HELEN M.

DOERR

EXAMINING THE TASKS OF TEACHING WHEN USING

STUDENTS’ MATHEMATICAL THINKING

ABSTRACT. Recent research suggests that the examination of students’ work may lead
to changes in teaching practice that are more effective in terms of students’ mathematical
learning. However, the link between the examination of students’ work and the teachers’
actions in the classroom is largely unexamined, particularly at the secondary level. In
this paper, I present the results of a study in which teachers had extensive opportunities
to examine the development of students’ conceptual models of exponential growth in the
context of their own classrooms. I describe two related aspects of the practice of one teacher:
(a) how she listened to students’ alternative solution strategies and (b) how she responded to
these strategies in her practice. The results of the analysis suggest that as the teacher listened
to her students, she developed a sophisticated schema for understanding the diversity of
student thinking. The actions of the teacher supported extensive student engagement with
the task and led the students to revise and refine their own mathematical thinking. This
latter action reflects a significant shift in classroom practice from the role of the teacher as
evaluator of student ideas to the role of students as self-evaluators of their emerging ideas.

KEY WORDS: functions, problem solving, secondary mathematics teaching, subject matter
knowledge, teacher knowledge, teaching practice

1. I NTRODUCTION

Research on problem solving suggests that many students tend to give up

rather quickly when presented with novel or unfamiliar problem solving
tasks. The NCTM Standards (NCTM, 2000) and innumerable practicing
teachers express the goal and desire for students to become more engaged
and more effective problem solvers. Recent research suggests that teachers’
examination of students’ work may lead to changes in teaching practice
that are more effective in terms of students’ problem solving activities.
When teachers understand how students might approach a mathematical
task and how their ideas might develop, this would seem to provide the basis
for the teacher to support students in ways that would promote students’
learning. However, the link between the examination of students’ work and
the teachers’ actions in the classroom is largely unexamined, particularly
at the secondary level.
Many researchers (Carpenter et al., 1996; Fennema and Carpenter, 1996;
Schifter and Fosnot, 1993; Simon and Schifter, 1991) have investigated how

Educational Studies in Mathematics (2006) 62: 3–24

DOI: 10.1007/s10649-006-4437-9 
C Springer 2006
4 H. M. DOERR

elementary teachers interpret students’ work, particularly around tasks in-

volving number sense and rational numbers. These researchers and others
(e.g., Franke et al., 1998; Jacobsen and Lehrer, 2000; Schifter, 1998; Tirosh,
2000; Tzur, 1999; Vacc and Bright, 1999) have argued that teachers’ un-
derstanding of students’ mathematical thinking can lead to more effective
teaching practices. However, similar research at the secondary level is con-
siderably more limited (e.g., Heid et al., 1999; Henningsen and Stein, 1997).
Despite the rather large body of research on students’ thinking about func-
tions (Dubinsky and Harel, 1992; Leinhardt et al., 1990; Romberg et al.,
1993; Sfard, 1991; Vinner and Dreyfus, 1989) and important related work
on teachers’ understandings of function (Even, 1993; Even and Tirosh,
1995), there is very little research that focuses on how teachers use an
understanding of students’ thinking about functions in their practice at the
secondary level.
In this paper, I present the results of a study in which teachers had ex-
tensive opportunities to examine students’ mathematical thinking as the
students developed models for exponential growth and decay. I describe
two related aspects of the practice of one of the teachers: (a) how she
listened to alternative solutions developed by students and (b) how she re-
sponded to the students’ thinking in the classroom. Because the underlying
mathematical structure in the task that the students investigate is exponen-
tial, I draw on the work of Confrey and colleagues (Confrey and Smith,
1994; Confrey and Smith, 1995) and my own earlier work (Doerr, 1998;
Doerr, 2000) on students’ thinking about exponential growth. In particu-
lar, Confrey has pointed out the distinction between a recursive view of
exponential functions (that relies on seeing the constancy of the successive
ratios in table entries) and a correspondence view of functions (that empha-
sizes the closed form of the equation). In the task that is investigated in this
study, the central difficulty for students is the shift from a recursive view of
the functional pattern to a correspondence view. This study focuses on (1)
how is it that teachers interpret the different ways of thinking that students
might bring to a problem-solving task and (2) how do those interpretations
of students’ mathematical thinking influence teachers’ classroom practice?

