[Marimba plays] - I've had a lot of students kind of resist math because they weren't comfortable in doing so, and I think now they're more than willing to try it - In Riverside County, changing how math is taught begins by finding the root of the problem.

- Math has been taught in very similar way for the last a hundred, 150 years.

It's very skills based, procedural based.

It's very much built off the idea that the teachers going to provide the steps on how to do something to students, and students are going to repeat and replicate those steps.

What we're trying to do throughout Riverside County is kind of the shift to students making more meaning for themselves so that the learning that they're participating in sticks longer and they have a deeper understanding of how it applies to other things.

- We're gonna be labeling one side of the box notice and wonder - The State Board of Education passed a new California mathematics framework in 2023.

Shifting the way educators teach math schools like Bethune Elementary in the Val Verde Unified School District are embracing this new way of thinking.

They say their goal is to engage students, giving them ownership over their learning.

Today, this math exercise is called notice and wonder intended to spark questions and curiosity.

- There's not really a wrong answer.

There's a lot of entry points.

Kids could notice the simplest things and they could notice things that are highly related to mathematics, and then they start to ask questions.

- Okay, go ahead and share Bailey.

- I think I noticed that the area of the of those two waffles are the same.

- Okay, so I heard you say the words area and that you said that these two are the same.

That's something that you noticed.

- The students were given an opportunity to share their ideas before the teachers jumped in to clarify misunderstandings.

There was a couple of times where kids shared out like, “oh, both of both A and B are equal,” when in fact they were not.

But that wasn't necessarily corrected right on the spot because that was that student's current understanding and they knew that the activities they were going to be doing throughout the lesson were going to help to clear that understanding up.

- What are some things that we wonder about the two options that is presented to us?

- I wonder which waffle holds more syrup.

- You wonder which waffle holds more syrup.

Nice.

That's a good one.

- Math is fun and I think it's fun because we could do it in many strategies in many ways.

- Another strategy is having students work closely together.

- Traditionally, I think of what we would see in math classrooms 10 or 15 years ago with timed math tests or worksheets.

What we're really trying to shift to is more of a community-based learning environment where students leave school no longer thinking that math is something they do by themselves.

- It's more powerful for a child to learn from their interactions from their peers because what they're thinking in their head is that maybe, I don't know this, I'm not too 100% sure about this, and I know that my partner may or may not know it as well, but I think we're both in the same boat.

- The school has also introduced math games and more hands-on materials.

This dice game is helping students learn how to measure area while also letting them have some friendly competition with their friends.

- How would you read this?

Two by five.

You could read it as a two by five or a five by two.

Why can I interchange that?

Why can I say five by two or two by five?

- I like it because we had a partner and we were able to talk how we did it.

- All right, friends, go ahead and shake hands with your partner.

Say, good job.

When we first came back from COVID, the scores were really low.

They were very, very far away from our standard.

By the end of the two to three years that we've been doing this, we are closing these gaps.

- Here at Bethune, math proficiency among third graders increased from 20% to 43%, but educators say scores aren't the only thing that matters.

- We're really shooting for so much more than that.

We wanna change the hearts and minds of the way people think about mathematics and recognizing how instrumental it is to their daily lives and understanding the world around them.

- I like learning math because I'm always gonna need it in future jobs.

Instead of someone just giving you the equation, they take little steps to help you learn the equation even more.

- I see the joy.

They want to come to class because of this new approach.

They're so excited about having the opportunity to collaborate with other students.

They're having the opportunity to share things about math, and we didn't see a lot of that in the past.

- What we saw today is really building that stability and allowing our students to see themselves as mathematicians and to be able to see this as something that they can do.