Because of federal legislation, between 1995 and 2005, the percentage of stu-
dents with disabilities spending 80 percent or more of the school day in a gener-
al classroom showed an overall increase from 45 to 52 percent (NCES 2007). The
1997 amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) require
schools to account for student progress toward higher educational standards and
to increase participation of students with disabilities in the general education cur-
riculum (Thurlow 2001). The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) also
requires educators to provide children with disabilities access to the general cur-
riculum.
Another recent development that places additional demands on the class-
room teacher is response to intervention (RTI), a model that is designed to match
high-quality instruction and intervention to student needs and to bring the efforts
of general and special education together in working with students who are strug-
gling. The orientation of RTI is to move away from thinking about students in
categories and to work toward addressing the learning challenges of individual
students through appropriate teaching strategies. The tiers of RTI range from
having the classroom teacher plan and implement high-quality instruction for the
entire class with ongoing formative assessment that monitors students’ progress,
to offering targeted differentiated instruction within the classroom for students
who are not showing progress, to providing intensive intervention that includes
special education teachers for those students who still need more support.
(National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities 2005).
To address the challenges of teaching students who are struggling with math-
ematics, either already in special education or identified as needing more support
through RTI, the Accessible Mathematics project developed strategies to support
students to actively engage and make sense of mathematics along with their class-
mates. For two years, TERC researchers met regularly in an action research group
with sixteen teachers, both special educators and classroom teachers working
together to present and discuss episodes from their classrooms, plan next steps in
their investigations of students’ learning, and document what worked. The audi-
ence for this work is primarily teachers, either those who are already working with
young students or those who are preparing to teach mathematics in the elemen-
tary grades.
All of the Accessible Mathematics teachers made sure that their students
knew that they expected them to support one another as learners and that they
expected their students who struggled to learn along with their peers. They cre-
ated a culture based on respect and acceptance of differences in which students
felt safe to take risks and to admit confusions. The teachers listened carefully to
students’ thinking, analyzed how students made sense of the mathematics and why
they might be confused, and chose representations that could help the children
Introductionxi