2004 Inquiry Into Children's Mathematical Thinking

RUTH M. STEINBERG, SUSAN B. EMPSON and THOMAS P.
CARPENTER
INQUIRY INTO CHILDREN’S MATHEMATICAL THINKING

AS A MEANS TO TEACHER CHANGE
ABSTRACT. In the context of U.S. and world wide educational reforms that require
teachers to understand and respond to student thinking about mathematics in new ways,
ongoing learning from practice is a necessity. In this paper we report on this process for
one teacher in one especially productive year of learning. This case study documents how
Ms. Statz’s engagement with children’s thinking changed dramatically in a period of only
a few months; observations and interviews several years later confirm she sustained this
change. Our analysis focuses on the mathematical discussions she had with her students,
and suggests this talk with children about their thinking in instruction served both as an
index of change, and, in combination with other factors, as a mechanism for change. We
identified four phases in Ms. Statz’s growth toward practical inquiry, distinguished by her
use of interactive talk with children. Motivating the evolution of phases were two sorts of
mechanisms: scaffolded examination of her students’ thinking; and asking and answering
questions about individual students’ thinking. Processes for generating and testing knowl-
edge about children’s thinking ultimately became integrated into Ms. Statz’s instructional
practices as she created opportunities for herself, and then students, to hear and respond to
children’s thinking.
KEY WORDS: discourse community, elementary mathematics, practical inquiry, teacher

change, teacher learning, teacher reflection
Mathematics educators have articulated a vision for teaching mathematics

that includes engaging students in problem solving, mathematical argu-
mentation, and reflective communication (NCTM, 1991, 2001). Calls for
instructional reform in mathematics have been accompanied by demands,
in many countries, for radical changes in teaching practices. Many teachers
have learned to teach in ways consistent with calls for reform (Cobb, Wood
& Yackel, 1990; Cobb & McClain, 2001; Fennema et al., 1997; Hiebert,
Carpenter, Fennema et al., 1997; Hiebert & Wearne, 1993; Jaworski, Wood
& Dawson, 1999; Schifter & Fosnot, 1993; Sullivan & Mousley, 2001).
Without attention to how teachers learn, however, our understanding of
instructional reform is seriously incomplete (Franke, Carpenter, Levi &
Fennema, 2001; Hammer & Schifter, 2001; Richardson & Placier, 2001;
Schön, 1983; Sherin, 2002).
A small but growing body of research has focused on teacher learning
as practical inquiry into the problems of teaching (Jaworski, 1998, 2001;
Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education 7: 237–267, 2004.

© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
238 RUTH M. STEINBERG ET AL.
Lampert, 1985; Richardson, 1994; Tabachnick & Zeichner, 1991). This

research has found that teachers who engage in practical inquiry are able
to change their teaching in ways that are sustainable and self generative
(Franke, et al., 2001). There has been little research, however, on the
process of change towards inquiry-oriented practice.
In the current study, we focus on one teacher’s use of practitioner
knowledge and research-based knowledge as she learned to integrate
practical inquiry into her teaching. We focus in particular on the mathe-
matical discussions she had with her students, and argue that this talk with
children about their thinking during instruction served both as an index of
change, and, in combination with other factors, as a mechanism for change.
We concentrate on this latter feature of teacher-student talk because, we
contend, it provides insight into the nature of generative change (Franke et
al., 2001) in teaching.
This teacher’s mature teaching can be characterized as an integra-
tion of inquiry and instruction, in which both she and students learned.
Although the process of change we have documented does not necessarily
represent the path to practical inquiry that all teachers should take, it lends
useful insight into how a teacher can combine practitioner knowledge and
research-based knowledge to ask and answer questions profitably about
teaching and learning.
The teacher, Kathy Statz,1 taught mathematics using the precepts
of Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) (Carpenter & Fennema, 1992;
Carpenter, Fennema, Franke, Levi & Empson, 1999; Carpenter, Fennema,
Franke, Levi & Empson, 2002). CGI is a research and professional devel-
opment program founded on the fact that children enter school with a rich
store of informal knowledge that provides a basis for engaging in problem
solving. We draw on previous research that documents levels of teachers’
engagement with children’s thinking in order to track Ms. Statz’s learning
(Fennema et al., 1996; Franke et al., 2001; Simon & Schifter, 1991). We
go beyond documenting the fact of change to describe how she progressed
from one level to the next, initially by reflecting on instruction as questions
about her students’ thinking were posed for her and, later, by posing and
answering such questions herself. Changes in her practice accompanied
these changes in her stance towards teaching.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Research suggests that teachers learn a great deal from teaching, but the
content of that learning varies from teacher to teacher (Richardson, 1990;
Richardson & Placier, 2001). Conditions that appear to be most condu-
INQUIRY INTO CHILDREN’S THINKING 239
cive to learning include: 1) membership in a “discourse community” that

provides tools for framing and solving the problems of teaching (Ball,
1996; Cobb & McClain, 2001; Stein, Silver & Smith, 1998; Wenger,
1998); 2) processes for reflectively generating, debating and evaluating
new knowledge and practices (Ball, 1996; Jaworski, 1988; Wilson &
Berne, 1999; Wood, 2001); and 3) ownership of change, so that the prob-
lems of teaching that change is meant to address are problems that teachers
want to solve and feel capable of solving (Loucks-Horsley & Steigelbauer,
1991; Simon & Schifter, 1991).
None of these conditions, alone or in combination, assures ongoing
teacher learning. Perhaps the most important is teachers’ own stance
towards practice as inquiry (Jaworski, 1994; Schifter & Fosnot, 1993;
Tom, 1985). This inquiry can take several forms. It can be exercised in
interaction with students and the curriculum (Sherin, 2002) or removed
from classroom interactions, in reflection on action (Mewborn, 1999;
Schön, 1983, 1987; Wood, 2001). Little (1999) noted that the “systematic,
sustained study of student work, coupled with individual and collective
efforts to figure out how that work results from the practices and choices
of teaching” may be one of the most powerful sites for teacher inquiry
(p. 235). Student thinking is not the only focus possible, but it is one
that has proven productive for teachers and students (Carpenter, Fennema
& Franke, 1996; Carpenter, Fennema, Peterson, Chiang & Loef, 1989;
Schifter, 2001; Steinberg, Carpenter & Fennema, 1994; Tzur, 1999).
Teachers who change in ways that embrace new knowledge and beliefs
about children’s problem solving do not necessarily sustain that change
or continue to change. Franke et al. (2001) found that the most profound
change among a group of 22 CGI teachers occurred for those who engaged
in practical inquiry into children’s thinking. Those 10 teachers, more than
the rest, thought of the research-based framework for children’s problem
solving as “their own to create, adapt, and investigate” (Franke et al.,
2001, p. 683). Franke et al. (2001) called this learning “generative change”
because teachers used what they knew to generate new knowledge through
practical inquiry, and saw this inquiry as part of their identity as profes-
sionals. In particular, 1) these teachers believed understanding children’s
thinking was central to their work, and 2) their knowledge of children’s
thinking went beyond the frameworks first presented to teachers in staff
development four to eight years earlier.
Not all teachers who use problem solving in teaching (e.g., NCTM,
2000) take a stance of inquiry toward their practice. There are many profi-
cient teachers whose instruction is based on problem solving but who do
not engage in practical inquiry. However, as Franke and colleagues (2001)
argued, practical inquiry is a powerful means to the continued improve-

ment of practice. The case we report here is an example of a teacher
who not only taught in reform-oriented ways, but also developed a stance
of inquiry towards her practice. We examine in closer detail the process
of change towards what Franke and colleagues (2001) called generative
learning and the mechanisms that appeared to stimulate this change.
Levels of Teacher Change in Cognitively Guided Instruction

