The Inspiration Behind TransMath
Released: Monday, April 13, 2026
Math education expert Dr. John Woodward talks about the motivation behind TransMath® starting from sitting in classrooms and observing students to creating a small-group, intensive intervention. He talks about the early days of standards‑based math education and how thoughtful instructional shifts helped students with learning difficulties find their voice in math class. Through small‑group problem-solving, intentional scaffolding, and a focus on communication, students who were once invisible built confidence, engagement, and success in mathematics—lessons that continue to shape effective math teaching today.
The story that I’m gonna tell you comes from the mid-90’s, which is quite a bit of time ago.
But in the context of the 90’s, I was one of the first researchers in special education to be looking at math education in its emerging form, the standards-based form, via a pretty ambitious curriculum in the elementary schools. And what was so interesting about the time is this was a complete shift in the way that special educators in particular had been doing business with math and kids in special education. So, you were trying to sort of ask the question in these new ways of teaching math. How could you enable these kids who are gonna start to fall further and further behind in the elementary grades to become more successful? Now, if you can take your mind back to that time, and this is the NCTM standards and all that, one of the premium concerns was increased communication and problem-solving skills. Well, one of the things that we did and we started in just a very exploratory, descriptive way, we sat in classrooms, watched kids that were having difficulties in those classrooms, particularly third, fourth grade.
And certainly, what we noticed for the most part over the course of the first half of the year, these kids never talked. They never participated. They were invisible, OK? And so, in the second year of the project, we crafted this idea when we started to turn our attention toward interventions. How do we get these kids to have increased participation around problem-solving? Well, we worked with an incredibly wonderful principal who gave us a lot of latitude to work with teachers on, you know, just tentative interventions.
And the first thing that we crafted or one of the first things we crafted is what was called ad-hoc grouping. And what I mean by that is, every Friday, a fourth grade teacher would split up their classroom. And so, from two fourth grade classrooms, you would pull together about 10 kids who are really struggling in math. And the other teacher would take the majority of this classroom. So, let’s suppose that there are, you know, 25 kids in each class.
That’s 50 kids. We take 10. The other teacher would take 40. And we would work with these kids for, like, 45 minutes in small groups to do problem-solving. And the thing that was really most encouraging about the experience because we didn’t know where this was gonna go … I mean, this is problem-solving, and, again, this is an area where kids shut down automatically. But having a teacher be able to guide a small group of kids where you can’t hide when it’s only 10 of you. And the playing field to some extent has been leveled because it’s one of the patterns that you see in those classrooms is they just turn the classroom experience over to the quote/unquote more capable kids, and they don’t say anything.
Well, in that context, it gave them the opportunity gradually to increase their participation, in real legitimate problem-solving. And it took scaffolding, but I think what was remarkable from that was the kind of growing confidence kids had in being able to do multistep or longer word problems that, otherwise, they would have just ignored, failed at, etc. So, it was a very gratifying point and where it led to TransMath was this allocation of time on a daily basis, not a weekly basis or monthly basis, but a daily basis for kids to engage in problem-solving for a substantive period of that time for the communication, for the articulation, for the ability to become more and more successful at solving problems. So, that was sort of a foundational piece that we thought was found to be really poignant and pretty important.
As an anecdote to all this, you scale this upward into the middle grades and you start to work there, and the challenge becomes greater. And then you realize, all of Freud, the purpose of therapy is to bring people back to everyday unhappiness. The purpose in that context is to get kids just to do their homework.
And, if I tell that story, it just sounds like: “Well, what?” But, I mean, like, working with those kids over the course of the year, the fact that you started to get them to do homework was pretty profound when you connect to math that’s at their level.
