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The researchers conducted a qualitative case study to describe the experiences (over the course of a semester) of an inter-disciplinary team of three special education and three psychology undergraduates who participated in a relational learning community and a graduate student who designed and facilitated this learning community. An associate professor and special education researcher oversaw and co-facilitated the project. The design of the learning community promoted the building of rapport and trust among the group members and the progress of the group toward a common goal of incorporating principles from psychology to develop teaching strategies for students who are struggling in math and experiencing severe math anxiety. Gathering more frequent and individualized feedback would have helped the learning community facilitator make some key adjustments earlier in the project, but the incorporation of rapport building activities that supported trust and collaboration among the group was supportive of group progress toward a common goal. We learned key lessons about how to design and implement a learning community that can be applied to the field of education, interdisciplinary collaboration, and other contexts. 

Posing questions is a direct way for teachers to push students to verbalize justifications and make connections among ideas—a crucial component of giving students with learning disabilities access to high levels of mathematical reasoning—but this skill is difficult to learn. We recruited four pre-service special education teachers to provide 1-1 algebra tutoring to students with learning disabilities while receiving instruction related to posing mathematics questions and supporting students’ reasoning. The pre-service teachers increased their frequency of questions overall and of questions that probed students’ thinking or explored mathematical relationships. Students gave correct and complete responses to these more complex questions approximately half of the time; however, pre-service teachers most often reduced the complexity of their questions when students gave incomplete responses. The findings of this study illustrate the potential for pre-service special education teachers to develop questioning routines that engage students with learning disabilities in mathematical reasoning while scaffolding their progress toward new understanding. 

Gestures are an integral component of mathematics classroom discourse. There is a need to classify the types of gestures that teachers use according to their purposes towards supporting and extending students’ mathematical thinking. We analyzed 16 algebra tutoring sessions between pre-service teachers (PSTs) and high school students to categorize the PSTs’ gestures. We identified 10 categories of PST gestures that we roughly organized into three supercategories: gestures that facilitate shared attention and communication, gestures that emphasize written visual representations, and gestures that support verbal explanations. A taxonomy of gestures based on their purposes will enable further analyses of teacher gesturing and help preservice and practicing teachers use gestures in more purposeful ways. 

The authors describe how professors can work with schools (teachers and/or administrators) to create and implement a tutoring program designed to promote the learning of Algebra 1 by students with learning disabilities as well as provide a learning experience for undergraduates majoring in special education. From the professors’ perspective, we report on our experiences with developing trusting relationships with schools, matching our tutoring services with the needs of the schools and its students, the logistics regarding setting up trainings and tutoring sessions, and how we provide a learning experience for special education majors and students with learning disabilities. 

In this paper, we make a case for the importance of teaching secondary school level algebra to students with learning disabilities (LD). Furthermore, we illustrate how they struggle and present best-practices on how they are best supported. We demonstrate effective ways of how teachers can show students with LD how to solve challenging algebra problems. In particular, we depict how educators can help learners with LD show their work on paper in ways that support their thinking processes as they engage with challenging algebra problems. 

Posing questions is a direct way for teachers to push students to verbalize justifications and make connections among ideas, but this skill is difficult to learn. We recruited four pre-service special education teachers to participate in a semester-long professional development focused on developing mathematics knowledge and asking questions, while concurrently providing 1-1 tutoring to students with learning disabilities. The pre-service teachers increased their frequency of questions overall and of questions that probed students’ thinking or explored mathematical relationships. The pre-service teachers also developed strategies for shifting among different types of questions when students struggled. The findings of this study illustrate the potential for pre-service teachers to develop questioning routines that challenge students while scaffolding their progress towards new understanding. 

We conducted a review of literature to answer the following research questions: (1) What types of questions do teachers pose in mathematical discussions? (2) What evidence exists of the effects of different types of questioning on students’ learning and participation? (3) What are the implications of existing research for teacher preparation? Existing literature can broadly be categorized according to studies that distinguish between higher order and lower order questioning, studies that characterize and distinguish probing questions, and studies that address teacher questioning in technology-rich environments. The demands of different types of questions need to be considered in light of the broader contributions that such questions make to students’ mathematical learning. 

We provide a detailed description of a purposefully sampled tutoring session during which a student with a learning disability displayed common tendencies we have seen in our work on algebra teaching. The student struggled with solving equations in general and especially with distribution and knowing how to distribute terms and what steps to take in the correct order. The tutor responded by helping the student offload information, gesturing while speaking with the student, and asking questions strategically to both support and challenge the student to think critically. The purpose of this paper is to provide, through a case study, an accessible description for teachers and researchers of how students with learning disabilities interact with algebra and how teachers can support and challenge these students in this context. 

The researchers conducted a qualitative analysis of the perceptions of school personnel and pre-service teachers about an Algebra I tutoring program for students with learning disabilities. The researchers surveyed and interviewed the participants about the effectiveness of the program for the mathematics learning of the students with LD at the school and as a learning experience for the pre-service teachers. The school personnel indicated there was a mutually beneficial relationship between the tutors and the school. The perceptions of the tutors revealed considerations about the challenges they face as Algebra I tutors of students with learning disabilities including remembering Algebra I content, posing strategic questions to students, dealing with students’ math anxiety, and conveying Algebra I content accessibly. The tutors reported positive experiences in the program including learning from field experience and, in particular, learning to promote the progress and learning of students with learning disabilities using gestures and strategic questioning.