Chapter 2: Using Your Own Teaching as a site for Research into Practice

The purpose of this chapter is to convey the authors’ journey as they participated in a long-term process of systematically analyzing classroom teaching in order to uncover what it takes to support children to learn mathematics with understanding. This occurred in the context of a five-year professional development project involving the implementation of the Investigations in Number, Data, and Space¹ (Investigations) curriculum across several different districts. We begin by briefly describing the professional development project that provided the context and impetus for our drive to pursue more deliberate inquiry into teaching, and then describe the specific journey of one teacher—Mary Kay Archer. Although most of the chapter is written in Mary Kay’s voice, the words, thoughts, and insights into teaching represent our collective attempt to convey the depth to which this experience has affected us all.