Description: In Wrestling with Change, Lew Romagnano, an experienced high school mathematics teacher, teacher educator and researcher, collaborated with Shannon Curry, a first-year teacher, to transform two ninth-grade general mathematics classrooms into problem-centered environments in which the students explored the concept of function. Practicing mathematics teachers will recognize elements of their own work in the story told here. Prospective teachers and teacher educators will find themselves in real mathematics classrooms via detailed vignettes of classroom events and the planning that led to them. Researchers of teaching will discover arguments built from a carefully constructed conceptual framework and rigorous qualitative research methods. Readers will also find evidence that some of the difficulties encountered by Lew and Shannon were not problems that could be solved simply by diligent work. They were, in fact, dilemmas for which these teachers found no clear solutions. These dilemmas were created, in different forms, by the teachers and their students, by the teachers' personal knowledge and beliefs, and by the layered contexts of classroom, school, and community. To accomplish the goal of teaching real mathematics, these teachers had to manage the dilemmas of change.

Please Wait