History
The instructional materials included in this website have been adapted from classroom-based research projects and are intended for general use in classrooms by teachers without the outside support of researchers. The instructional sequences and approaches were first developed in typical American classrooms by teams of researchers, including Paul Cobb, Erna Yackel, Koeno Gravemeijer, and others. Subsequently Erna Yackel, mathematics education researcher and practitioner, and Debra Herndon, an elementary school teacher, have worked for more than two decades with teachers in a variety of cultural settings across Northwest Indiana to support them in using these inquiry sequences and approaches as the basis for their mathematics instruction. The resources on this website reflect what Yackel and Herndon have learned from their experiences with these teachers.
One Teacher's Story
Debra Herndon
First grade teacher Winfield Elementary School and mathematics education teacher consultant, Crown Point, IN.
When I first started teaching, I used a traditional math series. I was discouraged because my students were not understanding mathematics. They were only learning procedures that did not work for them because they did not understand the procedure. They had no idea what those procedures meant. The procedures did not work for children because they were not conceptualizing mathematics. Mathematics did not make sense to them. It wasn’t real for them. One year while teaching fourth grade, a teacher I worked with went to an inquiry math workshop and asked if she could teach my students during their math time to use what she had learned. Of course, I agreed because I wanted to learn more about how students could learn to conceptualize math in a meaningful way that they would understand. I sat and watched my students work together, gain a respect for each other’s thinking, and share their thinking with the class. My students were making sense of math. They loved math and so did I. I had the opportunity to learn inquiry mathematics and started using it with my students. I was amazed at what my students learned, how they conceptualized mathematics.
A few years later, I had the opportunity to teach first grade. I used the inquiry math sequences for first grade developed by Erna Yackel and her colleagues. The beauty of the sequences is that everyone has the opportunity to progress at their own conceptual level of understanding, even when moving onto the next instructional sequence. For example, after working with the Patterning and Partitioning Instructional sequence, a few of my students needed more time to work on numbers to 10 while moving onto Structuring Numbers sequence that focused on number relationships to 20. However, even while students were working on numbers to 20, my least sophisticated students still had the opportunity to work with numbers to 10 and at the same time also working with numbers to 20.
My students learned to give reasons for their answers, even in other subjects. For example, when I asked my students a question after reading a book or story, students often gave several different answers and reasons for their answers. Students learned to think in flexible ways. Inquiry math changed the way I taught other subjects. Often, I would ask open-ended questions for which my students would have the opportunity to give various answers and reasons for their answers. It changed how I personally work through problems myself. Now, I use grouping ways to figure out problems and often I think in linear based ways of reasoning to figure out problems.
