Excellent project

Welcome to our EQSTEMM project-Advancing Equity through Math Modeling in the Elementary Grades, where we focus on mathematical modeling as a powerful lever for equity and civic empathy in elementary math classrooms. We have been working with teachers across different geographic regions with four different university partners. In modeling tasks that connect to authentic contexts in schools and communities, students from diverse cultural, linguistic and geographic backgrounds draw on their experiences and mathematical ideas to make sense of problems, to empathize with others, and to take action.

Our project includes a blended professional development program with a series of modules that have both asynchronous and in person learning activities. Please learn more about our project at our website http://eqstemm.org

Thank you for visiting and please share with us how some of your work connect with our project! 

Your project leverages some really important ideas and theories in a practical and impactful way. I was curious if you could share some of your findings on the impact of your mathematical modeling approach. I would be interested to learn about the long-term impact of such instruction on STEM-intending students. Thank you for sharing!

Thanks for your question. Introducing the mathematical modeling process to teachers and elementary students has allowed for us to develop the practice of problem posing which is pivotal to any STEM field or learning in general. As we work with our teachers, we introduce routines that really invite students to be problem posers - who take a real world situation and think about questions that mathematize situations. For example, many of our community based mathematical modeling tasks look at issues locally that matter to students and their community. Some of our math modeling tasks focused on food insecurity in the community that led to lessons where students examined local data on food insecure population, USDA food database to learn about modeling cost of food for an average family which led to a coin harvest to make meal baskets. Another inquiry on this same issue led to a class collecting data on how much food was being wasted at school cafeterias by creating a plan to assess how they would quantify food waste. These modeling tasks followed an inquiry approach starting with problem posing, considering variables, creating a model to describe or predict a phenomenon (like food waste) and then creating a plan to improve the condition or taking action in their own way. We have found that authentic tasks like this give our students an opportunity to develop their inquiry skills and see mathematics as being a powerful tool to make important decisions in our life and take action towards the goal of Zero Hunger. This is just one example. I hope this gives you some ideas of how it may help STEM-intending students. Check out some other tasks that we have engaged in at https://www.eqstemm.org/mm-tasks 

This project looks amazing ... I am excited to learn from you all! 

I love the mix of culturally relevant pedagogy with math modeling. 

My experience with working with kids on modeling is that, while it's engaging to many, some students who have excelled in a more "traditional" approach are disenchanted by the modeling approach. Did you find that with your population? 

I love the connection of this project to real life situations and challenges that impact the lives of the students.  It also engages them in a variety of ways to problem solve and have a voice in decisions being made based on sound evidence and mathematical reasoning.  I also use Notice and Wonder warm up tasks in my classroom, which is based in the philosophies of CGI.   However, I have never pushed myself further to utilize the "mirror" vs. "lens"  idea to build a math lesson that might introduce a new space of the world and cultures to some of my students.  Your website is so resourceful and I look forward in engaging with it to enhance my own teaching practices.

Thanks for sharing!

This project and your study sounds very exciting! Can you share more about the locales where you are working and building these resources for teachers? Thanks!

Your project is very exciting - modeling is compelling because it's interesting and real; not a contrived story. Teachers facilitating learning with modeling as a tool for learning need your PD. What types of challenges are you noticing teachers having, and how are you supporting them? 

What an exciting project! I love the authenticity of the contexts in the lesson resources, and the emphasis on modeling and discourse of the mathematics, and the routines to build thinking about modeling are genius! I think the PD modules will be especially helpful - engaging PD that supports & advances practice is desperately needed! I'm curious about how teachers are supported within the project in terms of being able to think about students' work from a strengths-based lens. I imagine it must be infused throughout, and is a major part of Modules 2-4 but would love to know more specifics.

Thanks for sharing this project!

Could you share more about the teachers who are involved in your project and how much experience they had with mathematical modeling prior to this involvement? Additionally, it would be great to hear more about how you introduce the practice of modeling and why it is important to teachers who have less experience teaching it. Our project focuses on making computational models of science phenomena, but the modeling process highlighted in your video is very similar to the one we use with students and teachers in our project.

Thank you for sharing your work with concrete examples! I can see the EQSTEMM project engages children. I was curious about how you analyze power and participation. :)