Educational Program

The University of Florida in the U.S. will develop an interactive mathematics learning platform with instructional videos incorporating high-quality, culturally responsive educational material and online resources to better engage students experiencing poverty and Black and Latino students.

German-Hungarian startup Mastory is developing an e-learning system to engage Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty in interactive storyline games. While students are immersed in a real-time sci-fi adventure, they learn to deal with mathematical topics from the core curriculum and experience their importance in emotionally meaningful contexts. Current methods for teaching abstract concepts in mathematics often fail to explain why they are relevant to real life, and particularly to the lives of priority students, causing many of them to disengage.

Broward County Public Schools in the U.S. and partners will enhance and pilot a set of tools and strategies that enable teachers and priority students to build classroom cultures and practices for the learning and teaching of mathematics that incorporate the needs of the entire class, with a particular focus on engaging priority students.

The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) in the U.S. will develop a pre-algebra "Readiness Course" to better prepare multilingual learners in Providence for Algebra I. In 2020, only 3% of multilingual learners (also called "English learners") in Rhode Island achieved the SAT college readiness benchmark in mathematics. RIDE has developed and piloted a summer course that uses student-centered pedagogy and real-world examples to strengthen students' math skills, while also promoting their social-emotional growth.

The Partnership for Los Angeles Schools in the U.S. will work with teachers and students to develop and incorporate social justice and identity-affirming content into math curricula for students to improve their academic performance and further enhance their opportunity to attain their hopes and dreams as independent and confident lifelong problems solvers. The Partnership will develop prototypes that incorporate social justice into teacher supports to modify lessons, tasks, and assessments, and to build new classroom cultures that cultivate student genius.

Plan of Action for Challenging Times in the U.S. will use a student-driven approach to develop a program that leverages storytelling to improve the conceptual understanding of Algebra 1 for Black and Latino students. They will offer small group tutoring using a peer-led model to strengthen understanding of core algebraic concepts. They will also organize student groups and support them to use their own life experiences to create new stories for explaining specific concepts, and to develop them as learning tools for teaching other priority students.

Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science, in partnership with Howard University, in the U.S. will develop a program that teaches mathematics by applying it to the everyday lives of their female Black students in Washington DC, in order to spark their interest and improve their achievement scores and attitudes towards the subject. The abstract nature of mathematics lessons makes it inaccessible for many Black students, and this leads to fewer pursuing higher degrees.

ConnectED: The National Center for College and Career in the U.S. will develop a digital tool to improve the Algebra I performance of multilingual students learning English. New approaches to teaching mathematics support students to think, talk and write about their mathematical reasoning -- not merely to apply formulas and solve for right answers. While the language that students generate while they are making sense of mathematics is rich with information about student learning, that information tends to be hard for math teachers to capture and analyze.

The Black Teacher Collaborative (BTC) in the U.S. will develop a teacher training program for Black teachers to help them produce more affirming Algebra I classes for Black students to facilitate their learning and development. Their teacher training program will adapt traditional teaching practices for mathematics and make them more relevant for Black students, such as creating racially-relevant examples to better teacher principles and operations of inequalities. BTC will pilot test their approach in classrooms.

BetterLesson Inc. in the U.S. will develop professional learning opportunities for teachers seeking to create positive and affirming mathematics classrooms; they will also design rigorous, culturally-connected Algebra I activities for Black and Latino students. The content of traditional Algebra I lessons tends to reflect the inequities experienced by Black and Latino students, thereby failing to engage their strengths and inhibiting learning.