Pedagogical Strategies to Use as a Math Teacher 

The main goal of the teachers in this article is to understand their students and to help them find their voice. They not only want to teach their subjects but social justice as well. The strategy is co-teaching mathematics and social studies. Mathematics is mainly right or wrong, so these teachers use the social justice in marginalized social studies to teach math. It is a way to learn about the world and not just rules that are present in the standard math curriculums. The use of mathematical thinking can help with decision making on public issues for their futures. The teachers suggest that math teachers connect the math to each of the students so it becomes more meaningful. Two main areas that these teachers emphasized on is collaboration and modeling. Collaboration refers to constant reflections and mature discussions about the students viewpoints. Modeling refers to hands on activities of the integrated subjects. To sum up this strategy, the main lesson is a hands on less that involves both social studies and mathematics. The students work together and use mathematical thinking to do the lesson, and then they use their own opinions and viewpoints explaining their work. Then at the end there is a debriefing where they explained what they learned and how they'll use it in their future. 

As a teacher I would love to collaborate with a social studies teacher to better teach social justice to my kids. I love the idea of hands on and collaborated work. I will definitely have a lot of group activities for my students to participate in. As a group they learn from each other more than just sitting and getting lectured to by me as a teacher. For example, I could use graphs as the mathematical part of the lesson to show an issue in the past. Then have the students make their own graph on how that issue is in the present day, and have them explain why they made the graph they did. Then both the social studies teacher and myself will talk about the math and social studies aspect of the lesson. Finally at the end have them reflect on what they learned and how they'll use the information learned in the future. 

The math teachers in this podcast use a different and unfamiliar strategy, in which they call Equip. It is bringing awareness to teachers about participation patterns. Teachers need to observe who participates, how the students participate, and how teachers affect this participation. It is also the observation of participation through gender, race, and disability groups. Knowing this knowledge will make it easier for teachers to then change their ways of teaching to make everyone able to participate. Using this method of sitting back and observing participation patterns they can see which students were getting opportunities and which ones are not. This strategy also states how teachers should observe each other and form relationships with other teachers to then improve on this new strategy for teaching. This strategy also leads to teachers to gain understanding of equity and equality. The podcast states that one teacher said that using Equip made her realize that she rarely called on any latino students. It points out how teachers are socialized and allows for them to pull away from those socializations and to bring more social justice within the classroom. 

As a teacher I will use this observing strategy to see participation strategies with my students. I will learn about my students and learn how each one likes to participate. I need to learn these things so I can help each and every student participate. I will have to learn how to ask questions to certain kids so they understand and are confident to answer the questions. I will make sure that gender, race, and disability groups are not markers for different treatment in the classroom. Teacher student relationships are key to success, so I will make sure that I understand and help each and every single one of my students. Additionally, I will definitely help out other teachers and observe their classrooms in order to help them with their participation patterns within their classroom. 

This article's main focus how everyone wants high quality mathematics learning for every student. But good education isn't always what is needed. This article states how school mathematic curriculums are biased to begin with. The valuable math that teachers are teaching in schools comes from the dominant group of society. This makes some students struggle with math and not want to engage at all. The main point of this article is for teachers to change the set questions that are asked within the mathematical curriculums to be less biased. Good math learning will not help students with the inequalities that they are facing. It does not allow the students to create a voice and be able to stand up for social inequalities. This strategy is essentially to nit just be a good math teacher, but to incorporate social justice into math and to make it less bias. 

As a teacher I will make sure the math questions asked are fair for everyone and not biased towards some students. This may not see like a huge problem but it is. Biased and unequal questions asked in math classes can affect students forever and make them not want to engage in any math in the future. I will not be a lazy teacher and just give the students questions that are asked in textbooks. I will make sure to create my own questions for the students to promote equity. No student will ever feel out of place or inferior to anyone in my classroom. I will promote social justice and equality within my classroom. 

This articles strategy incorporates a real life present day crisis into their math class in order to understand social justice and mathematical modeling. This strategy is to think about social justice and mathematical modeling in a synergistic way. Synergistic means different groups or elements working together. The goals of this strategy is one mathematical modeling and social justice teaching engaged students in ill defined problems for which they can have multiple valid approaches. Two they both leverage the real world knowledge that students bring to the classroom. Finally, three it raises students interest in mathematics by supporting them to better understand and transform their world. This strategy brings real life social problems into the classroom for then students to use math to see these problems more clearly.  

As a teacher I will first bring one social justice issue to the students attention. I will come up with a mathematical modeling problem for the students to understand the issue more. Then I will allow for all the students to find their own social justice issue that they would like to learn more about. I will have them come up with a mathematical modeling presentation to then show and teach the class about. This will hopefully bring interest to the students in wanting to learn math. It will also teach the students about social justice issues that they did not know were relevant in the world. 

This articles strategy is to incorporate real world projects into math to better look at and understand the social  justice issues occuring. They found out that students respond better in math when the problems are relevant and closely connected. One main point of this strategy is that the teacher should be open with it's students. But not too open that they change their students viewpoints of social issues to that of the teachers. Teachers just need to share enough to get the students talking and engaged. The use of mathematics to teach social justice goes beyond just bringing out the opinions of the students. It allows for work able and provable disparities. It gets the kids engaged and willing to take action and fight for the inequalities. But the teacher has to have great knowledge between math and social justice to steer clear from oppositional binary between the two. Another main point is to not let the students feel hopeless while learning about social justice. Students should read the world, write the world, and then reflection and action. Read through math problems about what is going on, write out the solutions to the math problems, reflect on what is going on socially, and then take action. Math allows for students opinions and arguments to make more sense and stronger. Both the teachers and the students are teaching and learning in this instance. 

As a teacher I will be open and honest with my students. Allow for them to see that I am just like them, and that I care for them. I don't want to change my students viewpoints on issues but bring awareness to the issues and allow for my students to understand their peers culturally. I will educate myself on social issues to then be able to incorporate them into the math lessons. For example, maybe I'll look at unemployment percentages through the years and do a lesson on how unemployment is calculated. This will allow for the students to see the issue of unemployment and in hopes take action in the future. I will also incorporate reflection into my classroom. That is more of a English/ Social Studies but reflecting on these issues and how it affects the students and their peers is very important and that will hopefully lead to the students wanting to raise awareness and fight for these issues.