Creating a Positive Math Classroom Where Students Love Learning

For generations, math has carried an unfortunate reputation among students as the “hard subject” or the one to dread. Walk into many classrooms on the first day of school and you’ll hear comments like “I’m just not a math person” or “math is too hard for me.”

These perceptions, which are often formed early and reinforced year after year, make the work of math educators uniquely challenging. Teachers are not only tasked with helping students understand concepts and master skills, but also with breaking down emotional barriers and negative associations students bring with them into the math classroom.

Zak Champagne, an experienced educator and author of the new enVision+ Mathematics program from Savvas Learning Company, believes that the way forward is clear: establishing a positive and productive learning environment from the very first moment students walk into the classroom.

He believes that by putting students’ humanity at the center of math learning, teachers can help students view mathematics not as something to fear, but as a subject full of curiosity, creativity, and community.

The Challenge: Overcoming Math Anxiety and Disengagement

When students enter the classroom with the belief that math is about speed, right answers, or natural talent, they often disengage before real learning begins. Years of being told that mistakes mean failure can leave students silent, hesitant, or defensive in math discussions.

Champagne has seen this firsthand across grade levels, from third graders to middle schoolers. “By the time they get into upper elementary or middle school, many students have internalized the idea that math is about quick answers and about being right,” he explains. “They’ve learned that if they don’t fit that mold, math isn’t for them.”

This mindset creates a culture where students hide their questions, disengage from problem-solving, or avoid sharing ideas because they fear judgment. For educators, the challenge becomes not just teaching math but rebuilding trust — helping students believe that they have a place in the math classroom.

The Solution: Building a Positive and Productive Math Classroom Culture

Champagne’s solution begins with the first words spoken in the classroom. He challenges educators to script out exactly how they want to start the year, not with rules, not with a syllabus, but with a message that sets the tone for learning.

For his eighth graders, his opening words were: “Your mental health and your emotional health will always be more important to me than the math.” With third and fourth graders, he started by saying: “We’re all going to be learning in a community together. We’re all going to fail, and we’re all going to succeed, but what matters is that we work together.”

By leading with care and community, Champagne ensures that students understand, from day one, that their well-being and voices matter more than speed or correctness. “That was the first thing I wanted them to hear because I wanted them to know that I see them as people first,” he explains.

The Benefits: Why Environment Matters

Creating this kind of environment is not just an add-on to instruction, it fundamentally transforms how students engage with math. Champagne points to several lasting benefits:

• Confidence and Risk-Taking: When students know their ideas hold value, they are more willing to share them, even when they are uncertain. This builds mathematical resilience.
• Collaboration and Community: A positive classroom shifts ownership from the teacher to the students. Learners begin valuing one another’s contributions, creating a culture of peer-to-peer learning.
• Deeper Understanding: When the focus moves from speed and answers to reasoning and exploration, students develop richer conceptual understanding.
• Lifelong Attitudes Toward Math: The habits students build in these environments, such as confidence, curiosity, and persistence, extend far beyond a single school year.

Champagne often reminds educators that this work pays off long-term, “It doesn’t always look the way you want it to the first, the fifth, the tenth time. But the more you do it, the better your students get at it, and the better you get at it as a teacher. Eventually, you create a community of kids who want to learn together and support each other.”

Practical Strategies for Helping Students Love Math

How can educators put these ideas into practice? Champagne offers several concrete strategies:

1. Start with Math, Not Rules

Instead of opening the year with procedures and expectations, dive right into a math task. This immediately signals that math is about thinking, not compliance. Champagne recommends pairing the task with a with reflection, asking students to consider two lenses:

• What math ideas are you exploring?
• What do you need from your classmates, teacher, and classroom space to be successful?

By co-creating these norms, students feel ownership over their learning environment.

2. Value Every Voice

A key challenge is ensuring all students, not just the confident ones, feel that their ideas matter. Champagne resists the urge to validate students' thinking himself. He, instead, nudges peers to notice and celebrate one another’s work. For example, he may quietly encourage a respected student to check out another classmate’s approach, elevating that student’s status in the community.

This shift ensures that validation comes from the collective, not just from the teacher.

3. Model Curiosity and Struggle

Students need to see their teachers as learners. Champagne makes a point of tackling authentic math problems he doesn’t know the answer to, sometimes alongside his students, during a dedicated “explorations” time. By modeling excitement, frustration, and even the decision to step away from a tough problem, he normalizes the emotional journey of math learning.

4. Prioritize Thinking Over Answers

Champagne pushes students to focus less on “What’s the right answer?” and more on “How did you think about this?” By asking open-ended questions and celebrating different pathways to solutions, he creates space for diverse strategies and deeper mathematical reasoning.

5. Trust the Process

Perhaps Champagne’s most important piece of advice for teachers is to trust that this work takes time. Building a supportive math community is not immediate or easy. Students may resist at first, especially if they’re used to traditional “answer-driven” classrooms. But persistence pays off. As Champagne emphasizes, “Trust the kids with the math. Trust the process. Stick with it.”

The Long-Term Impact

The payoff of this approach is that students begin to see themselves as capable mathematicians, regardless of speed or past struggles. They grow into risk-takers who are unafraid of mistakes and who view math as a subject of exploration.

More importantly, these attitudes spill over into other areas of life. A student who learns to persist through frustration in math is also learning resilience. A student who learns to value peers’ ideas in math discussions is also learning empathy and collaboration.

Champagne also stresses the reciprocal benefits for teachers. Each year of practicing these strategies strengthens not only students’ math communities but also teachers’ skills in facilitating them. Over time, educators become more adept at anticipating challenges, scaffolding discussions, and nurturing classroom culture.

By intentionally crafting positive and productive classroom environments, starting with the very first words we speak, we can help students see math as a subject worth loving, not fearing.