In Routines for Reasoning, Grace Kelemanik, Amy Lucenta, and Susan Janssen Creighton explore the power of mathematical routines. They reveal that using routines gives students with learning disabilities precisely the support they need in four key ways. Here’s how it works.
Students with learning disabilities have a particular set of learning needs in mathematics. The literature suggests that these students need mathematics learning experiences that:
Students with learning disabilities benefit most from explicit instruction, opportunities to verbalize their mathematical reasoning, visual representations, and a range and sequence of mathematics examples.
The set of recommendations above points toward four important instructional ideas:
These four areas of need and the related instructional ideas reveal a great deal of overlap with the approaches to doing mathematics that are championed in the standards for mathematical practice!
There is good news here for both teacher and students. These math practices that may have seemed daunting actually provide a much-needed opportunity for all students to excel. To turn that opportunity into a practical reality, instructional routines can develop and support students’ use of the mathematical practices.
Any routine designed with students with learning disabilities' areas of need in mind will emphasize the interconnectedness of mathematics and provide a structure that helps students learn how to intentionally reason. These kinds of routines are not problem-specific, they are thinking-specific. They provide guidance for students, helping keep the focus on flexible thinking. These instructional routines and strategies have been successfully implemented repeatedly in the authors’ work in a range of mathematics classrooms over the past decade. They are universally designed to provide access to a wide range of math learners.
in addition to co-authoring Routines for Reasoning: Fostering the Mathematical Practices in All Students, she is also coauthor of The Fostering Geometric Thinking Toolkit. She is a mathematics education consultant and professional development provider.
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