Teachers face many challenges in meeting the cultural diversity they encounter in current mathematics classrooms. To avoid marginalisation of specific groups of students we advocate for a strength-based approach in which teachers are supported to build deep understandings of the lived home context of their students. We discuss findings from our research projects with immigrant students (Pāsifika) in New Zealand and with Mexican American students in the United States. While our contexts are quite different, our approaches have much in common, in particular through their focus on teachers learning from and about their students’ communities to then build on this learning in their mathematics teaching. Bridging theory and practice, we share specific strategies that we have used to support teachers as learners of their students’ home contexts (e.g., home visits; parents’ classroom visits; school meetings led by parents).