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The Urban Mathematics Collaborative Project

A Study of Teacher, Community, and Reform

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Bold Ventures

Abstract

In a three-year junior high school of 800 students—grades 7 (age 12), 8 (age 13), and 9 (age 14)—located south of the automobile bypass around Memphis, Tennessee, a mathematics teacher in a large classroom moves among her students as they work in groups of four. Her students sit at clusters of desks, and the walls are covered with numerical charts and mathematics slogans. Over the past 10 years, this teacher has made a significant transformation from conducting a very controlled classroom dominated by her lecturing. Now her students are much more actively engaged in learning mathematics by working and interacting with each other. She spends much less time standing in front of her classroom telling her students what to do. Her students are doing projects and writing about their thinking, individually and—especially—in groups. She has become very active professionally in writing grants to fund projects, attending professional meetings and institutes, making presentations at national meetings, and field testing a new mathematics curriculum.

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© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Webb, N.L., Heck, D.J., Tate, W.F. (1996). The Urban Mathematics Collaborative Project. In: Raizen, S.A., Britton, E.D. (eds) Bold Ventures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0339-5_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0339-5_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-6639-6

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