ABSTRACT
Motivated by the lack of empirical research about how African American students who become proficient in mathematics have been taught, my purpose in this chapter is to present the instructional strategies and dispositions of teachers who helped African American middle school students gain conceptual understanding in mathematics. Before presenting data on these teachers, I feel compelled to share a brief case that represents what happens to many African American students in mathematics classrooms. I chose this case because it does not represent a student who continually struggled to understand mathematics or who was in a lower track mathematics class; it presents what happened to a student in a ninth-grade honors geometry class.