The teacher in this study taught mathematics using Cognitively Guided
Instruction (CGI). In this approach to professional development, teachers
are encouraged to use research-based knowledge about children’s mathe-
matical thinking to make instructional decisions (Carpenter et al., 1999). It
differs from most curricular interventions in that lessons are not prescribed
for the teachers. Instead, teachers plan for instruction using what they
know about their own students and their general knowledge of children’s
problem solving. CGI consists of research information about the develop-
ment of children’s thinking, portrayed through problem-type frameworks
that emphasize semantic differences among problems and solution strategy
hierarchies. Teachers learn which semantic features of problems are easiest
for children to understand, and which features are more difficult. In whole-
number addition and subtraction, for example, problems involving actions
on sets (e.g., joining two sets together) are generally easier than problems
involving relationships between sets (e.g., comparing the sizes of two sets).
Similar analyses have been developed for multiplication and division, and
the development of base-ten concepts and multidigit strategies for addition
and subtraction. (See Carpenter et al. [1999] for more information.)
A longitudinal study of a sample of 21 first through third-grade teachers
involved in CGI professional development documented five distinct levels
of teachers’ use of children’s thinking (Fennema et al., 1996). Franke et
al. (2001) revised the levels to reflect the integration of teacher beliefs and
practices, and called the classification scheme engagement with children’s
mathematical thinking (Table I). The levels are useful for characterizing
teacher change, for they go beyond dichotomizing teachers’ practice into
reform-oriented or not. Fennema et al. (1996) found that teachers who
engaged with children’s thinking at levels 3, 4a, and 4b of the scale taught
in ways that were distinctly different from teachers at levels 1 and 2. The
key distinctions hinged on students’ opportunities to solve and discuss
problems. Further, student outcomes were higher in the classrooms of
teachers at the top three levels (see also Carpenter et al., 1989). We review
these levels here and use them to describe Ms. Statz’s growth.
TABLE I
Levels of Engagement with Children’s Mathematical Thinking from Franke, et al., 2001,
p. 662 (Copyright 2001 by the American Educational Research Association; reproduced
with permission from the publisher)
Level 1: The teacher does not believe that the students in his or her classroom can solve
problems unless they have been taught how.
Does not provide opportunities for solving problems.
Does not ask the children how they solved problems. Does not use children’s
mathematical thinking in making instructional decisions.
Level 2: A shift occurs as the teacher begins to view children as bringing mathematical
knowledge to learning situations.
Believes that children can solve problems without being explicitly taught a
strategy.
Talks about the value of a variety of solutions and expands the types of problems
they use.
Is inconsistent in beliefs and practices related to showing children how to solve
problems.
Issues other than children’s thinking drive the selection of problems and
activities.
Level 3: The teacher believes it is beneficial for children to solve problems in their
own ways because their own ways make more sense to them and the teacher wants the
children to understand what they are doing.
Provides a variety of different problems for children to solve.
Provides an opportunity for the children to discuss their solutions.
Listens to children talk about their thinking.
Level 4A: The teacher believes that children’s mathematical thinking should determine
the evolution of the curriculum and the ways in which the teacher individually interacts
with students.
Provides opportunities for children to solve problems and elicits their thinking.
Describes in detail individual children’s mathematical thinking.
Uses knowledge of thinking of children as a group to make instructional
decisions.
Level 4B: The teacher knows how what an individual child knows fits in with how
children’s mathematical understanding develops.
Creates opportunities to build on children’s mathematical thinking.
Describes in detail individual children’s mathematical thinking.
Uses what he or she learns about individual students’ mathematical thinking to
drive instruction.
At level 1, teachers mostly used direct instruction, and, as measured by

interviews and beliefs scales, did not believe children could invent their
own strategies to solve problems. There was little to no opportunity for
children to solve problems. At Level 2, teachers began to believe children
could solve problems on their own, but were inconsistent in implementing
this belief. At Level 3, teachers believed children should solve problems
using their own strategies because it led to deeper understanding. Children
were presented with a variety of problems to solve and discuss. Teachers
listened to children’s thinking, but did not necessarily build on it. Although
they understood the problem-types and solution-strategy frameworks, they
were not aware of individual children’s thinking in detail. Nonetheless, this
level marked a departure from the teacher-centered instruction that charac-
terized levels 1 and 2. At Level 4A, teachers believed children’s thinking
should drive the curriculum. Children’s thinking was elicited and teachers
could describe that thinking in detail. However, decisions about how to
build on that thinking were made at a global level, for the whole class.
At Level 4B, teachers believed the curriculum should be driven by what
individual children know. They knew what problems individual children
could solve, what strategies children used, and how children’s strategies fit
with understanding mathematics. Teachers used this knowledge to build on
individual children’s thinking in instruction. Fennema et al. (1996) argued
that instruction at Levels 3, 4A and 4B “epitomize the process standards
of the reform movement” (p. 429). Thus, teachers who reach levels 3 and
above teach in ways that are consistent with U.S. calls for mathematics
education reform (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1991;
2000).
Fennema et al. (1996) found 19 out of 21 teachers teaching at Level 3
or higher at the end of a four-year intervention; that is, 90% of the study
teachers taught using reform-oriented practices by the study’s conclusion.
Nine of those teachers began the study at Level 1, and seven teachers at
Level 2. Twelve teachers’ instruction was classified as Level 3 by the end
of the study, suggesting that attaining Level 4A or 4B is not common, even
among teachers who change.
The case study we report here deepens our understanding of how
teachers may attain a level of teaching in which instruction is based
on teachers’ generative knowledge of individual children’s mathematics
(Level 4b in the scale).
METHOD
This study was conducted in collaboration with one fourth grade teacher,
Ms. Statz, who has worked as a classroom teacher and mathematics
resource teacher for grades K-5. We collected data at three points in time.
At the first point, the first author acted as an observer participant for a
five-month period, in Ms. Statz’s third full year of teaching. At the second
point, the following year, Ms. Statz was observed by the second author,
over a period of several months. These data are used to ascertain whether
Ms. Statz maintained the changes documented here, and are only briefly
reported in this paper. At the third point, several years later, Ms. Statz
was interviewed about her growth as a teacher, looking back on her career
beginning with her pre-service teacher education.
Data Collected in Ms. Statz’s Third Year of Teaching

At the time of the observations, Ms. Statz had been teaching three years,
all of which were with fourth grade classes. She had implemented CGI
from the first year, after learning about it in her University certification
program. That year’s class consisted of 21 students from a racially, ethni-
cally, linguistically, and economically diverse population of families. A
third of the class was new to the school. All the children’s names reported
in this paper have been changed.
PROCEDURES
Classroom observations. Thirty-four complete mathematics lessons were

observed by the first author, over a five-month period. Lessons were
audiotaped and parts were transcribed. Field notes were taken on teacher-
student interactions, students’ solution processes, class organization, and
the teacher’s knowledge of, and efforts to build on, children’s thinking.
Nine children were randomly selected as target students and their solution
processes were documented regularly by observing them and asking them
how they solved the problems. The other children were observed on a
rotating basis.
Teacher’s meetings with researcher. The first author met with Ms. Statz 13
times during the first year of data collection, usually once a week for 30–40
minutes. All meetings were audiotaped and transcribed, and included
discussions about Ms. Statz’s knowledge of her children’s thinking, her
decision making processes regarding content and classroom organization
and their relation to children’s thinking, and the researcher’s observa-

