child study – Jenna Laib

Measuring Growth in Mathematical Reasoning: What Mia’s Thinking Reveals

29 Dec 202529 Dec 2025

Mia* is a fourth grader who participates in a small-group intervention with me that focuses on multiplication. She is enthusiastic and playful -- curling the dot in the i in…

How Amalia Multiplies: Listening and Learning from a Fourth Grader

It's hard not to let our own bias creep into teaching situations. For one, our decision making processes thrive on context: what thinking has this student demonstrated about this topic?…

Seeing the World through One Kindergartner’s Eyes

Sometimes I see Hassan, a kindergartner at my school, at the local mosque where my daughter attends Sunday School. I always wave brightly: "salamu alaykoum! Good to see you, Hassan!"…

Listening to Understand: Visualizing Adrian’s Thinking about Comparing Fractions

26 Feb 202326 Feb 2023

Marilyn Burns recently blogged about a 38 second video clip that I probably spent 380 seconds watching. (click on the image below to read the post -- but then come…

I Don’t Speak Russian, But…

My mother-in-law speaks three languages fluently -- and none of them are English. Her speech dances between Arabic and French and Algerian, and I do my best mental gymnastics to…

Assessments: Capturing a Moment in Time

20 Feb 20205 Feb 2022

It can be tempting to overgeneralize what we learn from an assessment. See how that second grader drew tally marks to solve 54 + 28? He's a direct modeler. He…

Everyone Gets A Handful: Preschoolers Explore Division

28 Jan 20205 Feb 2022

One bag of cheese puffs. Four hungry children. My two children -- ages 4 and 2 -- had been playing with friends -- ages 4 and 8 -- when my…

Building Mental Representations

25 Nov 201917 Nov 2019

"Sabrina is fascinating. She will look at a problem for three minutes, not appearing to be thinking about it at all, and then come up with the correct answer," her…

Students Surprise Us: Interviews with Juliet

20 Jun 201919 Jun 2019

Have you ever had a student just gloriously prove all your assumptions wrong? Things move so quickly in a school. In order to grapple with the pace of our days,…

What does it mean to be “struggling” in math class? (Eduardo’s Story)

5 Feb 20195 Feb 2019

It was a sea of dots. Eduardo's work for 47 + 27 Over and over again, for both computational and story problems, third grade student Eduardo drew dots. Eduardo's work,…

Presuming Competence: Using Clinical Interviews to Support Classroom Instruction

13 Nov 201827 Nov 2018

"She's not on an IEP, but she's struggling in class. What should I do?" I don't know the student -- Alejandra, or Ali, for short -- very well, so I arranged…

Cultivating a Listener’s Mindset — with ELs

10 Jun 20186 Feb 2022

In a post last January, I wrote about how the "mental load" teachers carry can impact their ability to listen to their students. ...but listening is critical. It's especially critical when…

Breaking the “100 Barrier” with Jamal

10 Mar 201727 Nov 2018

“98, 99…” Second grader Jamal and I had worked for a full month -- one-on-one, four days per week -- to develop his sequencing skills and mental number line. Every time we made it…

Counting to 10 in Danish: Learning from Students, Colleagues + the #MTBoS

23 Jan 201727 Nov 2018

I started this post yesterday, and then read a blog post by Kyle Pearce that filled in some of the gaps in my own thinking. Once again, I feel indebted…

Counting with Celine / Response to Michael Pershan’s Essay, part 1

13 Jan 201723 Feb 2017

I read Michael Pershan’s essay, "Missing Factors: On Learning What You Don't Know," twice. He described a familiar experience: when students seem stuck with operational fluency, in spite of our…