Integrating Social and Emotional Learning in Math Class

Let’s say the quiet part aloud: Millions of students believe they are not “math worthy.” Too often, students feel compelled to downplay their personal, cultural, or linguistic assets in order to participate in mathematics.

As a New York City public school math teacher, I experience daily what a 2025 report from the city’s Department of Education confirms: Stark disparities in mathematics proficiency persist. As pandemic recovery efforts stall, these gaps continue to widen for many learners, locally and beyond.

Awareness alone is insufficient. We must reimagine numeracy instruction as a space that affirms students’ identities and leverages their lived experiences as cultural capital. My goal is to energize the social and emotional dimensions of students’ quantitative thinking through mathematical identity, fluency, and access to the futures they envision for themselves.

Social and Emotional Foundations of Math Learning

Regardless of pedagogical approach or curriculum resources, students cannot access learning when they feel unsafe, anxious, or unseen in the classroom. Research demonstrates that social and emotional regulation is a key driver of academic readiness, enabling learners to be cognitively available for instruction. Importantly, schools do not need to devote hours to standalone social and emotional learning (SEL) programming to see meaningful academic benefits. A growing body of research and classroom practice points to the power of embedding SEL directly into academic content—particularly mathematics.

While SEL interventions are not always designed to directly improve academic outcomes, multiple studies indicate that students in SEL-infused math classrooms outperform their peers by an average of four percentile points, with academic gains doubling when practices are sustained over time.

Here are some of the daily instructional routines with embedded SEL principles that I use in my classroom to foster consistency, psychological safety and trust, and a sense of belonging.

Count to 10

Count to 10 is a seemingly simple activity that, when viewed through a social and emotional lens, brings students into alignment through mindful collaboration. The task is for students to count to 10, with one student saying one number at a time—but without communicating who should speak next. It requires awareness of how one occupies space in relation to others, encouraging students to listen, pause, and engage thoughtfully as they collectively navigate silence, timing, and turn-taking.

I always follow Count to 10 with a reflective debrief, using sentence stems such as:

• “I noticed that I spoke when…”
• “When I listened carefully, I was able to…”
• “When we made a mistake, the class responded by…”
• “These habits can help us in math because…”

Through this reflection, students make explicit connections through collaboration, self-regulation, and numeracy.

Always, Sometimes, Never

Always, Sometimes, Never is a discourse-based routine in which students analyze mathematical statements and determine whether they are always true, sometimes true, or never true (for example, “Multiplication makes numbers larger” is sometimes true). Working in small groups, students engage in guided dialogue, surfacing uncertainty, disagreement, and justification. They listen to peers whose reasoning differs from their own, revise claims when presented with new evidence, and respectfully advocate for their ideas.

When SEL is intentionally embedded, this routine becomes more than a reasoning task; it becomes daily practice in belonging and humility. To make these habits explicit, I introduce SEL-aligned statements, such as the following:

• Changing my answer means I am learning.
• Evidence matters more than being right.
• I face challenges with a positive mindset.
• Mistakes are not confirmation of incompetence.

Sleepytime Scatterplot

Sleepytime Scatterplot is a data analysis routine that invites students to explore relationships between variables using their own lived experiences. In this activity, students plot their commute time to school on the horizontal axis and their bedtime on the vertical axis, generating a shared class dataset. I begin by modeling the routine, plotting my own data point while narrating my bedtime and commute routines. As the scatterplot fills in, students analyze patterns, reason about correlation, and deepen their understanding of data interpretation. Here are some guided questions that extend this inquiry:

• Does the scatterplot suggest a positive correlation, a negative correlation, or no correlation?
• Are data points clustered or dispersed, and why might that be?
• Which points represent the most and least sleep, and how might those change with different routines?

Students quickly learn that variation is expected, and that outliers are not errors but meaningful sources of information. In discussion, students may cite homework demands, screen time, family responsibilities, stress, or individual sleep needs as factors influencing bedtime and commute length. Surfacing these influences collectively normalizes challenges often experienced privately. Students begin to see how daily routines are shaped by intersecting internal and external demands.

Naming these factors also opens pathways to support. Students can position themselves to seek help, advocate for their needs, or explore school resources that promote balance and well-being. For me, the routine creates opportunities to listen for common stressors, identify students who may need additional support, and connect mathematical learning to broader conversations about health, time management, and empathy.

It’s still unclear which specific social and emotional competencies most directly drive academic gains, but developmental research suggests that emotional regulation plays a central role in how students learn. If we are serious about closing long-standing opportunity gaps in mathematics, SEL-infused instruction cannot remain an add-on. It must be treated as a foundational practice at the heart of equitable math education.