tions of specific solution strategies in interviews with students or in class
observations.
Student assessments. Each child was interviewed at length, at the begin-

ning and at the end of the study, on solution strategies for word problems in
a variety of content areas. Students’ mathematics journals were examined
regularly by the researcher.
Data analysis. Observations and interview decisions were made in

response to the situations arising in the classroom and in the teacher-
researcher discussions. Themes consistent with teacher change and the
CGI framework for teachers’ engagement with children’s thinking were
marked, such as teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, building on thinking
in instruction, and teacher-identified dilemmas and resolutions (Denzin &
Lincoln, 2000).
Career Interview. Ms. Statz was interviewed by the second author several
years after the primary data were collected. The interview was designed to
elicit the story of her teaching career, in terms of formative events, such
as high points, low points and turning points. The interview was adapted
from interviews (Math Stories) used by Drake (under review)2 to elicit the
stories for teachers involved in reform.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In her third year of teaching, Ms. Statz changed dramatically in her knowl-
edge of children’s thinking and the use of interactive talk to enhance this
knowledge and build on her students’ understanding. In this section, we
describe how Ms. Statz made the transition from good reform-oriented
teaching, corresponding to level 3 in Franke et al.’s (2001) scale, to
outstanding teaching, corresponding to level 4b, that incorporated practical
inquiry as a way to continue to acquire knowledge and gain insights into
teaching. We documented four distinct phases of change. We frame the
changes Ms. Statz experienced in her third year of teaching by describing,
based on her own reports, Ms. Statz’s earlier and later years of teaching
and teacher learning.
Early Teaching Years

Ms. Statz reported that she left her teacher certification program with a
commitment to working with a belief in all children’s potential to succeed.
She began her teaching career in a fourth-grade classroom. She described
her first year teaching as one of two low points in her career because she
had no materials to teach mathematics other than a commercial textbook
series. She tried to use it, but felt “lousy” when she taught expository
lessons. She felt her students were not learning.
Ms. Statz decided to abandon the textbook in the middle of the year and
to begin using the framework for problem types and solution strategies,
the basis for CGI, to plan instruction. She had the support of her principal
and a mathematics resource teacher, Ms. J, who was herself experienced at
building on children’s thinking. During this time, Ms. Statz gladly accepted
help from Ms. J, “who would say things like . . . ‘Don’t tell [the students]
that. Let them find it out.’ ”
Ms. Statz reported that, with help from Ms. J, she changed her mathe-
matics instruction a great deal during that first year, but described the
second year and beginning of the third as “more of a plateau.” The
remaining stretch of the third year – the time we report on here – was
described by Ms. Statz as “a big jump.”
Third Year Teaching: A Year of Change

In her third year of teaching, Ms. Statz experienced intense growth in
understanding children’s thinking, knowledge of the content area, and
beliefs about her role as a teacher. Concurrent with this learning, Ms. Statz
developed a stance of inquiry into her teaching practice and its relationship
to children’s thinking. In this section, we document these changes, and
consider possible mechanisms of growth. These mechanisms include the
types of situations that prompted Ms. Statz to perceive a need for change,
and how her concerns and internal debates inhibited or contributed to
change.
PHASE 1: LEVEL 3 ENGAGEMENT WITH

CHILDREN’S THINKING
In November of the school year, Ms. Statz’s instruction was consistent with
calls for reformed classrooms (NCTM, 1989) and CGI’s Level 3 of engage-
ment with children’s thinking (Table I): students solved challenging word
problems using their own strategies; the teacher gave students opportuni-
ties to present and talk about their strategies; and children recorded how
they solved problems in mathematics journals. No textbook was used. Ms.

Statz’s goals for her students coincided with several of those of the reform
movement:
Being able to write about math. And being able to verbalize what they’re doing and
thinking about math . . . Being able to feel comfortable enough about math to share what
they’re talking about. And to develop an appreciation for each other. That people solve
math problems differently and that’s okay.
Ms. Statz often chose topics for word problems that related to a story the
children had read in class or to events in the children’s lives (e.g., selling
things in the school store, counting the number of names on a child’s cast).
Talk with Children about their Thinking

Although students had opportunities to solve problems, Ms. Statz did
not build on or extend children’s solutions strategies in her interactions
with students. After children solved problems, there were short discus-
sions of each problem, lasting 5 to 10 minutes, in which four or five
different strategies were presented. Although Ms. Statz encouraged the
children to talk about their strategies, she seldom challenged them to
justify them, think of alternative solutions, or relate their strategies to more
advanced strategies. She listened to what they said, and accepted it with
little questioning.
For example, one day late in the fall, Dan showed the class how he
had solved a word problem by calculating 68 + 37. He drew 37 tallies and
counted by ones from 68, using the tallies to keep track. Ms. Statz then
called the next child. She did not question Dan’s strategy or relate it to
more advanced strategies that used base-ten concepts (such as adding the
three tens and the seven ones) presented by other children.
Ms. Statz’s belief in accepting and encouraging a variety of strategies
from children was so strong she perceived her role in helping children to
progress as passive. Later in the school year, Ms. Statz reflected on her
interactions with students at that phase: “I would just accept what was put
on the board and that was all ‘good’, that’s fine. Go have a seat. Next
person.”
Further, Ms. Statz’s knowledge of individual children’s thinking was
not well integrated with the research-based framework for children’s
thinking that was the basis for CGI. In December we asked Ms. Statz to
classify students in her class according to the strategies she predicted they
would use, in our clinical interviews with them, to solve a set of problems.
She accurately predicted the strategies of students who “direct modeled”3
to solve problems, but did not predict the more sophisticated strategies five
of her children used. Although she knew who used more or less advanced
strategies, when it came to strategies beyond direct modeling, Ms. Statz

did not describe or classify these strategies appropriately.
Not surprisingly, this state of knowledge influenced Ms. Statz’s inter-
actions with students. For example, in October, Ms. Statz assisted a child
to solve a problem in a way that acknowledged neither his understanding
nor the solution-strategies framework. David was trying to solve a Joining
problem with an Unknown Change (“Raji has 17 dollars. He wants to buy
a pet snake that costs 33 dollars. How many more dollars does he need
to earn to buy the pet snake?”) by counting up from 17 to 33. He was
keeping track of how many numbers were added by going back and forth
between each number sequence: “first is 18, second is 19, third is 20” and
so forth until he got to “ninth is 26.” He lost track of his double count
here and stopped. His strategy was appropriate to the additive semantic
structure of the problem but the method of keeping track appeared to
make more demands on his working memory than he could handle. Ms.
Statz’s first attempt to help David encouraged him to continue to think
about the problem additively, but did not address his specific difficulty
of keeping track. She suggested, instead, that he add 10 to 17, and then
asked if it would be enough. Before David could respond, another child,
Nick, said he had solved the problem by subtracting 17 from 33. Ms. Statz
suggested to David that he could use a strategy similar to Nick’s and solve
the problem by separating 17 counters from 33. Although this strategy is
“concrete” it does not directly model the semantic structure of the problem,
which is additive. It re-represents an additive semantic structure in terms
of subtraction and so is a more difficult strategy (Carpenter et al., 1999).
When Ms. Statz asked him to solve the problem using subtraction, she
did not realize this strategy required knowledge of the inverse relationship
between addition and subtraction that David may not have had.
Beginning Inquiry. Discussion of episodes like this one began to help Ms.
Statz reflect on how she used knowledge of children’s thinking in instruc-
tion. In a conversation with the participant researcher a few days later,
Ms. Statz said she was often not sure how to respond to children, like
David, who were struggling with a specific strategy. She then recalled a
strategy she had recently seen in which a child used tallies to keep track of
a count. She realized it would have been an appropriate strategy to suggest,
because it would have addressed his specific difficulty of keeping track and
would have allowed him to build on the additive structure that he saw in the
problem. Thus, this conversation facilitated new connections for Ms. Statz
among different episodes involving interactions with children’s thinking.
In the next section, we document how, as the first author and Ms. Statz
continued to have these kinds of conversations, Ms. Statz became increas-

ingly dissatisfied with her use of children’s thinking and began a transition
from Level 3 towards Level 4A engagement with children’s thinking.
PHASE 2: MOTIVATION FOR TRANSITION FROM LEVEL 3

