These teachers do not wait for students to become frustrated or fall be-
hind. They take an active role, analyzing activities ahead of time and
preteaching necessary skills such as vocabulary or directions for a game, ar-
ticulating the goals of the activities and the expectations for completing a
mathematical task. When they find students are confused, the teachers work
with the students in small groups to review key concepts using authentic con-
texts and multiple representations. The teachers also model computation
strategies that students can make more efficient over time, pose problems to
elicit these strategies, and ask students who have used these strategies to
share their work. Asking students to make connections among the strategies
shared also brings forth mathematical ideas. These teachers do not assume
that their struggling students are making these connections on their own—
they recognize the need to make the connections explicit through discussion.
In “Are We Multiplying or Dividing?” Ana Vaisenstein writes about the
teaching moves she uses to help her students solve multiplication and divi-
sion problems. She creates a structure for her group of fourth graders in
which they think about what they know before solving a new problem,
make connections among strategies and representations, work through their
misunderstandings, reflect on their learning, elaborate their answers, and
explain why their solutions worked.
In “What Comes Next?” kindergarten teacher Laura Marlowe writes about
her focus on helping struggling students understand patterns. She helps her
students who have difficulty with the concept of patterns by providing re-
peated opportunities for practice, verbalizing each element of the pattern
along with the student, and asking specific questions so that the student
knows what to look for, such as, “Where’s the part that repeats? Where do
you start over?”
In “You Can’t Build a Sand Castle on a Classmate’s Head,” Lisa Seyferth
writes about how she carefully goes over the goals and important mathe-
matics of an activity or game both before and after—to preview, and then
to assess. She works closely with her students who are struggling to make
sure they have an entry point into the mathematics and then, during share
time, she names the strategies that students are using, emphasizing the
mathematical concepts.
In “Double or Nothing,” Michelle Perch notices that a small group of her
third graders struggle with the concept of doubling. She writes about how
MAKINGMATHEMATICSEXPLICIT