Raising the Ambition of Math Students and Teachers

Jeannette Garcia Coppersmith is most definitely a “math person.” And while not every student necessarily likes math, according to her research, anyone can be a math person like her.

“We've all heard the stereotypes around who is successful at math and who isn't,” says Garcia Coppersmith, Ed.M.’20. “I think a lot of people attribute it to something you're born with, as opposed to something that's like a muscle that you exercise.”

A Ph.D. candidate in the Human Development, Learning, and Teaching (HDLT) concentration, Garcia Coppersmith came to the Ed School after a career in teacher preparation and as a math teacher. She now studies how social psychology can impact teacher education and student expectations in mathematics.

For her, helping teachers better learn how to teach can make all the difference in the classroom for students. And that study includes teachers’ own biases and expectations for their students. Math in particular, she says, often has biases around which kind of student is most likely to be “good” at it.

“It's very easy to adopt and tacitly endorse these stereotypes around who is good at math and who isn't. So I do think that it's a discipline that's uniquely sensitive to racial and ethnic biases,” she says. “You don't have that same stereotype for, say, something like social studies. ‘Oh my god, you're a social studies person.’ That's not a thing.” 

Garcia Coppersmith’s work is not about overt racism or discrimination, she explains, but the more “unconscious” or “automatic” biases people rely on when otherwise lacking context. She cites Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt’s work in understanding racial biases, noting that inequalities are “the raw material for racial biases to be formed.” Those biases, unconsciously or otherwise, make their way into the classroom and the expectations teachers have of their students.

For example, one study published in October 2024, co-authored with Hannah Kleen, Cynthia Pollard, and Professor Heather Hill, found that teachers expected Latinx and Black students to struggle with ambitious math lessons relative to white students. Those same teachers were also found to “support student sense-making and provide more positive, substantive affirmations” — meaning, offer larger hints and more praise — to students of color compared to their white counterparts while learning the same material.

“I think a lot of teachers, very well-meaning educators, have a lot of responsibility when it comes to these very real racialized achievement gaps that we see in this country. That helped me develop my line of inquiry for my dissertation work,” says Garcia Coppersmith. “People have been thinking very carefully about how implicit bias can affect teaching and learning, and other behaviors in society, writ large. So how do I bring that literature in conversation with teaching and learning mathematics?”

Her dissertation work involves looking at how to measure how teachers maintain a student’s cognitive demand — the “productive struggle” that students engage in when asked to undertake higher order thinking. Unconsciously expecting something to be too hard for a student, or “helping” with answers to ease that struggle, can limit a student’s actual learning. Identifying what teachers are thinking about their students, and how it impacts how they teach, can help find better ways to train educators in the future.

“In terms of classroom instruction, there are definitely things that teachers can do to make mathematics learning more challenging and therefore giving students more equitable opportunities to learn regardless of their background,” says Garcia Coppersmith.

She knows intimately the significant impact training educators and implementing ambitious math curriculum can have in a classroom. Garcia Coppersmith started teaching in East Oakland, California, in a residency-based teacher preparation program. Her first school had resources “pouring in” to help develop teachers and improve its curriculum and, most importantly, saw results in its student outcomes.

A move to the East Coast, however, brought her to classrooms where “those resources weren’t there.” And neither was an appetite for ambitious math teaching when it seemed students lacked math skills according to testing standards.

“It really got me thinking about this sort of chicken or egg situation around student inequalities in mathematics and the achievement gap,” recalls Garcia Coppersmith. “Is it that we're not preparing students to do complex mathematics, or is it as some would argue, that they're arriving unprepared entirely?”

Garcia Coppersmith advocates for teachers to allow their students to have time to struggle in the classroom, even if it means periods of silence. Efficiency is often the driving force of classroom learning, and with only so much classroom time and a curriculum to march through, allowing for that silence can often feel like a luxury. But it’s when teachers don’t fill in those gaps with answers and assumptions about their students, she argues, where students make progress.

“I would love to see space in our education system for that efficiency logic to not be dictating everything,” Garcia Coppersmith said. “Allowing the space, the mental space and the actual curricular space, for students to explore and do the challenging work of thinking. Because thinking takes time.”

Garcia Coppersmith recalls a time she was at a training where a classroom of students were learning how to derive a formula from a hexagon train. One student, called to the front of the classroom, offered her a unique lesson about her own biases.

“If you didn't know this student,” recalls Garcia Coppersmith, describing a Latinx boy sitting in the back of the classroom, “you might assume they’re just kind of checked out.”

Given the chance to come up to the whiteboard, though, and asked to do the work for himself, that productive struggle yielded unexpected results.

“He came up to the board and presented a rule that wasn't even in the curriculum guide and nobody had accounted for,” says Garcia Coppersmith. “So I think, when given the opportunity, students might surprise you when you put the challenging work in front of them.”