TO LEVEL 4A ENGAGEMENT WITH CHILDREN’S THINKING
In this phase of change, Ms. Statz became dissatisfied with what she knew
about children’s thinking. She realized that many of her students’ strategies
were basic or even wrong and did not necessarily show well developed
understanding. In response to this dissatisfaction, Ms. Statz formulated
questions for teacher inquiry that guided her in later phases. She thought,
in particular, about her knowledge of students’ strategies and her role
as a teacher in facilitating more sophisticated strategies and deepening
children’s understanding. Little action to answer her questions took place
in this phase. Rather, this phase was distinguished by “reflection-on action”
(Schön, 1987), as Ms. Statz stepped back from her practice and began to
identify personal dilemmas.
The transition from satisfaction to dissatisfaction with Level-3 type
engagement with children’s thinking appeared to have been triggered by
discussions with the first author about the researcher’s problem-solving
interviews with the children. Ms. Statz sat in on some of the interviews and
was intrigued, often surprised, and sometimes troubled by how children
solved the problems.
For example, one child, Pang, wrote down every single number between
398 and 500 to solve a Join Change Unknown problem (“Robin has 398
dollars. How many more dollars does Robin have to save to have 500
dollars to buy a new bike?”). Surprised by this strategy, Ms. Statz checked
Pang’s journal and discovered she was using similar strategies there too:
The way she solved this is kind of strange . . . Can I go see what she’s got in her journal?
. . . Yeah, she’s doing similar things.
Ms. Statz became especially concerned about seven children who were
using the standard subtraction algorithm incorrectly in the interviews.
Ms. Statz had not introduced this algorithm in class; instead, she encour-
aged children to generate their own conceptually grounded strategies
for multidigit addition and subtraction. However, for problems involving
regrouping, these seven children always subtracted the smaller digit from
the larger one, an example of a buggy algorithm when the smaller digit
is the minuend. When asked if she had seen the children using this kind
of strategy in class, Ms. Statz replied, “That’s something that surprised
me during these interviews.” Because she believed children should always

solve problems with understanding, and not by rote, she was taken aback:
The borrowing with regrouping really disturbs me now. That’s all that I’ve been thinking
about now that we’ve been interviewing the kids and we see that they don’t have it. And
they don’t; they’re not even coming up with a good way of explaining it. It doesn’t make
sense to them.
Ms. Statz’s growing knowledge of the basic character and inadequacy of

her students’ strategies, combined with a strong belief against grouping
children by ability or even by type of errors, presented a dilemma for her:
how to accommodate a wide range of children’s thinking without resorting
to ability grouping or remediation. Maintaining her belief in the centrality
of student-generated strategies to the development of understanding and
confidence, she started to think about how she could assist these children
to grow mathematically without directly telling them how to solve prob-
lems. She re-examined her belief that the teacher should accept whatever
strategies children chose to solve problems, and began to believe she
needed to be more active in helping children progress – especially those
children who used incorrect strategies or still counted by ones to solve
problems involving quantities in the hundreds.
Ms. Statz’s deliberations about children’s buggy subtraction algorithms
illustrate these nascent changes. She discussed with the first author the
fact that the children did not connect their paper-and-pencil algorithms to
their knowledge of working with base ten blocks. For the first time, she
debated whether to show children how paper-and-pencil algorithms could
be modeled using base-ten blocks to make sure children understood:
I was even struggling with the idea of getting the overhead projector and doing it for the
whole class. Here are the base ten blocks, here is my marker and this is what we are doing.
But maybe we should try it, let them construct it themselves first?
I am struggling with how to go about doing that. Give them lots of take away problems and
try to go around to each person individually? That is the hard part. That’s what I’m trying
to figure out, how to do that.
In summary, in this phase, Ms. Statz became aware of the inadequacy of

her knowledge of children’s strategies and some of the consequences for
her students. As she learned more about their thinking by sitting in on the
participant researcher’s one-on-one problem-solving interviews with her
students, dilemmas arose regarding her teaching, because she saw evidence
of rote or underdeveloped understanding. This phase was an intense one
for Ms. Statz, characterized by uncertainty and unresolved questions; she
reported she thought about these issues a lot, “even when I first wake up.”
The net result was that Ms. Statz developed a deeply felt motivation to
learn more about the children’s thinking.
PHASE 3: LEVEL 4A ENGAGEMENT WITH

CHILDREN’S THINKING
This phase was characterized by the integration of practical inquiry into

Ms. Statz’s practice. Motivated by a need to know more about her students’
thinking, Ms. Statz began to assess systematically individual children in
depth and decide how to use the information in planning instruction.
Because Ms. Statz was interested in specific questions such as how David
used counting on to solve Join Change Unknown problems, and how to
help Pang go beyond counting by ones to find triple-digit differences, she
required more talk with individual students in the context of instruction.
Talking with Children about their Thinking. In January, Ms. Statz began to
spend much more time with individual children at their desks. Previously,
these sessions usually lasted no more than a minute. Now they often ran for
more than 10 minutes per child or a pair of children: “What I am noticing
in these last couple of weeks is that I am spending less time with all kids
and more time with particular kids.”
Ms. Statz was especially interested in children who were using inef-
ficient or incorrect strategies. She began to probe their thinking more, to
help them use base-ten blocks to represent quantities in the hundreds and
thousands, and questioned them in ways that built on their thinking. For
example, to solve 378 + ? = 600, Mark started to represent the 378 with
base-ten cubes. Ms. Statz asked him if he could do it in his head, and
he replied that he did not think so. So Ms. Statz scaffolded a strategy that
followed his use of base-ten materials, but focused on operating on number
relationships instead of base-ten blocks. She asked him how much was
needed to get from 378 to 380 and he immediately gave the answer 2. Then
she asked how much was needed to get from 380 to 400; he answered 20.
And to get from 400 to 600, he knew it would take 200. Mark then totaled
the addends on paper, to get 222.
This time spent talking with individual students was fruitful for Ms.
Statz. Her growing knowledge of their thinking helped her to adapt instruc-
tion to their needs and motivated her to consider children’s thinking in
specific content areas:
I definitely think I am noticing more than I noticed before. And not only just noticing it but
knowing where to take it and how to push further and how to question more. . . .
This period was also stressful to Ms. Statz, because as she learned more
about her students’ thinking, her questions grew:
I think I am more frustrated now about teaching math. . . . I am more exhausted . . . because
I am then spending more time thinking about it. Although the things that I think are coming
out of it are good, I am seeing what needs to be done. I am spending more time with kids
who need specific things. I think it is making a difference . . . Now there are all these other
questions that are on top of it.
After a few weeks of focusing on specific children and interacting exten-