2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Increasingly, researchers on teachers’ knowledge have come to recognize

two important perspectives on that knowledge: (1) that the knowledge for
teaching is a complex and ill-structured knowledge domain (Davis and
Simmt, 2003; Feltovich et al., 1997; Lampert, 2001) and (2) that to a large
extent such knowledge is situated and grounded in the particularities of the
 EXAMINING THE TASKS OF TEACHING 5

contexts and constraints of practice (Borko et al., 1997; Lave and Wenger,
1991; Leinhardt, 1990). Taken together, these perspectives suggest that
knowing how to teach means knowing how to see and interpret the complex
and ill-structured domain of classroom practice. Understanding teachers’
knowledge means knowing how teachers interpret the complexity and the
situated variability of the practical problems of the classroom, and how and
when those interpretations influence decisions and actions in the classroom.
It is not enough to see what it is that a teacher does in particular settings. We
also need to understand how the teacher interprets the salient features of an
event, integrates those interpretations with past experiences, anticipates ac-
tions and consequences, and makes subsequent interpretations (Doerr and
Lesh, 2003). It is precisely a teacher’s interpretations of a situation that
influence when and why as well as what it is that the teacher does.
One aspect of teachers’ knowledge that has been the subject of much
research (particularly at the elementary level) is teachers’ understanding
of the landscape of students’ conceptual development. In this paper, I ar-
gue that knowing this landscape is not the same as understanding one way
of thinking or one way of developing an idea or of following a particu-
lar learning trajectory (Simon and Tzur, 2004). Baroody and colleagues
have suggested that the notion of hypothetical learning trajectories seems
“overly prescriptive and inconsistent with an inquiry-based investigative
approach” to mathematical learning (Baroody et al., 2004, p. 253). I would
further argue that hypothetical learning trajectories posited on the learning
processes of individual learners would create an unmanageably large set of
trajectories for a classroom teacher; the task of continual revision of multi-
ple learning trajectories (Simon, 1995) would seem equally unmanageable.
When using model-eliciting tasks (Lesh et al., 1992, 2003) or other tasks
that place high cognitive demands on students (English and Lesh, 2003;
Henningsen and Stein, 1997; Stein et al., 1996), teachers are confronted
with the multiple ways students can interpret a problem situation and the
multiple paths students might take for refining and revising their ideas. Re-
cent theoretical work by Davis and Simmt (2003), in understanding learning
as the development of complex interactive systems, describes the paths that
groups tend to take on their way to solutions as “meandering or roving”
(p. 146) and that the presence of diversity of approaches is necessary since
“one cannot specify in advance what sorts of variation will be necessary for
appropriately intelligent action” (p. 148). The task for the teacher involves
seeing the multiplicity of approaches that students might take in interpret-
ing a situation and in developing their solutions. The teacher also needs to
respond in ways that support students in revising their ideas along various
dimensions of the problem situation, while not revising them along other
dimensions.
6 H. M. DOERR

Traditionally, teachers have been prone to seeing their students’ re-

sponses to tasks for the purpose of evaluating the correctness of their an-
swers (Crespo, 2000; Even and Tirosh, 1995; Heid et al., 1999). Using what
Davis (1996, 1997) in his earlier work terms an evaluative orientation, these
teachers are primarily concerned with identifying and correcting students’
errors. With this orientation, the teacher sees the students’ work in light of
how she herself would approach the problem; such an orientation would ap-
pear to be consistent with the notion of guiding students along the teacher’s
hypothesized learning trajectory for her students. In contrast to the evalua-
tive orientation are the interpretive and hermeneutic orientations. Teachers
who display an interpretive orientation listen to their students’ ideas with
the aim of accessing their understandings, seeking information through
more elaborated responses, and asking for demonstrations or explanations.
Teachers with a hermeneutic orientation interact with their students, lis-
tening to their ideas and engaging with them in the negotiation of meaning
and understanding.
The interpretative and hermeneutic stances of the teacher towards stu-
dents’ problem solving activity suggest that the teacher is engaged in mak-
ing sense of how the students are interpreting the problem task. However,
the difficulty of this task for the teacher should not be underestimated. As
Even and Wallach (2003) have argued, such listening is not unproblem-
atic as it is necessarily constrained by the teacher’s own view of the task
and her prior experiences in teaching the task. Moreover, with rich and
complex tasks, there are potentially multiple ways for students to interpret
the problem situation, and, further, the ideas that students do have might
develop in substantially different ways. In interpreting and interacting with
students’ work in the activity of the classroom, the teacher is faced with
making sense of the multiplicity of developments of students’ ideas.
The teacher is also faced with the task of deciding how to use the multi-
plicity of students’ ideas to guide the lesson. That is, how can the teacher act
in ways that will support students’ conceptual development towards some
particular learning goal? This implies that teachers’ knowledge includes
not only their mathematical understanding of the learning goal, but also an
understanding of the multiple ways that students’ thinking might develop,
the knowledge of typical early conceptions and possible mis-conceptions
that students might have, an understanding of appropriate representations
and the connections among those representations, and a knowledge of ped-
agogical strategies that will support the development of students’ thinking.
In this study, we examine closely the ways that one teacher saw and inter-
preted the multiple ways of student thinking that occurred in a modeling
task on exponential growth and how the teacher’s interpretations influenced
her practice.
 EXAMINING THE TASKS OF TEACHING 7

3. M ETHODOLOGY AND DATA ANALYSIS

This particular study is part of a larger research project on the develop-

ment of effective pedagogical strategies for teaching modeling tasks in
technology-enhanced environments. The overall project includes model-
ing tasks that are intended to elicit the development of students’ models
(or conceptual systems) of linear change, exponential growth and decay,
and periodic functions. The use of modeling tasks enables researchers to
examine the interpretations of teachers as they engage in understanding
their students’ interpretations of particular mathematical situations (Lesh
and Kelly, 1999). In this paper, I report on a case study that examines the
interpretations and actions of one of the teachers as she was engaged in her
teaching practice.

