The best way to help students thrive in math is to meet them on their level. This belief is the key behind Penn GSE’s Responsive Math Teaching Project (RMT), a teaching method that responds to students’ needs in real-time and prioritizes ongoing teacher support.
What began with a planning grant from the William Penn Foundation has since launched with more than 300 teachers going through the program’s training and bringing the approach to more than 14 School District of Philadelphia (SDP) K–8 schools. Additionally, RMT has trained 13 teacher leaders, and several have gone on to school or district leadership positions.
“This idea of RMT is to meet students where they are, which is very powerful and central to the approach around problem-solving; it requires listening to students and being sensitive to tools in their tool belt to approach robust problem solving,” said Joy Anderson Davis, a senior instructional math coach at Penn GSE.
RMT’s approach to professional training has three stages. First, teachers engage in responsive math instruction from the learner’s perspective. Next, they acquire new responsive teaching strategies and instructional practices. In the final stage, they are trained to lead professional development on responsive math teaching for their peers within their schools.
“Any curriculum, no matter how good it is, wasn’t written for the kids in your classroom, not in a way that will meet the needs of your students unless as a teacher you know how to elicit and respond to their thinking,” said Penn GSE’s Caroline Ebby. “We’re about being responsive to the kids you have.”
The RMT team is now collaborating on an upcoming book, Becoming a Responsive Math Teacher, which will help teachers nationwide understand and implement responsive math instructional practices. The book is set to be published July 2025.