sively with them, Ms. Statz felt more confident in her knowledge of
individual children, but she was frustrated she did not have enough time
to do this kind of in-depth work with everyone. A new dilemma arose:
But sometimes I feel like I’m spending too much time and neglecting the rest of the
classroom. I’ve felt like that, more frustrated almost, this year because I’ve needed more
time with each kid.
Ms. Statz wanted the benefits of talking extensively with children about
their thinking to extend to all. Thus, she started thinking of new ways to
organize her class that would allow her to spend more time with individuals
but ensure that all children were working and progressing.
When the participant researcher suggested that Ms. Statz would be able
to talk to more children if they worked in pairs, Ms. Statz rejected the idea,
because she believed working in pairs would not be beneficial to students
who used significantly different strategies to solve problems. Two days
later, Ms. Statz devised a solution that accommodated her concern. She
asked the children to “choose partners who solve problems in a similar
way to you.” Each pair got a sheet with the problems and a space for
two strategies. Each child could use his or her own strategy or the pair
could generate two strategies together. The children were fairly accurate
in choosing partners who were solving problems in a similar way. Ms.
Statz had time to work with individuals while the other children worked
with their partners. Having ten pairs to work with instead of 20 individuals
made the class more manageable for Ms. Statz.
To help children move forward to using more sophisticated strategies,
Ms. Statz told them she would ask both children from a pair to explain
his or her partner’s strategy at discussion time. Most children were able to
explain their partner’s strategy. When a child had difficulties, the partner
explained the strategy. More children were called to the board in this way,
during the discussion time, and giving opportunities to more children to
share strategies helped to solve another issue that concerned Ms. Statz.
Ms. Statz started thinking of how to choose problems to help children
progress:
I wouldn’t say it is any easier (to come up with the problems for the children). In fact, it may
be more challenging to decide what type of problems to use . . . I think I am thinking more
of the problems . . . and the kids who are doing the problems that I am writing specifically
for them.
In summary, in this phase Ms. Statz learned about her students’ solution
strategies by talking with children individually about their thinking. The
new need to spend much time with individuals stimulated her to think of
how to change the class organization. She began to experiment, an activity
that continued in the fourth phase. She continued to generate new questions
and look for solutions. This phase corresponded to Franke et al.’s (2001)
Level 4A classification of engagement with children’s thinking. Ms. Statz
interacted with students individually to learn more about their thinking.
She acquired detailed knowledge of what her students understood and
the kinds of strategies they could use. But decisions about what to teach
were still largely driven by the global notions of children’s thinking and
the curriculum. In the final phase of change, Ms. Statz began to build on
individual children’s knowledge in instruction.
PHASE 4: TRANSITION TO LEVEL 4B ENGAGEMENT WITH

CHILDREN’S THINKING: BUILDING ON CHILDREN’S
THINKING IN WHOLE-GROUP DISCUSSIONS
In this phase Ms. Statz considered how her teaching practices influenced
children’s thinking, and how what she learned about children’s thinking
influenced her teaching practices. She began to experiment with using
the knowledge she gained from working with the children individually to
guide whole-class discussions.
Ms. Statz wanted to increase the number of children who presented
strategies to the group, yet felt that the sharing time was not productive
for many children because they were not listening to or thinking about the
presenters’ strategies. Ms. Statz was especially concerned about children
who might not understand the more sophisticated strategies. To address
this concern, she started to get students more actively involved in the
discussions: she would typically stop the child who was presenting and
ask the class or specific children what they thought the child’s next step
would be. Ms. Statz asked other questions, in addition, such as “Can you
tell what she did?” “How is her strategy different than somebody else’s?”
“How can we make this strategy easier? Clearer?”
The children became more involved during discussions and Ms. Statz
increased the discussion time considerably, from 5–10 minutes early in the
year up to two consecutive lessons of 45 minutes of discussion for one set
of problems. The discussions in this phase lasted on average 21.8 minutes

(based on 18 observations), whereas discussions in phases 1, 2 and 3 lasted
an average of 7.9 minutes (based on 16 observations).
Ms. Statz’s efforts to elicit children’s thinking in discussions and
involve the audience in responding to this thinking led to a breakthrough
in her engagement with children’s thinking. She started to use the whole-
class discussions to help individual children progress. This practice marked
a change in instructional goals and orientation toward the use of interactive
talk:
I never used the sharing strategies as a time to move the kids along. That was just a time
for the kids to be able to talk about their strategies . . . And maybe that’s why they’re being
more focused on it (now). Because I’m including more of them in the discussion. I have
given the kids more time to discuss their strategies. And I have used the information that I
am getting from their strategies to move other kids. In the past I would just have [student]
show the class that problem and that would be all, but not use it as a teaching moment, to
teach the rest of the class about renaming fractions or whatever it was.
Ms. Statz remembered individual children’s strategies or difficulties that

were elicited while working one-on-one with children and addressed them
in whole-class discussions. The way in which Ms. Statz began to use
whole-class discussions to help individual children move from strategies
based on counting by ones to strategies that incorporated base-ten concepts
was especially striking.
The whole-group discussion of the following problem typifies these
kinds of discussions: “Ellen has 287 books. How many more books would
she need to have 400 books?” First Ms. Statz called on Anne, who usually
solved problems like this one by writing all the numbers between 287
and 400 and counting them by ones. This time, Anne began to solve the
problem, with help of her partner, by adding 200 to 287 to get 487. The
teacher stopped her and asked the class what problem Anne was facing at
that point. Some children said that Anne had 87 too many. Ms. Statz asked
a few children what they would do to continue and then asked Anne if
that was what she did. She helped Anne and the rest of the class to do the
calculation 200 − 87, needed for the next step, by counting down 80 by
10s to 120, and subtracting 7 from 120 by taking away 5 then 2 more.
When Ms. Statz called on Jared, he was hesitant to share his strategy
with the class, because, he said, “It will take me years.” He drew tally
marks and wrote next to each single number: 288, 289, 290, 291, . . . The
teacher stopped him when he got to 310 (in his notebook he had drawn
tallies all the way to 400) and asked him what he needed to get from 300
to 400. Jared said 10 10s or 2 50s. Other children suggested one 100 and
Jared added the 100 to the 13 tallies he made to count from 287 to 300.
Jared concluded by saying the strategy was “really easy.”
Another child presented the beginning of his solution, writing “287 +

100” vertically. Ms. Statz stopped him and asked Anne again what 287
plus 100 was. Then she asked a few of the children, who tended to use
ones instead of tens or hundreds to calculate multidigit sums, a series
of problems in which 100 was added (387+100, 487+100 . . . 987+100).
The child who solved the problem showed the next step: 387 + 10. Ms.
Statz returned to Jared and asked him to solve the problem. When he had
difficulty, she asked another child from the group she was targeting that
day. The next steps, involving 397 plus 3, then 100 plus 10 plus 3, were
handled by Ms. Statz in a similar manner.
The fourth child who came to the board solved this problem using
the standard subtraction algorithm (400 − 287 written vertically, with
regrouping from right to left). He, as well as other children, explained the
conceptual underpinnings of each step. For example, Mary explained that
she saw 400 as 40 tens: if you take 1 ten, 39 tens are left, so you just write
39 tens and a 10 on top.
In this example, Ms. Statz used whole-class discussion to help specific
children, such as Anne, to construct base-ten concepts and to use more
advanced strategies. Her agenda that day involved helping these children
by building on her knowledge of their strategies. Before this lesson, Ms.
Statz rarely, if ever, attempted to build on children’s thinking in whole-
class discussions. Afterwards, she regularly used whole-class discussions
like this one to assist individual children.
Whole-Group Discussion and Inquiry into Mathematics. As Ms. Statz

