Weekly Question: How do teachers make instructional decisions so that all students develop disciplinary agency?

Essential Question: What does equitable, justice-oriented, and/or anti-racist mathematics learning look like?

This week's question, how I initially understand it, ties well to what I learned from my readings in Classroom Ecology this week. On the notion of caring, Shevalier and McKenzie ("Culturally Responsive Teaching as an Ethics and Care-Based Approach to Urban Education") talk about the idea of "confirmation" as a response to misbehavior and discipline. In short, teachers who care for their students need to assume best intentions when a student messes up. People typically are acting out for positive, well-meaning reasons, even if their effect is negative. That is to say, if a student A tells student B to shut up, it is more caring and more beneficial when talking to student A about the incident to acknowledge that student A only acted out because they wanted to hear the lesson -- a positive reason for their intentions. Student A did not speak this way simply to attack student B. However, that attack still happened, which is why a discussion needed to occur to encourage different language for expressing emotions in the future. It can no longer be a teacher's job to police students into submission. In this COVID era, there are countless examples on the internet of teachers who are requiring a myriad of things in order for students to come to class over Zoom, all the way down to wearing shoes in the house. Particularly in a setting where students' feet are not even visible, it is culturally insensitive and flat out overbearing to waste time policing student attire and behavior that is not essential to classroom instruction.

On the other hand, I suppose this question might just be asking about discipline and agency in oneself when motivating to complete work. In this sense, we can return to the ideas discussed by NCTM in Catalyzing Change (2018). The constant tracking in high school mathematics courses often leaves students in lower tracks discouraged and put down. Students will have a much more difficult time developing their own agency and motivation in mathematics if they are always told they can't do it and are not good enough (even implicitly). The more we work to eliminate tracking and set students on equal footing, the more we remind them that they can do math, the more students will see it worth it to have their own agency in the classroom.