Cultivating Inquiry into the Teaching of Mathematics (CITM) is a project conducted by SummerMath for Teachers (SMT) of Mount Holyoke College. CITM is designed to assist teachers and teacher leaders

• to reconsider their own teaching practice
• to examine the way professional development is carried out
• to define a new role for teachers as active participants engaging with their peers in an effort to support mathematics education reform throughout their schools

  Cultivating Inquiry into the Teaching of Mathematics: Seminar for Undergraduates

First offered in the academic year of 1996-1997 to twenty-four Massachusetts educators, CITM has continued into the 1997-1998 academic year with eighteen of its original participants and twelve additional educators. The CITM seminar draws on material from the Developing Mathematical Ideas curriculum, as well as from the two-volume collection of teacher-written narratives, What's Happening in Math Class?, edited by Dr. Deborah Schifter of the Education Development Center, Inc. published by Teachers College Press.

CITM incorporates the use of materials from the facilitator's guide of DMI as a means of provoking discussion about the work of the teacher educator. In particular, one component of the facilitator's guide, Maxine's Journal which details one facilitator's reflections on a DMI seminar, offers teacher educators an opportunity to reflect on the issues they face as they work to help teachers extend their mathematical understandings and to develop new notions of what it means to teach and to learn mathematics.

The seminar requires participants to complete reading and writing assignments in preparation for each meeting and to maintain a portfolio of their work. Participating educators receive four graduate credits in mathematics education each year.

• develop a sense of mathematics as a logically interconnected body of ideas to be explored, rather than as a set of discrete facts and procedures to be memorized
• view learning as a process of concept construction and refinement of ideas
• learn to listen to, follow and analyze children's mathematical thinking
• develop a disposition of inquiry toward learning and teaching
• establish norms and structures to support collegial relationships

The CITM-U course meets twice weekly in 75 minute sessions over the course of a fourteen week semester. Additionally, the CITM-U students participate in a pre-practicum field experience with a practicing teacher who is engaged in the process of reforming his or her own classroom practice.

Offered on an experimental basis in the spring of 1997 to twenty-one students, the CITM-U course was so successful that it has become part of the regular offerings of the Psychology and Education Department at Mount Holyoke College. Students receive four credits upon completion of the course.

In the fall of 1998, with funding from the MA Board of Education Goals 2000 project, the CITM course for Undergraduates became part of the Sustaining a Community of Inquiry program. (SCI) This innovative program provides the opportunity for in-service and pre-service teachers to work together in an intellectually stimulating environment.

Through SCI, SummerMath for Teachers offers a seminar based on the curriculum Developing Mathematical Ideas to a class composed of ten undergraduate students and ten inservice teachers. The undergraduate students are paired with the teachers for the field experiences. In these field experiences SCI participants interview children to analyze their mathematical thinking and write episodes describing the mathematical conversations of the classroom. The partnerships between pre-service and in-service teachers allow opportunities for both groups as they work together to analyze the mathematical thinking of children, deepen their own mathematical knowledge, and consider the implications of what they are experiencing for the practice of teaching.

For the fall semester, the seminar meets each Monday from 4 to 7; interest from both undergraduates and teachers was so high that a similar program will be offered in the spring semester.

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