Cultivating Math Confidence: Teaching Strategies to Boost Proficiency in Grades 6-12

This guidebook helps you tackle roadblocks your students may be facing in their math understanding and confidence. Author, teacher, and instructional coach Kristen Smith brings together dozens of classroom-tested planning and instructional strategies that have shown measurable improvements in student proficiency. Written in an easily replicable format, these practices demonstrate the direct connections between math instruction, student behavior, and student learning, and how making these connections with your students boosts proficiency. The book is divided into sections on planning, instruction, and coaching, addressing how teachers can use math content to both build student skills and drive student engagement and motivation, ultimately unlocking confident math learners. Chapters include examples and visuals like classroom photographs, sample materials, lesson plans, pacing guides, and coaching agendas. The author balances personal classroom anecdotes with student proficiency data collected across various educational settings, grade levels, and on all types of assessment. These markers include internal outcome-based assessments, state standardized tests, and performance tasks. Designed with both classroom-level and school or district usage in mind, this resource offers strategies that can be immediately implemented or used in evaluation and professional development. Teachers, administrators, instructional coaches, and pre-service teachers in secondary mathematics courses can all benefit from this practical primer on building math proficiency among their current and future students alike.

Kristen Smith is a Math Teacher, Instructional Coach, and Mentor Teacher and has taught secondary mathematics for the past 16 years at both the middle and high school levels. She is recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching and a former Math for America Master Teaching Fellow and Desmos Fellow.