would be hard pressed to match. Because we knew that she was doing very good
work with the students in literacy and that she was well aware of their strengths
and gaps, we began this relationship with a high level of mutual trust and respect.
Karen had worked extensively with our struggling students throughout the year
using KWL (What I Know, What I Want to Know, What I Learned) charts to
understand reading passages as well as using visualization, inferring, making con-
nections, determining importance, and questioning in small-group reading les-
sons. Karen is a master at guiding children through these thinking processes while
reading and has a relatively strong mathematics background. It was a very natu-
ral transition for her to adapt those strategies for mathematical situations. In our
meetings, Karen was able to share her experience merging her literacy compre-
hension strategies with math problem-solving strategies. We knew she would be
able to make connections to math work with the students in our classes be-
cause we worked with her closely during reading and writing instruction. We
were fortunate that she was eager to take on this additional responsibility and add
to her knowledge of teaching mathematics.
It was clear that a productive collaboration between the classroom teachers
and the Title I reading staff (led by Karen) would be key to the success of these
groups. We knew we needed to work together to determine when and how to use
reading comprehension strategies to help students make sense of the mathemati-
cal problems they were trying to solve. Given our focus on comprehension, we all
determined several goals for the math literacy groups:
- Students will carefully read and unpack each math problem, taking it apart
and figuring out what each piece of the problem means and what it is ask-
ing. All of our students have been working extensively with KWL charts
to aid in reading comprehension, so for our mathematics work, we will use
a variation of the KWL chart—a KWC (What I Know; What I Want to
Know; What are the Constraints or Conditions of the Problem) chart. - Students will use a variety of reading comprehension strategies to help
them understand and solve the problem, including visualizing, inferring,
making connections, determining importance, and questioning.
The school’s math committee developed and led a monthly, school-based profes-
sional development series, involving the entire school-certified staff, based on the
bookComprehending Math: Adapting Reading Strategies to Teach Mathematics, K–6
in which particular strategies to develop comprehension in math are outlined
(Hyde 2006). This book’s approach is only one tool to foster math comprehen-
sion, but as our entire staff was trained in this strategy, we believed it would be ef-
fective. At our meetings, we collected, shared, and analyzed student work based
on the comprehension strategies we were using from the book.
Planning Guided Math Groups