clinical interview – Embrace the Challenge

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!"…

How We Listen: Astrid’s Thinking about 5 x 6

27 Mar 202327 Mar 2023

"Clinical interviews are an opportunity to listen closely," I caught myself telling a colleague recently. But... is that enough? How we frame the act of listening changes our entire experience.…

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…

Clinical Interviews in the Virtual Space (Using Flipgrid)

2 Apr 20212 Apr 2021

One of my favorite things to do as a math specialist is clinical interviews. During a clinical interview, I sit down with a student -- one-on-one -- and ask questions…

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…

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…