In order for teachers to increase their effectiveness in helping students develop skill in representing their ideas, it's helpful to explore how representation relates to developing an understanding of mathematical concepts and relationships. In our own mathematics experience, most likely the focus was on getting the correct answer, though sometimes we may have been asked to show the work we did to get that answer (which was usually a rote process).

Thinking more expansively about representation allows us to help students in the early grades by giving them many opportunities to represent their ideas in a multiple ways -- through models, pictures, graphs, and words.

In this section, we will take a look at your, rather than your students', approach to using representations to help solve a problem and to show your thinking about the mathematics involved in solving that problem.

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