Two important goals in the Norwegian curriculum are to develop democratic agency and mathematical proficiency for all students. In this presentation we analyse teacher-student discourse in two mathematics lessons from this perspective. In the lessons observed, the students were thematically introduced to equations. By using very easy examples, the teacher expected all students to be able to understand and participate. However, as the examples and the following questions were not very challenging for students, they did not seem to stimulate meaningful mathematical discussions. It appeared that the selected tasks did not offer pupils sufficient opportunities to reflect and communicate- they were too easy and not genuine problems for these learners. We argue that the learning of democratic skills through particular communicative practices facilitates the development of the different strands of mathematical proficiency (Kilpatrick, Swafford & Findell, 2001). However, such opportunities are not always taken up by teachers, and by analyzing our data we try to develop a deeper understanding of why this may be the case.