Virginia Warfield - Böcker

This brief has a twofold motivation. One is to present an organization, Washington Teachers of Teachers of Mathematics (WaToToM) that has become a solid player in the arena of mathematics education in the state of Washington and has aspects that might be of value to people with similar goals in other states. The other is to present a history in grassroots development. WaToToM had its origins 15 years ago as a small gathering whose direction was not clearly defined. From those small roots it has grown not to an enormous organization but to a lively, goal-oriented and highly functional one that has had profound influences on educational policy, curriculum development and teacher preparation.

This work presents one of the original and fundamental experiments of Didactique, a research program whose underlying tenet is that Mathematics Education research should be solidly based on scientific observation. Here the observations are of a series of adventures that were astonishing for both the students and the teachers: the reinvention of fractions and of decimal numbers in a sequence of lessons and situations that permitted the students to construct the concepts for themselves. The book leads the reader through the highlights of the sequence's structure and some of the reasoning behind the lesson choices. It then presents explanations of some of the principal concepts of the Theory of Situations. In the process, it offers the reader the opportunity to join a lively set of fifth graders as they experience a particularly attractive set of lessons and master a topic that baffles many of their contemporaries.