Equity & Engagement
Open the Door to Learning  

The Five Components of Equitable and Engaging Teaching Found in Eureka Math^2® California 

Eureka Math² California is created to take an assets-based approach to instruction, supporting active engagement through investigation and connection while acknowledging that cultural and personal relevance is vital to learning. By feeling engaged in the mathematical journey, all students can begin to see themselves as mathematicians, empowered to solve problems and make meaningful connections. 

Eureka Math² California strategically incorporates the five components of equitable and engaging teaching to help ensure that all students feel included and involved.

The Big Ideas shape student learning in Eureka Math² California and allow students to make connections across modules and grade levels. By seeing math as a story, students build conceptual knowledge that helps them tackle more complex math learning.

In Grade 3, Module 1, students use their number sense and number flexibility to relate repeated addition, equal groups, and arrays to multiplication and division. With a focus on unity of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10, students use the commutative and distributive properties as strategies to multiply, and students write expressions with three factors as a foundation of the associative property. Students express division as both unknown factor problems and division equations and they break apart and distribute the total to divide. They use their understanding of the patterns in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to reason about and solve one- and two-step word problems.

02
Use Open, Engaging Tasks

These tasks provide opportunities for students to explore math concepts through real-world problems that feel relevant to their lives. This “low-floor, high-ceiling” approach ensures that every student has a chance to engage deeply with the material, whether they are just beginning to build their math understanding or are ready for more complex problem-solving.

In Grade 4, Module 2, Lesson 21, students make arrays to help them reason about the number of factors for a given number. This open-ended question allows students to approach the question from several different starting points, invites discussion and explanation for students’ thinking, and even links back to a similar open-ended investigation in Grade 3 where the students were asked to find all the possible side lengths of rectangles with a given area.

03
Teach Toward Social Justice

Eureka Math² California is crafted to ensure that all students can see themselves as doers of math. In our visuals, in the words that students read, and in math context videos that create low-floor/high-ceiling opportunities for students to engage with math, students will see themselves and other diverse populations that make up California’s classrooms. 

Our culturally responsive teaching resource videos help teachers understand the four tenets of culturally responsive teaching: valuing students’ assets and knowledge, creating a culture of high expectations for all students, communicating and collaborating with students and families, and empowering students as agents of change. A companion document for each video provides suggested next steps and recommends resources for more deeply exploring the themes while teaching Eureka Math² California. 

A video on empowering students as agents of change focuses on why it’s important to incorporate real-world contexts in math class as a way to help students understand complex issues and to use math to recognize inequity and act on it. 

04
Invite Student Questions and Conjectures

A Eureka Math² California classroom is one buzzing with student discourse. Every lesson includes opportunities for students to share their mathematical thinking with partners and the whole class, while activities such as Data Talks and Data Investigations allow students to explore real-world data about engaging topics and to discuss what the data points mean.  

Data Talks such as the ones shown above for Grades 1, 4, and 8 invite students to observe the world around them and to make conjectures. These small-scale investigations require no prior knowledge so that all students can begin their inquiry from the same place.  

05 Prioritize Reasoning and Justification

Mathematical Language Routines, or predictable patterns of classroom interaction, in Eureka Math² California allow students to demonstrate their thinking and to share their approach to different math problems. These routines help deepen students’ conceptual understanding and foster mathematical discussions that enhance problem-solving skills.

Eureka Math² California uses Mathematical Language Routines to allow students and teachers to focus on mathematical content.

These routines intentionally support engagement, discussion, and building content knowledge. Directions for a routine are included in a lesson every time the routine is used. That way, the specific facilitation guidance is immediately available to teachers as they work through the lesson.

Many of the same routines appear across grade levels from kindergarten to Algebra I, using age-appropriate variations.