Toward More Equitable Instruction - How Teachers Integrate Ambitious, Traditional, and Culturally Responsive Mathematics Practices

Oct 15, 2026

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The article examines how teachers integrate ambitious, traditional, and culturally responsive (CR) mathematics practices to support equity in instruction. Using self-reported survey data and mixture modeling, it develops an emergent typology of teachers’ engagement with CR teaching in mathematics. Results show most teachers rarely use CR practices, about one-third use some CR practices alongside others, and fewer than one-quarter strongly emphasize ambitious mathematics with robust CR practice sets. Teachers who de-emphasize CR report lower self-efficacy, informing implications for policy and practice.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages28

Reading Time1 h 11 min

AccessFree to download

Toward More Equitable Instruction

Teachers’ Integrating of Instructional Practices

Typology of Culturally Responsive (CR) Engagement

Results and Teacher Self-Efficacy

Implications for Policy and Practice

AERA Open January-December 2025, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 1–28 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584251331463 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2025. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Toward More Equitable Instruction: How Teachers Integrate Ambitious, Traditional, and Culturally Responsive Mathematics Practices Meghan Comstock University of Maryland, College Park Kenneth A. Shores Erica Litke Laura M. Desimone Camila Polanco University of Delaware Kirsten Lee Hill Kirsten Lee Hill Education Consulting, LLC Increasingly, there is consensus that equitable mathematics instruction incorporates ambitious and culturally responsive (CR) practices. Using self-reported survey data and mixture modeling, we examine teachers’ emphasis on ambitious, traditional, and CR mathematics practices. We offer an emergent typology for characterizing teacher engagement with CR teaching in mathematics. One-half of teachers—predominantly White and experienced—reported rarely engaging in CR practices, focusing exclusively on a mix of ambitious and traditional practices. One-third of teachers emphasized some CR practices alongside ambitious and traditional practices. Less than one-quarter of teachers—predominantly teachers of color—emphasized ambitious mathematics and a robust set of CR practices. Teachers who de-emphasize CR teaching reported believing in it but having low self-efficacy. We offer implications for policy and practice. Keywords: equity, instructional practices, social justice, survey research, survey analysis, regression analyses, culturally responsive teaching, equitable instruction, instructional reform, teaching, mathematics education In recent years, the mathematics education field has recognized that equitable mathematics instruction not only privileges classical mathematics knowledge (what the field considers tobe academic mathematical knowledge; Gutstein, 2012), but also cultural responsiveness—that is, leveraging students’ cultural assets and attending to social justice (Abdulrahim & Orosco, 2020; Aguirre & Zavala, 2013; Gay, 2018; Gutiérrez, 2012; Gutstein, 2006, 2012) . For instance, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’(NCTM, 2021) position statement on access and equity emphasizes the need for teachers to be “responsive to students’ backgrounds, experiences, cultural perspectives, traditions, and knowledge” to support equity in mathematics teaching (Paragraph 1) . Similarly, California’s most recent K-12 mathematics framework calls for equity and engagement, offering examples for how to “utilize and value students’identities, assets, and cultural resources” in mathematics instruction (California Department of Education [CDE], 2021, p. 3) . These calls occur amid the ongoing push to teach classical mathematics using ambitious practices. For the last several decades, the mathematics education field has called for shifts from traditional instructional practices (e.g., direct instruction, emphasis on rote computation) to ambitious mathematics teaching practices (e.g., facilitation of mathematical discussion and active learning) that support the development of both conceptual understanding and procedural fluency (NCTM, 2000; Smith et al., 2005) . Several large studies characterize teachers’use of ambitious versus traditional mathematics instructional practices (e.g., Desimone & Long, 2010; Hill et al., 2018) . However, the extent to which teachers focus on ambitious or traditional practices while simultaneously attending to cultural responsiveness is underexplored. Work that has attended to these different domains of mathematics instruction suggests Creative Commons CC BY: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/license

FAQs

What instructional approaches does the article focus on for equitable mathematics teaching?

It focuses on ambitious, traditional, and culturally responsive (CR) mathematics practices, and how teachers combine them to advance equity.

How is teachers’ engagement with CR teaching characterized in the study?

The study uses self-reported survey data and mixture modeling to create an emergent typology describing different patterns of CR engagement.

What role does self-efficacy play in teachers who downplay CR teaching?

Teachers who de-emphasize CR teaching report believing in it but having low self-efficacy for implementing it.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious