ABSTRACT
During the first week of school, Mrs. Porter asked her third-grade students to work independently on the following word problem: “You read for 15 minutes a day. How much time will you have spent reading in one week?” As they solved the problem, she stressed that she was less interested in the accuracy of their answers than in their solution strategies. She made it clear that there were many ways to solve this problem and she was most interested in knowing how each of them came up with their strategies. She said, “I don’t want an answer. I want how you figured it out. That’s only part of what I want. That’s the beginning. I want the whole story.” She emphasized that the whole story of their problem solving might include their entire solution path from beginning to end: “And think about how you get started. What would you do first?”
