Two Teachers' Conceptions of a Reform-Oriented Curriculum: Implications for Mathematics Teacher Development

This paper describes two high school teachers' conceptions of the cooperation and exploration components of a reform-oriented mathematics curriculum. Although the teachers appreciated the themes of cooperation and exploration in theory, their conceptions of these themes with respect to their implementations of the curriculum differed. One teacher viewed the curriculum's problems as open-ended and challenging for students, whereas the other teacher claimed that the problems were overly structured. Each teacher attributed difficulties with students' cooperative work to the amount of structure and direction (too little or too much) offered by the problems. Discussion of such similarities and differences in the teachers' conceptions emphasizes the dynamic, humanistic nature of curriculum implementation and gives rise to important implications for mathematics teacher development in the context of reform.