The CASEL Framework in Action: How Eureka Math® Integrates Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning

Learning is a social process.¹ Students’ social and emotional well-being is intimately connected to their academic success. Social and emotional well-being requires that students feel a sense of belonging and significance in the classroom and school environments and have a measure of autonomy or control over their learning.² Research has demonstrated that students succeed when these needs are met and struggle when they are not.³ Academic success requires developing key social-emotional skills, such as how to communicate effectively with others, how to organize and manage tasks, and how to recover from setbacks or failures.⁴ These skills allow students to develop the productive disposition that is critical for learning mathematics. Schools must accordingly foster students’ social-emotional development in seamless integration with academic learning.⁵ In addition, researchers argue that academic success for students relies on educators’ identifying the most effective teaching practices and working collaboratively to implement them well across all of a student’s instructional experiences.⁶

Academic curricula play a central role in supporting the development of social-emotional competencies. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2014) defines curriculum as “the program used to help students meet the standards, including instructional materials, activities, tasks, [modules], lessons, and assessments” (p. 70) and adds that “it is a coherent sequencing of core mathematical ideas that are well articulated within and across grades and courses” (p. 72).⁷ In mathematics classrooms, the curriculum allows for teachers and students to interact in a variety of ways. Teachers contribute to the curriculum by first understanding the mathematics both horizontally and vertically—horizontally in that teachers need an in-depth understanding of the mathematics of a particular grade or course and vertically in that they need to understand how the grade or course they teach fits into the progression of mathematics learning. Teachers also contribute to the curriculum by making informed decisions about the teaching practices that will most benefit student learning of the content. An effective curriculum can support teachers in this work by (1) providing teachers with a detailed description of the mathematics taught in each module in a grade or course and how the mathematics of that grade or course fits in the broader progression of mathematics understanding; (2) sequencing the mathematics coherently so that it builds logically across lessons, topics, and modules; and (3) illustrating how lessons might look, sound, and feel in a classroom with effective teaching practices.

Students contribute to the curriculum when they engage in tasks, activities, and exercises that are intended to develop their mathematical understanding. They also contribute to the curriculum when they engage in discussions with diverse groups to explain their thinking and reasoning and to consider and critique the thinking and reasoning of others. Through these learning experiences, students master the mathematical practices and the social-emotional competencies. An effective curriculum can support students in this work by (1) regularly providing tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving to help them make sense of new mathematical ideas and allow them opportunities to learn through productive struggle, (2) explicitly calling out points in lessons where they might pause to reflect on and discuss the mathematical learning that is taking place, and (3) providing opportunities for ongoing assessment and feedback to help them monitor their own progress over time.

This document describes Eureka Math’s integration of social-emotional learning in the following sections:

• Overview: How Eureka Math Builds SEL—an overview of SEL integration
• Elaboration: How Eureka Math Builds SEL—a detailed table outlining the integration of the Mathematics Teaching Practices, Standards for Mathematical Practice, and Social-Emotional Competencies within the curriculum with the dual goals of developing students’ mathematical and social-emotional skills
• Lesson Example: How Eureka Math Builds SEL—a sample lesson, annotated to illustrate SEL integration
• Family and Community Connections: How Eureka Math Builds SEL—a description of the parent and community resources available in the Eureka Math curriculum

Standards for Mathematical Practice

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
4. Model with mathematics.
5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
6. Attend to precision.
7. Look for and make use of structure.
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

Source—Standards for Mathematical Practice (NGA Center and CCSSO 2010)

The five social-emotional competencies, the eight effective mathematics teaching practices, and the eight mathematical practices have much in common, especially in the areas of goal-setting, discourse, and productive struggle. When teachers establish goals that are part of learning progressions and communicate the what, how, and why of those goals (Teaching Practice 1), students develop the ability to monitor their own progress toward the intended learning outcomes as well as the ability to set personal, related goals (Self-management); they are also more likely to be motivated to make sense of problems and persevere in solving them (MP.1). When teachers facilitate discourse among students to build shared understanding of mathematical ideas (Teaching Practice 4), students develop the ability to consider others’ perspectives and understand social norms as well as the ability to communicate, listen well, and to seek and offer help when needed (Social awareness, Relationship skills, MP.3). Finally, when teachers provide students with opportunities to engage in productive struggle and support their work (Teaching Practice 7), students learn to recognize and process their emotions and thoughts while building confidence, optimism, a growth mindset (Self-awareness), and their competence with reasoning about, modeling, and using patterns (MP.2, MP.4, MP.8).

The Eureka Math curriculum was built from the ground up, incorporating the progressions of mathematical understanding described in the Progressions Documents for the Common Core State Standards (Arizona Board of Regents 2007) and the Common Core State Standards. By starting from scratch, the writers and consulting mathematicians had a unique opportunity to tell the story of mathematics cohesively from Prekindergarten through Grade 12, presenting mathematics as one body of knowledge rather than a collection of isolated activities.

At each grade level, the curriculum is organized into modules, topics, and lessons that progress logically and build on one another. Over the course of their studies, students master a variety of representations and thinking strategies that will guide their mathematical learning. The curriculum introduces and consistently uses specific structures and routines, which fosters students’ connections to one another and to their learning and allows them to feel safe enough to take the academic risks needed to be successful in the classroom. Each lesson arranges for students to interact with the teacher, the content, and one another in a variety of ways, including interactive fluency activities, collaborative problem solving, and daily reflection and debrief.