The Importance of Emotionally Supportive Learning Environments in Mathematical Engagement

As the saying goes, “Maslow before Bloom.” These three words sum up decades of research that show how a sense of physical and emotional safety is the foundation for the development of social, emotional, and academic competencies. Learning environments that are emotionally supportive are associated with a variety of positive outcomes in mathematics classrooms, such as improved mathematics achievement, greater engagement, greater effort, and less fear of making mistakes.

There is growing awareness that the Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Practice—on which many states base their College and Career Ready (CCR) mathematical practice standards—have implicit social and emotional expectations. For example:

• MP.1. Making sense of a problem and persevering in solving it—requires cognitive and emotional regulation
• MP.3. Providing and/or receiving a constructive mathematical critique—requires social awareness, relational skills, and self-management

Therefore, if CCR mathematical practice standards have social and emotional expectations “baked in,” supporting students in meeting CCR mathematics standards may also require supporting students’ social and emotional development by providing an emotionally safe and positive classroom environment.

A recent analysis of mathematics lessons discovered that standards-aligned mathematical engagement was found only when the learning environment was engaging and emotionally supportive.

Rebekah Berlin and Julie Cohen analyzed more than 400 mathematics lessons of 49 elementary school teachers who taught grades 3 through 5. They used two observation coding schemes to measure the social-emotional and cognitive aspects of the lessons:

CLASS, to capture different aspects of the classroom learning environment

• Emotional Support (positive climate, teacher sensitivity, regard for student perspectives)
• Classroom Organization (behavior management, productivity, lack of negative climate)
• Student Engagement

Instructional Practice Research Tool for Mathematics (IPRT-M), to measure CCR-aligned mathematical engagement

• Coherence—extent to which a teacher intentionally relates the current lesson to students’ prior mathematical skills and knowledge
• Depth—focuses on whether the mathematics presented is clear and correct and whether the teacher uses explicitly connected explanations, representations, tasks, and/or examples
• Student Representations and Solution Strategies—captures the degree to which students strategically share their representations and solution methods. At the high end, the teacher must support students in explicitly drawing mathematical connections between various representations and/or solution strategies.
• Prompting Student Thinking—assesses the frequency with which the teacher poses questions and tasks that elicit mathematical reasoning and provide opportunities for productive struggle
• Responding to Misunderstanding—captures whether the teacher responds constructively to student misunderstandings with scaffolds that offer specific, clear, mathematical support for the student to use reengage with the problem and revise their thinking
• Opportunities to Engage with Mathematics—focuses on the proportion of the lesson that provided opportunities for all students to work with and practice mathematical reasoning
• Opportunities to Justify and Critique—assesses whether teachers prompt students to justify their thinking and/or critique the reasoning of others

The 400+ lessons fell into four types (see table below).