Math is Emotional – Edtech Leaders Should Embrace It

A passionate founder talks about teachers, technology, and changing the narrative.

GUEST COLUMN | by Jamie Poskin

Tapping into artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the dominant trends in education. From AI tools that handle teachers’ administrative duties to chatbots that adapt to students’ needs, the K-12 education space is suddenly awash in AI tools that promise to personalize, streamline, detect, synthesize, advise… the list goes on.

Out of the possible roles AI can assume or make more efficient in K-12 education, I am most energized by its potential to support teachers in their classrooms. The organization I co-founded (TeachFX) uses AI in this way, providing teachers with AI-driven insights on their instructional practices to drive better and more equitable student engagement.

‘Out of the possible roles AI can assume or make more efficient in K-12 education, I am most energized by its potential to support teachers in their classrooms.’

Shifting Mindsets

While innovative edtech tools, including those leveraging AI, hold incredible promise for improving teaching and learning, developers and investors must prioritize the very real needs and feelings of the humans — teachers and students — at the heart of education. We embrace this charge. We know that what happens in classrooms is extremely dependent on how teachers and students think and feel about teaching and learning. We are constantly looking for new ways to support strong teacher mindsets. We want teachers to think “my job is to get my students to do the thinking and talking” by posing questions and being curious about what their students think. But shifting mindsets is no easy task! Particularly when dominant and unhelpful narratives about students persist and influence how teachers engage with their class. For example, and perhaps most pernicious of all: that “some students just can’t get higher-level math.”

Math Narrative Project

Consequently, we’ve been thinking a lot about the findings of the Math Narrative Project, a research project funded through the Gates Foundation, which also funds our work. The Math Narrative Project explored how K-12 teachers, parents, and students think and feel about teaching and learning math, specifically for those in sixth through tenth grade. The research findings echoed my own observations and challenges as a math teacher:

• Learning and teaching math is a deeply emotional experience for all.
• Teachers and parents often have a hard time making higher-level math feel relevant for students.
• Struggling with math is perceived as negative – with teachers often misinterpreting students’ struggles learning math as students being checked out or not interested in learning.

The project includes actionable messaging recommendations for communicating with students, parents, and teachers, helping flip the script and shape narratives that inspire more students to want to learn more math. For example, the project recommends that those who serve teachers—including instructional designers and tool developers—should acknowledge the constraints that teachers experience, such as large class sizes and students who are chronically absent, to help reduce their skepticism about new approaches and tools.

‘The project includes actionable messaging recommendations for communicating with students, parents, and teachers, helping flip the script and shape narratives that inspire more students to want to learn more math.’

We are using insights from the Math Narrative Project to improve our product and make it more effective. Now, we are transforming our onboarding experience for teachers using narrative interventions to shift teachers’ mindsets about student capabilities in the math classroom, particularly regarding students of color and students from lower income backgrounds. These narrative interventions emphasize the lived experiences and expertise of real teachers, who share stories about the impact of effective instructional practices that elevate student talk and engagement in their classrooms.

Insights into Practice

Tech leaders leaning into AI can’t lean back from the user experience, user mindsets, and users’ lived experiences. We are excited to explore how we might build new machine learning models that provide teachers with automated feedback on how they put Math Narrative Project insights into practice in math classrooms. When teachers make a recording with our solution, we want to elevate moments when they encouraged help-seeking, reframed struggle, or made math relevant to students. We also want to elevate moments of student discourse that help teachers reassess assumptions they make about student behaviors in math classrooms.

Experts and mathematicians understand that mistakes are essential to learning – but for students, mistakes can be discouraging and lead them to abandon math rather than persist and succeed. Through the Math Narrative Project’s recommendations for teachers and adults, we know that normalizing – and even encouraging – making mistakes can build students’ growth mindsets.

Teacher and student mindsets and beliefs are pivotal to what happens in classrooms, and understanding these mindsets and beliefs is critical to our combined work. The Math Narrative Project is a game-changing resource for those in the math space and especially those of us at the helm of edtech. By embracing these recommendations and ensuring our products align with them, we can greatly impact teaching and learning, empowering educators to unlock the full potential of every student.

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Jamie Poskin is the founder of TeachFX, a scalable and effective way to support all teachers with private, automated feedback on their instruction, making it easy for teachers to record and reflect on their lessons, set goals and track progress over time. Over 60 school districts, including Detroit Public Schools Community District, Anaheim Union High School District, and Newport News Public Schools, trust TeachFX to empower their teachers with formative feedback that gets students engaged. Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn.

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