3.1. The task

The students were engaged in making sense of a well-known problem in
which the number of pennies on each square of a checkerboard is double
the number on the previous square, beginning with one penny on the first
square (see the appendix for a complete description of the Pennies Task).
Both the teachers and researchers saw the pennies problem as a model-
eliciting task (Lesh et al., 1992, 2003) that provided an opportunity for
students to investigate some of the essential mathematical characteristics
of multiplicative growth. For the purposes of this study, four of the six
principles for the design of model-eliciting tasks are especially relevant for
this task:
1. The Reality Principle. The reality principle refers to the meaningfulness
of the task to the student. Will students be encouraged to make sense of
the situation based on extensions of their own personal knowledge and
experiences? Or will they be required to suspend their sense-making in
order to conform to a teacher’s (or author’s) notion of a particular way
to think about the problem situation?
2. The Model Construction Principle. The construction principle implies
that the task is such that the students will clearly recognize the need for
a model to be constructed, modified or extended. Does the task involve
constructing, describing or explaining a structurally significant system?
Is attention focused on underlying patterns and regularities rather than
on surface level information?
3. The Self-Evaluation Principle. This principle means that the task is
such that the students will be able to judge for themselves when their
responses are good enough. They will not need to refer to an external
authority to know when they have a satisfactory solution to the task.
8 H. M. DOERR

4. The Documentation Principle. This principle means that the response to

the task will require students explicitly to reveal how they are thinking
about the situation by documenting and representing their ideas. The
students’ solutions will reveal the kinds of mathematical quantities, the
relations among those quantities, and the operations and patterns that
the students were thinking about (cf. Lesh et al., 2003, p. 43).
The Pennies Task was designed to elicit a shift in student understanding
from a recursive view of the functional situation to a direct correspondence
view, thus engaging the students in the construction of a model of that struc-
ture. Expressing the correspondence relationship between a given square
and the number of pennies was not obvious to any of the pre-calculus stu-
dents in this study. The task was realistic for the students in that they could
readily make sense of the problem situation and most students quickly saw
the recursive view of the situation. The task itself provided the students
with opportunities to document their thinking through equations, tables
and graphs. Generating tables and using a graphing calculator provided a
means by which students could evaluate their solution.
At the same time, this task provided an opportunity for the teacher
to see and interpret how students’ ideas about the underlying mathemati-
cal relationship would develop through their interactions with the task and
with each other. However, as Baroody and colleagues (Baroody et al., 2004)
have recently observed, the role of the teacher during model-eliciting activ-
ities or in follow-up class discussion has received relatively little attention.
This study examines the ways in which the teacher saw, interpreted and
responded to the students’ activities.

3.2. Participants and setting

The participant in this study was an experienced secondary teacher, who
was teaching this particular lesson for the second time as part of a 2-year
project. The teacher, along with 11 others, had participated in two summer
workshops where they explored the mathematics of exponential growth and
decay and discussed various strategies that students might take in approach-
ing the tasks in the lesson sequence. After the first year implementation,
the teachers recorded the alternative ways students might think about the
various tasks within the lesson sequence. During both years of the project,
the teachers participated in monthly meetings during the school year in
which student thinking and teaching strategies were discussed with col-
leagues and the researcher. Particular attention was paid to (1) listening to
and identifying the different ways students might think about a problem and
(2) supporting students so that they develop and revise their own solution
strategies.
 EXAMINING THE TASKS OF TEACHING 9

The teacher in this case study had 30 plus years of experience and, like
most of the other teachers in the study, had strong mathematical content
knowledge about exponential functions. This particular teacher spent an
extended amount of time on this task (nearly 70 minutes), thereby revealing
a greater range of details of her interactions with students and making
more visible her interpretations and responses to the students’ approaches
to the task. The teacher worked in a suburban public school with middle
class students, with block scheduling, where the classes met for 75 minute
periods for five times over a 10-day period. There were 19 students, aged
16–18, with most taking this course in pre-calculus as their final high school
mathematics course. All of the students had graphing calculators and were
generally familiar with their use from previous courses in mathematics.

3.3. Data sources and analysis

The data sources for this study consisted of the records of the lesson as
well as a set of interviews with the teacher. The records of the lesson
included the videotape of the lesson in which the Pennies Task was taught.
The videotaping focused on the teacher and her interactions and exchanges
with the students in her class. The videotape was subsequently transcribed.
Field notes recording the researcher’s observations were taken during the
lesson. In addition to these records of the lesson, the data included three
interviews with the teacher. The first interview took place at the beginning
of the year, the second just prior to this lesson and the third interview at
the end of the lesson sequence. The purpose of the first two interviews was
to identify and understand the teacher’s goals, expectations and intentions
for the lessons. The purpose of the third interview was to gain insight into
the teacher’s interpretations and reflections on the events of the lessons.
The analysis of the data took place in three stages. The first stage of
the analysis involved open-ended coding (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) of the
video transcripts and field notes of the lesson. The coding was revised and
refined through comparing the meaning of codes across the same lesson
taught by other teachers in the study. This was followed by viewing the
video tape for the lesson and adding annotations and clarifications to the
transcript that were visible from the video tape. In addition to gestures
by both the teacher and the students, this revealed many instances of the
teacher listening to and observing students as they worked on the task. The
coding of the transcript was revised and refined in light of these annotations
and clarifications.
The second stage of the analysis consisted of finding clusters of codes
that defined the critical features of the lesson, beginning with the coded
field notes. These features describe the dominant events that governed the
10 H. M. DOERR

lesson. In clustering these codes, I re-examined the data to find and inter-
pret all those instances when the teacher was listening to and interacting
with the students for the purpose of understanding the students’ thinking.
This led to a detailed description of the teaching of the lesson that was
grounded in the data sources described above. The third stage of analysis
involved examining the teacher’s goals and interpretations by coding the
interview transcripts. This coding led to revisions and additional details in
the descriptions of the critical features of the lesson. During this stage of
the analysis, an earlier version of this paper was shared with the teacher
for her comments and clarifications. The final results of this analysis are
reported in the next section.

4. RESULTS

In this section, I briefly describe the implementation of the lesson by the

teacher, followed by a presentation of the critical features of the teacher’s
practice, focusing on her understanding and use of students’ mathematical
thinking about the modeling task. The central characteristic of the student
work on this task is the difficult shift from thinking about the problem
recursively to thinking about a way to express the doubling in explicit
form. What was not obvious to any of the students was how to express the
number of pennies directly in terms of a given square.
The teacher (Mrs. C) began the lesson by asking the students to read
the task and then to think about it independently. After a few minutes,
she encouraged them to organize themselves into groups to work on the
problem. From the outset, Mrs. C had a clear understanding that the central
difficulty for the students would be in finding the equation that describes
the number of pennies on each square as a function of the number of that
square. As the lesson progressed, she repeatedly urged students to “think
hard” and that what she wanted them to do was to “find the equation.” Mrs.
C allowed the students to engage in finding the equation for an extended
amount of time. When the students had developed two different solutions
to the problem, she asked two of the students to put their solutions up on
the board and to explain how they arrived at their solution. She then posed
that the differences in the form of the equation was a difficulty that the
students must resolve.
The analysis revealed six critical features of the teacher’s practice:

4.1. Setting expectations for student thinking

Throughout the lesson, the teacher explicitly indicated that the problem did
not have an immediate and obvious solution and that the real task for the
 EXAMINING THE TASKS OF TEACHING 11

students was to work hard and think about the task. Since this particular
lesson was the first task in an extended sequence of modeling tasks, the
teacher wanted to make clear that the rules of the game were changing;
she would not provide them with “easy answers,” but would give them
challenging tasks that they could productively think about.
Throughout the lesson, she explicitly encouraged them to “work on the
hard part” and to use their calculators to test their conjectures about their
equations and to think about the data. As the students continued to work
on the task, they began to articulate that they were working hard and were
not looking to the teacher to give them the “easy answers.” For example,
we see in the following exchange that while Mark was not confident in his
solution, he did have a strategy in mind to test his thinking and was willing
to pursue it himself, rather than ask Mrs. C to confirm his idea. As this was
happening, another student explicitly discouraged Mrs. C from looking at
his work until he had further worked on it.
Mark (getting Matt’s calculator): Can I see the calculator for two seconds
to try an equation that’s not going to work?
Mrs. C (to Mark): You’ve got one [an equation]?
Mark: I don’t know if it’s gonna work.
Mrs. C: Okay. Oh, you don’t have a calculator.
Mark: I’ll let you know if it works first.
Mrs. C: All right.
<pause>
Darren (from across the room): Don’t come over here.
Mrs. C: Don’t come over there?
Darren: No. Not until I’m finished.
This exchange suggests that the students had taken on Mrs. C’s expec-
tations that they work hard on the task and come to their own conclusions.
Since the usual approach of being instructed in how to use particular
procedures and then applying those procedures to the problem at hand was
being reversed, Mrs. C recognized that she needed to convey the change
in her expectations for her students. In the interview following the lesson
sequence, Mrs. C described this change in her practice:
Mrs. C: I would let them go that extra 15 minutes without stopping them
and picking it up myself, you know, picking up the ball and running with
it. I let them keep going.
...
Int: You would let them work longer at a problem before just rescuing them.
Mrs. C: Yes! And somehow making them get, you know, even if they were
ready to give up, just going over and doing something to give them a
little prod rather than take over.
12 H. M. DOERR

