I recently caught back up with Jasmin, a fourth grade teacher in Durham, North Carolina. She’s been using Structures of Equality for three years now, and it shows. One of the things I’ve appreciated most about these conversations is seeing how her thinking has deepened over time, and hearing the clarity and conviction in her voice now. If you missed the earlier conversations, you can catch up on them here and here.

In our first conversation, Jasmin was just trying to make it work. In the second, she was finding her stride. Now, in her third year, she’s not testing the waters. She’s all in.

“It’s more of a non-negotiable now. I’ve seen how good this is for kids.”

Owning the Practice

What began as a learning curve has become a routine she stands by. This year, she doesn’t let things slide. If students skip a unit label or forget their line of equality, she stops them.

“I used to let it slide if they didn’t write the unit. Now I stop and say, ‘We just did a worked example. Go back and check it.’”

Her tone is clear, not punitive. It comes from a belief that if students are taught well and given the right scaffolds, they can and should do the work. She’s built her routines around that expectation.

The shift is subtle but powerful: it’s no longer about trying a new framework. It’s about holding students to a thinking routine they’ve internalized.

Scaffolding for Success

When asked what scaffolds help her students, she doesn’t talk about shortcuts. She describes the supports she builds in early and often:

• Pictures next to keywords to support multilingual learners
• A posted rubric, used like a checklist
• Worked examples on the board
• Visual anchors like the line of equality

She starts with I-do modeling and eases into we-do before turning it over. “Sometimes it’s just about leaving little crumbs, clues to help them reason through what makes sense.”

She’s using those same supports more intentionally now, reinforcing the routines students need to stay with the thinking. One area she’s still working on? Turn and talk. She wants to do more of it but realized she hadn’t really learned how to scaffold those conversations, especially for her multilingual learners. That’s something she’s hoping to grow in this year.

Redefining Student Struggle

In earlier years, she chalked up students’ confusion to decoding. That still matters. But now she sees something deeper: a need to slow down. Her students’ brains are wired for speed: tap, swipe, move on. That instinct doesn’t serve them in a math story that requires them to pause, process, and reason.

“They’re not lazy. They’re just uninformed. If they don’t know what a unit is, or what value we’re talking about, they freeze.”

So she builds questions into her lessons that help students pause. The most powerful one? “Does your model show equality?”

“It pushes them to self-check. If something doesn’t line up, they can’t just move on. They have to make sense of it.”

This is where her approach differs from quick fixes. The goal isn’t to solve faster but to think better.

Teaching Comprehension First

Jasmin’s not rushing to get through a lesson. She’s focused on comprehension before computation. Whenever students make a claim, she brings the attention back to the story and how it relates.

“We’re doing a lot of reading and comprehension. The math’s still there, but that comes second. We build understanding first.”

Her math class sounds like a literacy block. Students identify the characters, the setting, the verb. They find evidence in the story to support their model. And when they see language they might not typically use, like a direction with the term ‘statement’, she makes sure they know what that word means.

“Statement and sentence are synonyms. They don’t hear the word statement in everyday life, so we teach it.”

That attention to language, how words work in stories and in math, has become a throughline in her teaching. She also notices students seem to be struggling less in literacy because they’re focused on it throughout the day.

Advice for Teachers New to SoE

When asked what she’d tell someone just starting out, she doesn’t hesitate.

“Don’t plan yet. Just model the problems yourself. Teach yourself first.”

That one habit, she says, changed her teaching. Before putting a story problem in front of students, she works it out. What’s the relationship here? What’s the structure? Is this a composing or comparing story? If she can name the math main idea, she knows she’s ready to teach it.

It’s not about perfection. It’s about showing up prepared to think, and helping students do the same.

What We Can Learn

She’s not dabbling anymore. She’s leading. The growth in her school’s math scores is real, but it’s not the full story. What matters most is what’s happening in her room: students slowing down, making sense, and learning how to reason.

Other teachers are starting to notice. Some ask questions. A few have started to try it. That kind of shift doesn’t happen with just any instructional change.

And she’s not done.

“Every year I get better at this. And every year, my kids do too.”