Creating Teaching Practices That Focus on Understandings Strand 3: Teachers building teaching practices that work with the children’s understandings as together and individually the children construct new ideas

In the last chapter, we saw teachers working with one another and with their students to learn mathematics. Inasmuch as the stories were about fractions and counting, they were also stories about people laying out their thoughts for themselves and for one another, making their reasoning and their ideas explicit, reflecting on those newly explicit ideas, and, as a result, learning. In the case of the fractions story, the mathematical work and the representations and interactions that supported it took place in the teachers’ seminar with the help of the seminar facilitator. In the case of Tamar’s story, the teacher’s reflection on her students’ in-class representations took place on her own outside of both seminar and classroom.