In an evaluative approach to listening, the teacher listens for correct

responses. Since the task was designed to elicit student thinking about
the mathematics (rather than to apply an already taught procedure), the
teacher’s task was no longer to evaluate student responses, but rather to
develop ways of supporting the students’ engagement with the task. Mrs. C
explicitly encouraged them to “work hard” while at the same time resisting
the tendency to tell them about or guide them toward her way of thinking
about the task. Rather than “take over,” Mrs. C was looking for ways to
“give them a little prod” so that they could continue working productively
on the task.

4.2. Focusing the task

From the teacher’s perspective, the central mathematical difficulty for the
students would be to find the closed form equation to describe the pattern of
the pennies. Filling in the table and observing the pattern of doubling were
straightforward tasks for all of the students. Yet, despite having studied
exponential functions in the previous year, it was difficult to shift from
thinking about this task recursively (as co-variation) to thinking of it as a
correspondence relationship with a closed form equation. As the students
began work on the task, they readily generated tables and graphs on both
paper and in the lists in their graphing calculators. The teacher encouraged
this work, but repeatedly focused their attention on “finding the equation,”
“see if you can come up with that equation,” “figure out if you can come up
with an equation by going out a few more squares,” and “what I’m looking
for is the equation.” I interpret this as evidence that Mrs. C recognized the
central mathematical difficulty with the task and pressed her students to
engage with it.

4.3. Listening to students’ ways of thinking about the task

Throughout the lesson, various groups of students used different approaches
to modeling this exponential growth situation: (a) using linear functions, (b)
investigating the rate of change using slope, (c) finding quadratic functions,
(d) examining the behavior of the data at the origin, and (e) exploring the
patterns of perfect squares. As this multiplicity of approaches occurred
among the students, the focus of Mrs. C’s listening was to understand how
the students were thinking about the task; that is, she was listening with
an interpretative stance. For example, one group of girls had been working
with a linear equation to fit the data and had confirmed for themselves that
that was not correct:
 EXAMINING THE TASKS OF TEACHING 13

Mrs. C: All right. You came up with y = 8x. Why did you come up with
that?
Sally: I didn’t, I got this to be
Abby: I thought you just
Sally: Because we doing
Abby: the slope, but we don’t think it’s
Mrs. C: All right, did you graph it?
Sally: Yeah.
Mrs. C: Okay. I want you to show me your graph. [Sally puts graph in
calculator] And what I want you to tell me is, when do you use slope?
Sally: When it’s a straight line
Abby: When it’s a straight line
Mrs. C: And is that a straight line?
Sally: No. We already came up with that.
Mrs. C: Okay.
Abby: And we don’t know what to do.
Mrs. C: Okay, so you are not going to think about slope unless you have a
linear graph there, right?
Sally: Right.
Mrs. C: And you don’t. You’ve got to start thinking about something else.
<pause>
Sally: We don’t know what to think about.
Abby: I never found anything other than. . .
Mrs. C: How are you filling the chart in? Think about how you’re filling
the chart in.

Mrs. C recognized that the students had already attempted and rejected
a linear approach. Both the teacher and the students appeared to see a need
to think about the task in another way. Mrs. C focused their attention back
on the chart. She then left them to continue thinking about the task, despite
the fact that they appeared “stuck.” I see this as Mrs. C interpreting that her
students were still developing ways of thinking about the task and that by
focusing their attention on the data they might continue to make progress.
The data revealed that the teacher was confident in her own ability
to understand the diversity of students’ thinking as she anticipated linear
approaches, such as the one described above. In the interview prior to the
lesson, she described her confidence in herself this year:

Mrs. C: [Last year, I was] probably not as comfortable myself [as I] would
like. I was nervous, more nervous about a kid saying something and I
was like “Where are they getting this?” Whereas now, I’m not as nervous
about that. Okay. “Now tell me what you did.”
14 H. M. DOERR

She also was attuned to listening for new approaches. Mrs. C described
this form of listening in this way:

Mrs. C: You can see that kids think differently, and you just have to make
sure that you are open to the different ways that they think . . . Part of it
is me, that just needs to start thinking, to try to understand the way that
they [the students] are thinking . . . I just need them to further explain,
because I can’t sometimes figure [out] what they’re saying. My mind
isn’t working the same way as theirs.

