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Planning Guided Math Groups

A Collaboration Between Classroom Teachers and Title 1 Staff

John MacDougall, with Marta Garcia Johnson and Karen Joslin

For the last year and a half, Karen and her Title I assistants have been working
with students in my class and Marta’s on small-group literacy instruction focused
on comprehension strategies. The three of us began to talk about the potential for
extending our collaboration to mathematics. Karen felt strongly that mathematics
and reading should not be considered such separate subjects and that she could
bring her expertise in reading to help students understand mathematical problems.
Because Marta and I teach both literacy and math with our fifth-grade classes, we
too saw the connections between the two disciplines. At the same time, we real-
ized that some of our students were not doing well in math because of their strug-
gles with reading and comprehending word problems. Many students, across the
grades, were proficient computational thinkers but struggled to understand com-
plex situations represented in word problem form. Marta and I are on the school
math committee, and we brought up the possibility of working with the Title I
teachers on math literacy. With the math committee’s backing, Marta took the
next step of approaching the school improvement team, consisting of Marta, a
teacher-representative from each grade level, the principal, and the librarian. The
school improvement team gave us the approval to form math literacy groups with
grade 3–5 students that would meet once a week for approximately thirty minutes.

Implementing the Small-Group Math Instruction

As classroom teachers, we understand the importance of collaborating with our
special education colleagues to improve the learning of our students who are
struggling. Working together in mathematics can be particularly challenging be-
cause we often find that the special needs teachers we work with have a stronger
background in literacy than in math.
Karen has a unique perspective and set of experiences that allows her to en-
gage with the children in a way that a classroom teacher in a whole-class setting