On Wednesday, I presented at the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS) Special Education Conference. My session was called “Access & Equity in Math Class for Students with Disabilities.” The goal of the presentation was to review the Standards for Mathematical Practice and pair great Instructional Routines with each one so that the special educators in attendance would be prepared to engage their students in this high level of mathematical thinking.

I made one major oversight in the planning of this session…I’ll let you guess what that was…

Yes, we could not review the Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP), when only two of the participants had even heard of them prior to the session. Because of this, the goal of the session changed to using instructional routines to model what was meant by each of the Standards for Mathematical Practice.

Most of the instructional routines were culled from the #MTBoS. For instance, we used I Notice/I Wonder from The Math Forum to model SMP.1 – Making sense of problems and persevere in solving them, Estimation 180 to model SMP.2 – Reason abstractly and quantitatively, and Which One Doesn’t Belong? to model SMP.3 – Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.

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OR “Why Counting Collections Should Be In the Toolkit of Every Special Education Math Teacher.”

Over the years it has become clear to me that commitment to good instructional activities (or routines) is the bedrock of any good math class, special education or not.

Magdalene Lampert defines instructional activities (or routines) as “…well designed procedures that have been proven in practice, that take into account the complexity of the goals that need to be accomplished, and that allow the practitioner temporarily to hold some things constant while working on others.  The use of such routine procedures involves not only acquiring the capacity to do the steps in the routine in an actual working environment but also the learning professional norms or “principles” that would enable a practitioner to make appropriate judgments about when and where it is appropriate to use the routines.”

This is especially enticing in a special education classroom where holding constant parts of the classroom (behavior, anxiety, comfort level with the task, familiarity of expectations, etc.) in order to highlight and work on others (mathematical proficiency) is an ideal situation for learning.

One of my favorite instructional routines is called Counting Collections.

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Brought to you by the Global Math Department & MathTwitterBlogosphere

You can find out about the first #NYCMathTweetup here, here, and here.

At the annual meeting and exposition of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), a major theme was the access and equity of high quality mathematics instruction for all students in the United States.  This included race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, ESL/ELL students and students who were often referred to as “struggling in math.”  Very rarely was the access and equity of high quality mathematics instruction for students with disabilities discussed.

Equity and equality does not look the same for everyone

I freely admit that the equity for these other students groups must be a topic of discussion, but so does that same equity for students with disabilities.  Students with all disabilities, not just those who “struggle in math.”  If we are going to advocate for access and equity, then every student should be represented in the discussion.

NCTM’s Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All describes their vision of access and equity in this way:

Our vision of access and equity requires being responsive to students’ backgrounds, experiences and knowledge when designing, implementing, and assessing the effectiveness of a mathematics program.  Acknowledging and addressing factors that contribute to differential outcomes among groups of students is critical to ensure that all students routinely have opportunities to experience high-quality mathematics instruction, learn challenging mathematics content, and receive the support necessary to be successful.  Our vision of equity and access includes both ensuring that all students attain mathematics proficiency and increasing the numbers of students from all racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic groups who attain the highest levels of mathematics achievement.  (p. 60)

Students with disabilities are clearly lacking from this vision of access and equity.  Why? Students with disabilities are just as much a part of the fabric of our national education system as any other “stakeholders.”  Why have they been carefully left out of the conversation?

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