The teacher is aware that students might think about the task in ways
that are different from hers. Mrs. C’s awareness of the need to listen to new
approaches was vividly illustrated in her interactions with Sara:

Mrs. C: Okay. And that’s what I want you to do is come up with an equation.
[to Sara] Are you getting anywhere with it?
Sara: Does it have anything to do with perfect squares?
Mrs. C: (repeats to self) Anything to do with perfect squares . . . <pause>
Like . . . what are you looking at?
Sara: Like all the odd ones.
Mrs. C: Okay <pause>
Sara: [cannot hear]
Mrs. C: Well, that’s something that showed you something. Well, the even
ones aren’t perfect squares, though.
Mark: Yeah.
Mrs. C: Well, so figure out why that might be.

The teacher was surprised at Sara’s observation of the pattern of perfect

squares, as is indicated by her repeating the question to herself and pausing
to think about it. Mrs. C appeared to quickly realize that every other entry in
the table was a perfect square. She then reflected back to the student that not
all the entries were perfect squares and encouraged Sara and her group to
continue thinking about why that might be so. These students’ investigation
of the pattern of perfect squares and another group’s investigation of the
behavior of the data at the origin were novel ways of student thinking from
the teacher’s perspective. In both cases, the teacher pressed the students
to continue to follow their way of thinking and to investigate why their
current claims may be true. In other words, rather than guiding the students
to follow a hypothetical learning trajectory, the teacher was asking them
to follow their own ways of thinking. Furthermore, the teacher appeared
to assimilate these novel approaches into her overall schema for students’
ways of thinking about the task.
 EXAMINING THE TASKS OF TEACHING 15

4.4. Asking for student descriptions, explanations, and justifications

The teacher’s response to the various ways of students’ thinking was to
ask the students to describe, explain and, on occasion, to justify their in-
terpretations and reasoning. For example, when one student investigated
slope, she asked him to describe how he found the slope and to explain how
he was using that to find an equation to fit the data. In the course of the
student’s explanation, he recognized that “the slope is always changing.”
This led him to consider a quadratic function rather than a linear one.

Mrs. C: Yes. It is the slope. Didn’t you do a change in y over a change in

x? [Bill looks on at Jerry’s work]
Mrs. C (to Bill): No, he [Jerry] did the slope correctly.
Jerry: Well is there something wrong here?
Mrs. C: No, it is the slope, right?
Bill: Okay, okay, okay, I understand what you did. All right.
Mrs. C: It is the slope of the line connecting this [point] and this [point].
But [to Jerry] what did you just say?
Jerry: the slope changes, well, yeah
Mrs. C: So in other words, if you [Bill] used different points than he [Jerry]
did . . . .
Jerry: you’re going to get a different slope each time
Mrs. C: Which means?
Jerry: then, ‘cause it’s not a straight line. [Mrs. C shrugs affirmatively] So
this will not work.
Mrs. C: So if you used this point and this point, you won’t get the same
slope.
Jerry: So we have to figure out a parabola like.
Mrs. C: [nodding] Right. You could figure out an equation, but what did
you just say it wasn’t?
Jerry: A line,
Mrs. C: Okay, so you’ve ruled that out anyway. Right?
Bill: It’s challenging stuff.
Mrs. C: Yes, I know. [Mrs. C moves to another group of students]

In asking for a description and explanation, the teacher created a situa-

tion where the student shifted to a new way of thinking about the problem.
The focus on the changing of the slope led Jerry to shift from a linear way
of thinking about the problem to investigate whether the needed function
could be quadratic, since he knew from the previous unit that the slope of a
parabola changes. While Mrs. C knew that the parabola was not a solution
to the problem, she let Jerry continue with his own way of thinking about
the problem. Mrs. C saw that Jerry was actively engaged in pursuing a
16 H. M. DOERR

potentially viable analysis of the problem, namely the property of chang-

ing slope. By asking the student to describe his solution, Mrs. C supported
the student in revising his own solution, rather than guiding him along a
learning trajectory that she might have had in mind. In this way, the descrip-
tions and explanation served not only to help Mrs. C in understanding the
student’s current way of thinking, but also to help the student in evaluating
and revising his current way of thinking about the problem.

4.5. Sharing and comparing solutions

After extended time working on the task, several groups of students had
arrived at two different, but equivalent, solutions to the problem of finding
an equation. The teacher made these two solutions public on the board in
the front of the classroom (see Equation 1) and engaged the whole class in
an extended discussion of why these equations were the same and how to
justify that claim.
2x
y= and y = 2x−1 (1)
2
Mrs. C began by asking if both of the equations “worked” for the pennies
data, since they didn’t “look the same”:

Mrs. C: Which of those equations work?

