ABSTRACT
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Curriculum and Professional Standards (NCTM, 1989, 1991) and the California Framework (California Department of Education, 1991) lay out a vision of how mathematics learning and teaching should happen. This vision is in strong contrast to what one finds in the vast majority of standard classrooms. This new vision is becoming common in the mathematics education community. Researchers have written about their own attempts to transform the classrooms they work in and the difficulties they have encountered (Lampert, 1990; Ball, 1990; Cobb, Wood and Yackel, 1991). The NCTM’s Professional Standards (1991) are full of classroom vignettes, and there are even some videotapes that show exemplary practices. Yet, there has been little written about what it means for regular classroom teachers to try to make the transition from traditional mathematics teaching to the vision of inquiry learning articulated in these documents. In this paper we present some of our own efforts to help classroom teachers make this transition and some of the enduring dilemmas these teachers have encountered.