continued to grow in her use of group discourse to advance children’s
understanding, she broadened her inquiry into new domains, such as multi-
digit multiplication and division, and fractions. With these investigations
came new uses of interactive talk to build content in ways that were greater
than the sum of the individual contributions to a discussion.
For instance, to elicit children’s fraction thinking, Ms. Statz began by
giving partitive and measurement division problems that have fractions
as answers, and asked children to solve them using their own strategies
(Baker, Carpenter, Fennema, & Franke, 1992). Although Ms. Statz did not
instruct the students in specific strategies, all students were successful in
solving the problems and depicting fractional quantities using drawings
and diagrams.
Near the end of March, Ms. Statz, with much excitement, told the first
author what had happened in class. The day before, the children wrote and
solved their own word problems. Kanisha, a student who routinely counted
by ones to solve multidigit problems, wrote a problem similar to the kind
of problems they have been solving: “There were 20 cakes and there were
7 kids. How much cake will each kid get?” Kanisha solved the problem
using an unconventional partitioning strategy based on repeated halving.
To begin, she gave each child two whole cakes. She then partitioned the
remaining six cakes in half, and wrote the numbers 1 through 7 on the first
seven halves to designate 1 half for each of seven children (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Kanisha’s repeated halving strategy for sharing 6 remaining cakes among 7
children.
Continuing, she halved each of the remaining halves, to create enough

fourths for seven people. She wrote the numbers 1–7 to indicate giving one
fourth to each of the seven children. A half and a fourth remained in the last
circle. Ignoring the fourth, Kanisha divided the half into seven pieces and
again wrote 1–7 on each. (Ms. Statz later helped her create an appropriate
representation of equal pieces). Thus, at this point, each sharer had one
half, one half of a half, and one seventh of a half. Ms. Statz reminded her
to share the remaining fourth among the seven children and Kanisha did
that. Therefore, each child also got an additional one seventh of a fourth.
Ms. Statz then helped Kanisha decide the sizes of the fractional pieces.
She helped her see that, since the half was divided into seven pieces, each
piece was 1/14: “We said, if there are 7 slices in one-half, how many pieces
will be in a whole cake?” Kanisha knew it was 14. In a similar manner, she
figured that each of the seven pieces in the fourth was 1/28. Thus Kanisha
gave as an answer for her problem: 2 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/14 + 1/28.
Although this kind of strategy is not common in the standard teaching
of fractions, it is common in classrooms where teachers encourage children
to generate their own strategies (Empson, 1999). As the following account
of the whole-group discussion suggests, strategies based on non-standard
partitions of sharing situations, such as this one, can be mathematically
rich (Streefland, 1991).
Ms. Statz accepted Kanisha’s strategy and was excited by her achieve-
ment: “The fact that Kanisha did that was fabulous. I thought it was really
good. But then what came out of it (in the whole class discussion) . . .
was really cool.” After Kanisha had presented her strategy to the class,
Ms. Statz asked the children what the result would be if the fractions were
combined. She thus used Kanisha’s strategy as a basis for posing a new
problem to the class. Ms. Statz prompted the children by asking them how
many twenty-eighths were in one-fourteenth. Then they figured how many
twenty-eighths were in one-fourth and one-half and found that Kanisha’s
fractions combined to make 2 and 24/28 cakes.
Another girl then said she saw an easier way to solve the problem:
divide the six cakes that were left into seven pieces each (because there
were seven children sharing) and each child gets one seventh from each
cake for a total of 2 and 6/7 cakes for each child. Ms. Statz used the
two apparently different answers as an opportunity to explore the idea of
equivalent fractions, which was new to the children. She again posed a
new problem to the group by asking how they could decide whether the
two amounts were the same or not. Ms. Statz did not see immediately how
to help the children answer this question meaningfully and she resorted to a
symbolic technique based on reducing 24/28 to 6/7 by finding the greatest
common factor. However, the following year, Ms. Statz used opportunities
like this one to elicit children’s informal justifications about how equiv-
alent fractional amounts were related (e.g., Empson, 2002, Figure 6; this
example of a student’s work came from Ms. Statz’s classroom).
In this example, we see how Ms. Statz not only reacted to and built
on children’s strategies spontaneously in discussion, but also used the
problem and children’s different strategies as a basis for new, more
challenging problems. Through Ms. Statz’s orchestration of the group’s
discussion, the class explored mathematics topics that went beyond each
child’s effort.
In summary, in this phase Ms. Statz’s knowledge of children’s thinking
continued to grow. We classify her engagement with children’s thinking
as Level 4b on the CGI scale, because she used knowledge of specific
children’s thinking to inform classroom interactions. She found ways to
build on the children’s strategies in whole-class discussions and not just
individually.
Continued Inquiry
As Ms. Statz continued to grow in her use of group discourse to advance
children’s understanding, she broadened her inquiry into new mathematics
domains. With these investigations came new uses of interactive talk to
build content in ways that were greater than the sum of individual contri-
butions to discussion. The following year, the second author documented
Ms. Statz’s continued inquiry into children’s thinking in the domains of
fractions and multidigit multiplication and division (e.g., Baek, 1998;
Empson, 2002). Later, Ms. Statz became involved in inquiry into children’s
algebraic thinking (Carpenter, Franke, & Levi, 2003).
Retrospective Reflection
In a career interview several years after the events reported here, Ms.
Statz was asked about her growth as a teacher. She attributed her growth
in teaching to two main factors: a second pair of eyes in the classroom
focused on children’s thinking, and the freedom to experiment with
instruction based on children’s thinking.
A second pair of eyes focused on children’s thinking. When asked to

describe the most important turning points in her teaching, Ms. Statz
mentioned the times, such as in the year reported here, when she had a
second person in her classroom, who was knowledgeable about children’s
thinking and who could see and describe things to her that would have
otherwise gone unremarked. Interactions with people like the mathematics
resource teacher, or researchers such as us, provided some of the “raw
material” for Ms. Statz to reflect on her students’ knowledge. Her prior
beliefs in the value of children’s thinking provided some of the motivation
for this reflection.
Freedom to experiment. Ms. Statz credited the freedom she had to give
children problems to solve, to talk to her children about their thinking, and
to experiment with interactions with students for the growth she experi-
enced as a teacher. In her current role as a mathematics resource teacher,
she worried that an emphasis on teaching using printed curriculum mate-
rials – even standards-based curriculum programs – may prevent teachers’
deep engagement with children’s thinking. Because of an increased
emphasis, in many districts, on following these programs, Ms. Statz said
that teachers do not have the same kinds of opportunities to experiment and
find out what their children know and can learn. They feel that they do not
have the freedom to have discussion sessions that last 45 minutes because
there is so much to cover. Ms. Statz believed that, unless teachers are able
to have lengthy discussions with children about their thinking, they will
not be able to learn from their teaching – or at least not the same kinds of
things about children’s thinking that she had learned.
DISCUSSION
This case study documents how Ms. Statz’s engagement with children’s
thinking changed dramatically in a period of only a few months. In Phase
1, children talked about their strategies, and Ms. Statz listened, but rarely
challenged children to extend their thinking or referred to their strategies
in later discussion. In Phase 2, as the participant researcher shared infor-

