How I Get Kids to Actually Participate in Math Group Work

I used to think putting students in groups meant that they would collaborate. I would plan for productive math group work and carefully craft groups and clear expectations, only to see surface-level participation at best and, at worst, disengagement and opting out. As it turns out, math collaboration isn’t something we can simply expect students to know how to do.

This situation is especially true in a Title I, multilingual setting like my classroom. I was doing all the right things—cocreating class norms, addressing mathematical trauma, building strong relationships—but students still weren’t engaging in authentic group work. I kept tweaking math tasks, thinking that if I made it just right, then collaboration would finally happen. When it didn’t, I came to understand that collaboration is something that needs to be explicitly taught and nurtured throughout the year.

Starting with what students can do

My first step was to notice what students could do. I realized that students already had some foundations for collaboration. They were present, oriented to the work, and definitely willing to talk! These patterns helped me see that participation took different forms. As I named these different forms of engagement, a need for a clear continuum emerged.

I realized that students needed language for identifying where they were on a continuum and a clear understanding of how to grow. They needed a way to say, “This is where I am right now,” easily and without judgment. So I worked with my students to cocreate a continuum—a collaboration pathway. To make it visible and usable, we named five distinct ways that collaboration shows up in math classrooms. (The five levels don’t capture everything that can happen during math group work, but they cover what I most often observe.)

1. Setting a foundation: The foundational stage includes students who are still seeking the conditions they need to engage. Behaviors like avoidance can signal the need for emotional safety, access to the task, or a readiness to engage. Most of the time, avoidance reflects needs that aren’t met, rather than a lack of interest.
2. Listening: This stage includes those who are present with their group and attentive, but not yet able to contribute. Many students want to engage but may lack the confidence, the language, or the prerequisite knowledge to do so.
3. Attempting: At the attempting stage, students engage with the task, but independently. They may try to make sense of the math but are unsure of how to work with another peer.
4. Collaborating: Students have reached the collaboration stage when they are listening to each other, trying out each other’s ideas, and productively struggling together. Within this level, thinking belongs to the group rather than the individual.
5. Leading: Leaders in a mathematical group task elevate the ideas of their group by synthesizing explanations, questioning, and inviting others to engage with the group’s thinking.

The pathway identifies behaviors within each of the levels, but the value of having the continuum lies in its power to support growth between each level. Students use the tool to pinpoint where they are, and set a goal for where they want to grow.

Having this tool also sharpened my own practice. It made me think: What if instead of asking what students weren’t doing yet, I focused on what they already could do, and what could I do to help them engage more fully? It helped me to think about ways I could provide more access to the task through visuals or sentence stems. I also thought about how I could slow things down, offer more time and space to think, and normalize uncertainty.

Setting goals for growth

The continuum works even when classrooms have students with differing language levels, thinking styles, and past experiences with math. It’s there to help students notice where they are and set a goal to grow—and to nudge them forward through intentional instructional practice. When we make the goal clear and teach students how to do the work, they are capable of much more than we expect. It’s the assumptions we make as teachers that too often get in the way.

One afternoon, after we had implemented the collaboration pathway, my students were working on a rational numbers task. A student who had historically avoided group work listened as others in his group debated where -3.5 and -3 ¼ should be placed on a number line. Another student shared, starting with a sentence stem we had practiced and set a goal to use (“I’m not exactly sure, but I think…”). Then another student jumped in and connected an idea about negative numbers to debt: “Would you rather be in debt $3.50 or $3.25?” No one had an assigned role or was explicitly told what to discuss. The collaboration was completely authentic, and in that moment it revealed the student brilliance that had been there all along.