Teaching 6-12 Math Intervention: A Practical Framework To Engage Students Who Struggle
By Juliana Tapper
(Routledge/Eye On Education, 2025 – Learn more)
Reviewed by Andrew Krasnavage
In my third year as a teacher, I taught at a charter school in New Orleans. In my youthful wisdom, I decided to utilize a conceptual lesson structure that was different from what students were used to. The night before my first class, I slept wonderfully, dreaming of a period in which every student was focused and engaged. I was sure all of them would master the material.
Teachers reading this can guess how that first lesson turned out. By the end, I thought a dentist appointment would be less painful. Not only did students not learn the content, but they also were checked out. I wish I had had Juliana Tapper’s book back then – I could have avoided that terrible lesson, and the book would have helped me actually teach the students in front of me.
Most students drop out of high school because they can’t pass Algebra 1. Often these students have disengaged from math far before Algebra 1, sometimes due to poor instruction like the type I used to deliver.
In Teaching 6-12 Math Intervention, Juliana Tapper describes simple and effective instructional strategies that reengage those students and teach them the math they need to know. Tapper’s book is primarily for teachers of Math Intervention classes, but can be used by all math teachers and administrators looking to create effective systems for all students.
Building a supportive community
The book is separated into four sections: an introduction, chapters on student engagement, lessons on student achievement, and strategies for student motivation. The structure builds like a house, first laying out the foundation required for an effective classroom before diving into the topics that make a classroom worthy of student thinking. Throughout the book, Tapper provides rationale and practical strategies for everything from building a supportive community in math classrooms to weekly formative assessments.
Teaching is a human business, and we must attend to the humans we teach. To teach students, we must engage them. Unfortunately for students in Math Intervention classes, engagement is not a given. Tapper subscribes to the “Maslow before Bloom” idea and gives teachers guidance on creating a classroom culture where reluctant students feel like they belong and are psychologically safe enough to take the academic risks that are necessary for learning. She provides lesson plans for creating norms of respect, inspiration, and even a mathography that allows teachers to understand their students’ backgrounds.
Developing Math Wars lessons
If the first section of the book lays the foundation for Tapper’s methods, the second section builds the living room, kitchen and bedrooms. Tapper’s Math Wars lesson structure is the core of her strategies, the reason why she believes community building is so important.
Once students are willing to engage in lessons, the Math Wars lesson structure ensures they’ll learn. Tapper combines effective teaching strategies like cold calling, direct instruction, collaborative learning, scaffolding, cognitive load theory, and formative assessment to create an active, purposeful, and responsive lesson structure.
Just like the first section, Tapper lays out exactly how to implement her Math Wars program, with embedded examples. She puts students into collaborative groups and uses a modified version of guided instruction to directly model concepts. After modeling, she outlines how to cold call in granularized steps to check for understanding and engage all students in the thinking work required for true learning. Then students practice the problem types in their groups while the teacher circulates, gathering informal formative assessment data.
Best of all, Tapper shows how the Math Wars structure can be used alongside any curriculum. She argues for weekly plans that use the guided instruction lessons a couple of times per week. This organization creates space for inquiry lessons and weekly quizzes that act as more formal data collection. Of course, Tapper spends time in the third section showing exactly how those quizzes should be created and graded for responsive teaching.
At the end of the book, I found myself wondering how to create lessons that target specific skills for remediation. Tapper shows how to group students based on the weekly quizzes for a remediation lesson, but doesn’t go into effective strategies for those lessons. What should students who mastered the material do? How should teachers reteach so that students who didn’t master the material learn the necessary concepts? Given the detailed plans in the rest of the book, I’d love to hear how Tapper would create those plans.
I’d recommend this book to teachers of any math classes, but especially to those teachers struggling to engage their students and to early-career teachers. Tapper’s method seems easy to use, comprehensive, and based on proven strategies. I can’t wait to implement Math Wars in my classroom so that students will soon be on their way to passing Algebra 1, staying in school, and having access to the opportunity that a good education can provide.
Drew Krasnavage teaches middle school in New York and has spent the last ten years trying to answer one question: How do we help all students succeed? Whether he’s designing lessons or coaching colleagues, Drew is focused on making classrooms places where every student feels safe, challenged, and capable. He also enjoys writing about education and sharing strategies with fellow educators.