S: They both do.
Mrs. C: How come they both do? They don’t look the same.
Mark: Stan’s looks easier.

The teacher then asked the students to clarify the meaning of the vari-
ables in both equations. Stan and Sara both had the same meaning for the
variables:

Sara: X is the square that you’re on and Y is the number of pennies on that
square.

Then Mrs. C asked Stan to describe in considerable detail how he had

thought about the data in order to arrive at his equation. In sharing his
thinking with the class, Stan described how he first looked for a linear
relationship (“multiply something times X to get . . . each number in the
Y”) and then shifted to a quadratic relationship when that “didn’t work
out.” After rejecting the quadratic, Stan shifted his focus to the recursive
pattern, only this time he realized that every other entry in his table could
be found by multiplying successively by four, rather than two. Finally, Stan
 EXAMINING THE TASKS OF TEACHING 17

recognized that “you can do something to the power of two” and this finally
yielded the closed form solution that he was looking for.
The teacher, in discussing her goals for the students, had expressed her
desire to have the students give explanations that moved beyond descrip-
tions of calculations. In the first interview, Mrs. C said “The explanation is
what I’m really looking for . . . . They have to be able to give explanations
of what they are doing and it is not just a calculation type of exercise.”
Mrs. C followed Stan’s comments by remarking that all of the students
were looking at the chart and trying to see patterns. The teacher did not
make visible the pattern of the power of twos, in the sense of writing 8 as
2 × 2 × 2, but turned the discussion to the comparison of the two student
solutions. She challenged the students to explain why the solutions were
the same:

Mrs. C: Okay, now is anybody going to tell me why those both work?
Because they look different.
Jenny: They’re the same equation. They just look different.
Mrs. C: All right. You are saying they are the same equation. How come?
I mean, they look different to me, don’t they look different to you?
Mark (joking): Looks can be deceiving.
Mrs. C (laughs): They are the same equation. Can you tell me why they are
the same equation?

Many of the students had entered both equations into their calculators
and had seen that they generated the same graph and/or the same table.
However, Mrs. C continued to press them for a mathematical justification
that would show that the equations were the same. At this point, Mrs. C led
a whole class discussion in which they verified the algebraic equivalence
of the two solutions. Sara explained the equivalence of the solutions like
this:

Sara: It’s just a different way of writing the negative one.

S: Yeah.
Mrs. C: All right. So that one [Stan’s equation] shows to get the negative
one, he
Sara: divided by two
Mrs. C: and you’re showing . . . .
Sara: . . . it’s, you take it away from the exponent.

The teacher had intentionally let the students “work on it [the task]
until they had two different solutions.” This strategy enabled the teacher to
further her goal of engaging the students in describing and explaining their
18 H. M. DOERR

solutions. However, the teacher also shifted the task beyond a description
and explanation of the solutions. Mrs. C had created an opportunity for the
students to engage in a discussion of the mathematical equivalency of the
two solutions. In other words, the students were now in a position where
they were the ones evaluating the validity of their work.

4.6. Recognizing mathematical connections

The teacher appeared to have recognized the mathematical connections be-
tween the students’ responses to this task and later tasks within the overall
sequence of tasks. This occurred in two ways in this particular lesson, as the
teacher recognized: (a) the significance of the notion of changing slope in
understanding the distinction between exponential and linear functions and
(b) the role of alternative forms of equivalent equations in understanding
transformations of exponential functions. In her discussion with one stu-
dent about the changing slope, the teacher encouraged him to explore this
line of reasoning. Although it was not an immediate solution to the prob-
lem, the student revised his way of thinking about the changing slope in
order to reject a linear model and then later a quadratic model. The teacher
recognized that the changing slope of an exponential function was an im-
portant characteristic of the function that would continue to be developed
throughout the sequence of tasks; hence, the student’s investigation of this
concept was a worthwhile avenue for the student to pursue.
Similarly, following the comparison of the two student solutions de-
scribed above, the teacher pressed the students for other possible solutions
to the problem:

Mrs. C: Is there another way I could write this [Stan’s] equation?

Sara: Probably.
Mrs. C: Probably. Anybody think of another way of writing the equation?
<pause> Not yet? Okay.