mation with Ms. Statz about how individual children were thinking, Ms.
Statz realized there was a discrepancy between what she knew about her
students’ problem solving and how her students actually solved problems.
She realized, in particular, that some students used mistaken strategies and
others used very basic strategies, and was concerned by this information. In
Phase 3, Ms. Statz began to make time in her instructional routine to talk
to children in more depth about their thinking, for her own benefit. She
concentrated on students whose thinking she believed to be problematic
in some way, and struggled with how to support these students’ learning
by building on their thinking, rather than imposing her own. Her solu-
tion involved engaging students in talking to other students who solved
problems in a similar way. Finally, in Phase 4, Ms. Statz began to use
information gathered in one-on-one interactions to build on children’s
thinking in group discussions. Instruction was guided by knowledge of
individual children’s thinking. Ms. Statz continued to benefit from talking
with children about their thinking, but now that talk was also designed to
help children advance.
The extent of the change over the course of the study is especially
striking, given the fact that, at the beginning, Ms. Statz already used
many reform-oriented ideas in her teaching and believed that children
should construct their own knowledge. Her engagement with children’s
thinking corresponded, at the beginning of the study, to Level 3 in Franke
et al.’s (2001) scale. By the end of the her third year of teaching, Ms.
Statz’s engagement with children’s thinking was characterized by gener-
ative learning, and corresponded to Level 4b engagement with children’s
thinking.
We argue that the primary driving force behind the process of change
was Ms. Statz’s need to know more about children’s mathematical
thinking, and her pursuit of this knowledge in interaction with students.
This need was founded on her beliefs about the importance of student-
generated strategies, first fostered in her pre-service teacher-education
courses, and on her realization of gaps in her knowledge of her students’
thinking. It was nurtured by her participation in the discourse community
of CGI teachers and researchers. As she organized her interactions with
children to learn more about their thinking, new dilemmas arose about
how to increase children’s opportunities to express their thinking and to
learn by listening to other children’s thinking. These dilemmas, in turn,
led to solutions that allowed Ms. Statz to continue to learn about children’s
thinking while children learned of each others’ thinking. Ms. Statz began
to use whole-group discussions not just as displays of thinking, but also
as arenas for building on thinking. Each of these reflection cycles was

grounded by increasingly detailed knowledge of children’s thinking. Ulti-
mately, learning about children’s thinking was integrated with classroom
participation structures to elicit and build on children’s thinking. In this
way, Ms. Statz’s learning about children’s thinking became generative.
CONDITIONS FOR TEACHER CHANGE
In outlining the conceptual framework for this study, we discussed three

conditions for teacher change based on the research literature. We revisit
these conditions here, and speculate about their contributions to Ms. Statz’s
change as a teacher.
1) Membership in a discourse community. The CGI framework for

children’s thinking provided a basis for conversation and other kinds
of interactions about a phenomenon central to Ms. Statz’s work as a
teacher: children’s mathematics learning. By virtue of interactions with
“old timers” (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) such as Ms. J and
the participant researchers, Ms. Statz became an increasingly knowledge-
able member of this discourse community. Because the tools for thinking
about her teaching provided in this discourse community intersected with
the problems that were most pressing for her as a teacher, Ms. Statz was
motivated to use and adapt these tools for herself. Although there is no
single point at which Ms. Statz can be said to have joined this discourse
community, her opportunities for engaging in it were multiple and occurred
in a number of contexts.
2) Processes for reflectively generating, debating and evaluating new

knowledge and practices. The processes for producing new knowledge
and practices identified in this case study were, for the most part, infor-
mally organized. Other than during her pre-service teacher education, Ms.
Statz did not participate, in her early teaching years, in formally organized
learning opportunities, such as professional development workshops in
mathematics. However, these informal processes were powerful for her,
perhaps because, in partnership with old timers in the CGI discourse
community, she was able to formulate and address some of the most
pressing practice-based dilemmas.
We identified two sorts of processes in particular for generating new
knowledge and practices at work in Ms. Statz’s third year of teaching.
The first process involved the participant researcher making available new
information to Ms. Statz about her students’ thinking, through conver-
sation, examination of students’ written work, and one-on-one problem

solving interviews observed by Ms. Statz. The process of examining
her students’ thinking in partnership with the participant researcher (a
“second pair of eyes”) served as a kind of scaffolding to Ms. Statz’s own
inquiry into children’s thinking by placing in the foreground aspects of
her students’ thinking she had previously not seen. The second process
involved Ms. Statz’s independent inquiry into students’ thinking. As she
took ownership of questions about children’s thinking, as well as the
outcomes, she became engaged in practical inquiry. This inquiry included
questions about class organization such as how to assist struggling
children, how children learn from each other, and how to conduct mean-
ingful discussions. Thus, processes for generating and testing knowledge
about children’s thinking became integrated into Ms. Statz’s teaching as
she created opportunities for herself, and then students, to hear children’s
thinking.
In contrast, at the beginning of the study Ms. Statz did not learn from
her students in the manner in which she did later, even though she gave
them opportunities to solve problems in their own ways and to talk about
their strategies. We suggest a change in Ms. Statz’s perception of her role
as a teacher, from passive to active, provided a motivation to learn more
about what her students were doing in order to use that knowledge to help
them advance. She realized that, even as a teacher who valued children’s
informal thinking, she could have goals that called for children’s thinking
to progress.
We speculate this passive role is a common step in teachers’ develop-
ment. It seems there is a need at the beginning of teacher change to “step
back,” and not intervene in children’s problem solving very much (Jacobs
& Ambrose, 2003). After becoming convinced children can generate their
own solution strategies, teachers become active again but in a different way
from before, by: helping students develop their own strategies; helping
students who do not understand the meaning of the problem; helping
them express their solutions in multiple forms; asking probing ques-
tions; and leading discussions that build on children’s ideas and stress the
mathematics content of those ideas.
3) Ownership of change. Ms. Statz’s transition to practical inquiry is

evidence of ownership of the change she experienced. That Ms. Statz
made this transition may be due, in part, to the nature of the participant
researcher’s interactions with her. The participant researcher did not give
Ms. Statz ready-made activities, but encouraged her to make her own
decisions about instruction. Reflecting later on the process she experienced

in this collaboration, Ms. Statz commented:
You allowed me to voice my concerns. And you were somebody to listen to the things that
I had problems with. You gave suggestions. Yet you also said: ‘It’s up to you. Do it your
way. Try it your way. It’s up to you with your class.’ I guess I learned to stop asking for
advice and I learned to start thinking on my own. Because I knew you would say, ’What
do you think?’ So then I was already doing some of the thinking and trying it out on you
more.
Because of the participant researcher’s insistence that Ms. Statz knew her
own students best, Ms. Statz developed a predisposition to ask and answer
her own questions, which led to a sense of professional autonomy. Further,
without the freedom to experiment with the curriculum, cited by Ms. Statz
as key to her development as a teacher, she may not have developed this
predisposition, no matter what the participant researcher’s stance was.
IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE
What have we, as researchers and teacher educators, learned from

conducting this study? How has the collaboration between teacher and
researcher-teacher educator helped us educate other teachers? We present
some insights based on the first author’s subsequent experience with
teachers from about 80 schools in Israel, many of whom made major
changes in their teaching and pre-service education. Some adjustments
were necessary in adapting teachers’ use of CGI to Israeli classrooms,
because of larger class sizes (35–40 students), a different culture, and
the national curriculum. The findings of this study informed the profes-
sional development work in Israel in three ways. In her work with
teachers, the first author focused on 1) eliciting and interpreting children’s
thinking, 2) building on children’s thinking in one-on-one interactions,
and 3) building on children’s thinking in group discussions. The teacher
development program included study of children’s solution strategies, use
of challenging problems, encouraging a variety of solutions, discussion
of classroom organization, and examination of teachers’ beliefs about
the kinds of problems children can solve without direct instruction in
strategies. Special importance was attached to understanding and aiming
for the highest levels of teacher development in Table I. It is a difficult
task for teachers to obtain a clear picture of a student’s current level,
to understand his/her difficulties and to help in a manner that builds on
his/her thinking. Because it was not feasible to have a “second pair of
eyes” in each classroom, the teacher development included analyses of
written or videotaped examples of individual students and teachers inter-

