ABSTRACT
In each of the episodes in the last piece, teachers asked students to assume some responsibility for determining the validity of their statements (Part III will focus on what led teachers to make these changes). But how can teachers ask students to take on such responsibility? In the next essay, Marty Schnepp engages the question of how teachers support student reasoning. He suggests that teachers’ top-level curricular choices, for example the ordering of theorems in a Calculus course, relate to the opportunities students have to reason. Both the material in the last chapter and Marty’s essay also give a sense of how the teachers at Holt plan for their teaching. Often planning for a mathematics class is conceptualized as picking lessons and activities from a textbook and/or supplementary materials. In contrast, the teachers at Holt have begun to plan by thinking about the big picture of the year as a whole. Then they work to figure out how that big picture is comprised of units. Finally, based on the big picture of the year, the particular goals of a unit, students’ ideas, and interaction with colleagues, they develop activities and lessons and make decisions about the ordering of units.
