using math to address social issues was pretty much nonexistent in the analyzed materials. (4/8)

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

What did we find? Well...these curricula provide only brief attention toward culturally responsive mathematics (CRM), but there ARE differences across curricula. Perhaps unsurprisingly, curricula attend more to the dominant dimensions of equity than the critical dimensions. (3/8)

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

We analyzed the middle school materials of six different widely adopted math curricula, considering how the materials present opportunities to attend to Zavala and Aguirre's CRMT2 framework. (2/8)

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

#mathedresearch #mtbos I am excited to share the newly published article I cowrote with Riley Stone and Raisa Ebner, titled "Culturally Responsive Mathematics and Curriculum Materials: Present Realities and Imagined Futures." You can view the article here: mdpi.com/2227-7102/15... (1/8)

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

We also found that teachers who reported higher coach quality--both expertise and affective quality (e.g., “My coach is respectful and collegial”) also had higher perceptions of PL+curriculum quality. Perceptions of coaching quality matter!

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

However, teachers who had an instructional coach had stronger perceptions about the quality of their PL and curriculum. So coaching--or districts that use coaching and other supports--seemed to strengthen teachers' perceptions of PL and curriculum quality.

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

We found that coaches had more positive views about the quality of district-mandated PL and curriculum materials compared to teachers. True for specificity, consistency, buy-in, institutional authority. So coaches view PL+curriculum in meaningfully dift ways than their teachers

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

We had 15 rubrics on PEMTP-8 on academic support, 7 on social support. As a lead on the observation team let me assure you, this was a lot of data to capture and analyze! (5/10)

Building on literature regarding student engagement and motivation in mathematics (Middleton et al., 2017), we ultimately wrote 15 observation rubrics. Eight of these focused on academic support to investigate (1) students’ opportunities for sense making and reasoning, (2) connections between representations or strategies, (3) pressing students to explain, (4) contexts of tasks, (5) mathematical correctness, (6) mathematics language use, (7) feedback, and (8) students’ opportunities for agency and autonomy. Also building on literature, we wrote seven social support rubrics intended to investigate (9) whole class discourse, (10) small group discourse, (11) status raising, (12) motivational discourse, (13) enthusiasm about mathematics, (14) attention to students’ lives, and (15) account
ability and high expectations. We acknowledge that social support and academic support are often blended in some of these teaching practices.

A rubric for status raising/positioning students as mathematically competent from the PEMTP

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

We discuss our approach to coding instructional episodes in 10-min segments in comparison to coding entire lessons or shorter/longer time periods. We found the segmented approach to offer benefits in precision of the coding and retrieval of evidence for dissemination of findings (4/10)

A screen capture of text from the referenced journal article.

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

We describe the importance for researchers to share their process of establishing validity evidence and walk through our own approach. It is multifaceted (and sometimes messy) but important work! (3/10)

Figure describing eight steps that the SMiLES research team took for establishing evidence of validity for the PEMTP

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Ethan Smith @mathissippi.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Me at 2am, looking at a new call for manuscripts for a topic entirely outside of my expertise, writing up an abstract that (1) uses all of the keywords from the call and (2) then states "in this paper, I will..." and proceed to just explain my own thing.

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