acting with students from participating teachers’ classrooms. A second
important topic is how the teacher can stimulate class discussions that
build on children’s thinking and help them progress. The experience with
Ms. Statz was an important catalyst in bringing this topic to the forefront
of the teacher development. For example, one useful activity was to ask
the teachers to bring four examples of children’s strategies on a problem
and to think how they could build a discussion around them. This activity
helped the teachers understand what sorts of questions they could ask and
what mathematical ideas to emphasize.
CONCLUSION
An enduring problem in teacher change is the tension between inducting

teachers into new instructional practices and respecting teachers’ profes-
sional autonomy. In this study, these tensions were represented, respec-
tively, by CGI and Ms. Statz’s personal teaching dilemmas. Part of Ms.
Statz’s learning concerned learning problem types and solutions strategies;
but the other, more important part had to do with learning how to use
this knowledge and how to generate this kind of knowledge by/for herself
in practice – that is, to conduct practical inquiry into children’s thinking.
Ultimately, this practical inquiry was integrated into her interactions with
children and became generative. The result was a body of knowledge
for Ms. Statz that was richer and more complex than CGI’s research-
based framework for children’s thinking because it was informed by
the “concrete particulars” (Lampert, 1985) of her own practice-based
dilemmas, and driven by her growing knowledge of her own students’
thinking. Ms. Statz reported that she began teaching with a strong belief
in the value of children’s thinking. Many teachers have such a belief, but
without specific knowledge of children’s thinking, they may not be able
fully to implement it.
We conjecture that mechanisms that help teachers see their students’
thinking in new ways, combined with the freedom to respond to, and
experiment with, this information about children’s thinking are key to
the development of practical inquiry in teachers. More specifically, a
turning point for Ms. Statz was the realization that talk with children about
their thinking was valuable, not only because it provided opportunities
for students to articulate their thinking, but also because it provided a
context for her to ask and answer questions about children’s thinking for
herself. As Ms. Statz learned how to use the information gathered in these
interactions, she began to influence the direction of these conversations
through specific questions about cognitively, socially, and mathematically

appropriate extensions of individual children’s thinking.
Although Ms. Statz accomplished remarkable change during the course
of the study, the process was difficult. The experience of phases of uncer-
tainty and conflict that had no obvious solutions was emotionally trying.
Yet Ms. Statz was open to seeing and responding to these dilemmas, even
though she was not sure what would result. We believe this openness is
attributable to a school atmosphere that was open to teachers’ experimenta-
tion, and the emphasis by the participant researcher on Ms. Statz’s capacity
to ask and answer questions about her practice.
Finally, whatever form participation in a discourse community takes,
we believe it must emphasize the teacher’s professional autonomy. This
emphasis reinforces the capacity of teachers for practical inquiry, and
provides a means for the discourse community itself to adapt and remain
vital in response to new perspectives.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Kathy Statz, the teacher who collaborated in this
study, for her major contributions; Ellen Ansell, Linda Levi and Debra
L. Junk, for their feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript; three
anonymous JMTE reviewers and editor Peter Sullivan for their suggestions
for improvement; and Lou Her for translating interviews from English to
Hmong for two students. The first and second authors thank the University
of Wisconsin-Madison for support as visiting scholars in the Wisconsin
Center for Education Research and the Department of Curriculum and
Instruction, respectively, during part of the time this study was conducted
and written. The research reported in this paper was supported in part by
the National Science Foundation under Grants No. MDR-8955346 and
MDR-8954629. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of
the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science
Foundation.
NOTES
1 Her real name, used with her permission.
2 Drake, C. (under review). Mathematics stories: The role of teacher narrative in the
implementation of mathematics education reform.
3 Children initially direct model story problems, representing each object in a story
problem one for one in the strategy, and acting out the semantic structure of the story
with these objects. For example, to solve a Join Change Unknown problem, such as “Lucy
had 7 dollars. How many more dollars does she need to buy a puppy that costs 11 dollars?”
by direct modeling, a child would represent the first set of dollars with 7 objects (e.g.,
counters, tallies), and join other objects to the set until there was a total of 11 objects.
The child would then count the set that was joined to the initial set for the answer to the
story problem. Strategies beyond direct modeling include counting, deriving facts, and
imposing a different semantic structure on the problem (see Carpenter et al., 1999 for more
information).
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RUTH M. STEINBERG
Kibbutzim College of Education
Namir St 147
Tel Aviv 52507
Israel
E-mail: ruti_ste@macam.ac.il
SUSAN B. EMPSON
University of Texas at Austin
U.S.A.
THOMAS P. CARPENTER
University of Wisconsin-Madison
U.S.A.

2004 Inquiry Into Children's Mathematical Thinking

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RUTH M. STEINBERG, SUSAN B. EMPSON and THOMAS P.

INQUIRY INTO CHILDREN’S MATHEMATICAL THINKING

KEY WORDS: discourse community, elementary mathematics, practical inquiry, teacher

Mathematics educators have articulated a vision for teaching mathematics

Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education 7: 237–267, 2004.

Lampert, 1985; Richardson, 1994; Tabachnick & Zeichner, 1991). This

cive to learning include: 1) membership in a “discourse community” that

argued, practical inquiry is a powerful means to the continued improve-

Levels of Teacher Change in Cognitively Guided Instruction

At level 1, teachers mostly used direct instruction, and, as measured by

Data Collected in Ms. Statz’s Third Year of Teaching

Classroom observations. Thirty-four complete mathematics lessons were

and their relation to children’s thinking, and the researcher’s observa-

Student assessments. Each child was interviewed at length, at the begin-

Data analysis. Observations and interview decisions were made in

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Early Teaching Years

Third Year Teaching: A Year of Change

PHASE 1: LEVEL 3 ENGAGEMENT WITH

they solved problems in mathematics journals. No textbook was used. Ms.

Talk with Children about their Thinking

strategies, when it came to strategies beyond direct modeling, Ms. Statz

continued to have these kinds of conversations, Ms. Statz became increas-

PHASE 2: MOTIVATION FOR TRANSITION FROM LEVEL 3

me during these interviews.” Because she believed children should always

Ms. Statz’s growing knowledge of the basic character and inadequacy of

In summary, in this phase, Ms. Statz became aware of the inadequacy of

PHASE 3: LEVEL 4A ENGAGEMENT WITH

This phase was characterized by the integration of practical inquiry into

After a few weeks of focusing on specific children and interacting exten-

PHASE 4: TRANSITION TO LEVEL 4B ENGAGEMENT WITH

of problems. The discussions in this phase lasted on average 21.8 minutes

Ms. Statz remembered individual children’s strategies or difficulties that

Another child presented the beginning of his solution, writing “287 +

Whole-Group Discussion and Inquiry into Mathematics. As Ms. Statz

Continuing, she halved each of the remaining halves, to create enough

A second pair of eyes focused on children’s thinking. When asked to

in later discussion. In Phase 2, as the participant researcher shared infor-

as arenas for building on thinking. Each of these reflection cycles was

CONDITIONS FOR TEACHER CHANGE

In outlining the conceptual framework for this study, we discussed three

1) Membership in a discourse community. The CGI framework for

2) Processes for reflectively generating, debating and evaluating new

sation, examination of students’ written work, and one-on-one problem

3) Ownership of change. Ms. Statz’s transition to practical inquiry is

decisions about instruction. Reflecting later on the process she experienced

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

What have we, as researchers and teacher educators, learned from

written or videotaped examples of individual students and teachers inter-

An enduring problem in teacher change is the tension between inducting

through specific questions about cognitively, socially, and mathematically

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