viiiForeword
All teachers of mathematics face the challenge of reaching the range of students
in their classroom. Many teachers feel especially daunted by the task of helping
students who are struggling as learners. Faced with a student who lacks confi-
dence, doesn’t know how to interpret a task, and loses focus, what is a teacher to
do?My Kids Canis an important resource for teachers who are ready to tackle this
challenge.
The most important message in this book is that allchildren, given appropri-
ate supports, can learn mathematics for understanding. This may come as a surprise
to those who were taught that the best way to work with struggling students is to
break mathematical tasks into small chunks to be memorized. Instead, the key is
to find where a student is on solid ground and provide tasks that will help him or
her move forward. The examples presented here demonstrate the progress stu-
dents can make.
My Kids Candevotes each chapter to a broad principle: assessing students’
understanding as a way of making decisions about how to proceed, making the
mathematics explicit, helping students become independent learners. Within
each chapter, through written narratives and video cases, individual teachers con-
vey their own stories, illustrating how they worked with their students. That is,
readers can see the broad principles enacted within the constraints of day-to-day
classroom life: how teachers found time to conduct one-on-one interviews and to
keep records of students’ progress, which assessments were particularly useful, and
what kinds of accommodations were made to make the tasks accessible to stu-
dents while keeping the important mathematics intact. Readers learn about the
kinds of supports that made students who struggle feel confident enough to work
with classmates and to speak up in whole-group discussions. We are shown the
variety of representations students used to make sense of the mathematics and the
connections that students were able to make. And we witness the collaborations
forged between classroom teachers and special educators.
Although not explicitly stated, the knowledge these teachers bring to their
practice shines through each narrative and video case. They understand deeply