While Sara recognized that there might “probably” be other ways to

write the equations that she and Stan had found, neither she nor any other
student was able to offer any suggestions at this moment. However, Mrs.
C chose not to pursue the issue at this time. That alternative forms of
equivalent equations would emerge over the larger sequence of tasks had
been made explicit during the meetings in which the teachers examined the
investigations and had shared alternative approaches to transformations
of exponential functions. I interpret the comparison of equivalent forms
of solutions as indicative that Mrs. C recognized that this concept would
undergo further development across the sequence of tasks.
 EXAMINING THE TASKS OF TEACHING 19

5. D ISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

The mathematical task investigated in this lesson presented the students

with a conceptual challenge, namely the shift from a recursive view to
a correspondence view of a function, and with an opportunity to ap-
proach the task in multiple ways. This task was set in a context that pro-
vided a significant reversal from the students’ usual approach to learn-
ing mathematics, that is, by applying known procedures to new problem
situations. In this task, the students themselves had to mathematize the
given problem situation, thereby revealing their different ways of think-
ing about the task. This reversal placed new demands on the teacher
as can be seen in the analysis of the teacher’s interpretations of stu-
dents’ thinking and in the teacher’s subsequent actions in her classroom
practice.
The teacher had a set of interpretations (or schema) for understanding
the multiplicity of ways that students might think about the mathematics
of the task that included using linear functions, investigating the rate of
change using slope, and finding quadratic functions. As the lesson pro-
gressed, she added two new ways of thinking about the problem through
listening to two unexpected student approaches: examining the behavior
of the data at the origin and exploring the patterns of perfect squares. This
suggests that by listening to students’ ways of thinking the teacher’s schema
developed in ways that included a greater diversity of students’ thinking.
The teacher’s schema was a set of interpretations of possible ideas students
might have without necessarily describing any particular trajectory through
those ideas. Indeed, the possibilities of trajectories through these ideas for
nearly 20 students would be unmanageably large for a teacher. Rather, the
teacher had a set of ways of thinking about the task that she knew would be
productive for the students, in the sense that their engagement with these
early ways of thinking about the mathematics of the task were likely to lead
the students to more useful ways of thinking about the mathematics of the
task.
The teacher’s schema for the ways that students might think about the
problem included the recognition of ideas that would be encountered and
developed over the sequence of tasks. The teacher appeared to recognize
that some of the rudimentary ideas in this task foreshadowed significant
mathematical ideas that would emerge over the larger sequence of tasks
that the students would engage with. In particular, the teacher encouraged
students in investigating slope, as she realized that the idea of how a function
is changing was a major theme in the tasks that followed in the instructional
unit. The teacher saw the comparison of students’ symbolic solutions as
a potentially fruitful topic of discussion, since this, too, would be further
20 H. M. DOERR

addressed in students’ later investigations of equivalent expressions for the

transformations of exponential functions.
The listening for the purpose of understanding rather than evaluation
(or Davis’s (1997) interpretive listening) that occurred with this teacher
enabled her to manage the multiplicity of ideas in the class and to support
the multiple developments of students’ ideas. That is, the teacher supported
a diversity of ideas in the classroom rather than guiding students along
particular paths or trajectories. A crucial characteristic of her support was
in how she shifted the role of evaluator from herself to her students. This
was evident in her normative actions that encouraged the students to work
hard on the problem, suggesting to them that they are in fact able to make
sense of the task in ways that move towards solutions.
The shift toward student evaluation of solutions was evident as the
students themselves tested and rejected ideas about linearity, patterns of odd
numbers, and the relationship of the changing slope to a possible quadratic
function. She encouraged them to test their ideas by comparing the graph of
their equations to the graph of the data. As the teacher asked for students to
describe and explain their thinking, this not only contributed to the teacher’s
understanding of their thinking, but it created a situation where the students
could refine their thinking and shift to a new way of thinking about the
problem. This shifted the task of teaching from guiding the students along
a known (to the teacher) path or trajectory to fostering a multiplicity or
diversity of ideas and then engaging the students in evaluating, revising
and refining their ideas towards ones that are increasingly useful for the
task at hand.

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foun-
dation (NSF) under Grant No. 9722235. Any opinions, findings and con-
clusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the
author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

APPENDIX : THE PENNIES PROBLEM

Fully appreciating the nature of growth and decay can help us understand
much of what we see in the world around us. Many phenomena, such as the
spread of the AIDS virus, radioactive decay, and the payments you make
on a car, can be modeled by functions that describe how things grow or
decline over time. To prepare you for investigating such phenomena, you
should work on a problem that you may have seen before:
 EXAMINING THE TASKS OF TEACHING 21

If you place a penny on the first square of a checkerboard, two pennies on the
second square, four on the third square, eight on the fourth square, and so on, how
many pennies are on the very last square? A checkerboard is eight by eight squares.

Fill in the following table, in which the second column gives the number
of pennies on the square whose number is in the first column.

Number of square Number of pennies

1
2
3
4
5
6

Enter these values in your calculator and plot the points. What patterns
do you find in the data? Write an equation that gives the number of pennies
as a function of the number of the square. Graph this equation and compare
it to your plot of the data points. Compare the table values of the equation
with your data points. If your equation is correct, they should be the same.
What is a reasonable domain and range for this function? What is the dollar
value of the pennies on the 64th square?

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Syracuse University
Mathematics Department
215 Carnegie Hall
Syracuse
NY 13244, USA
E-mail: hmdoerr@syr.edu