Each teacher profile describes how the lesson was developed and includes a question and answer discussion about the lesson's relationship to reform issues. Additional chapters describe the NCTM Standards documents, discuss some of the research that provided the framework for their development, and illustrate how key elements of exemplary practices, such as problem solving, reasoning, and communication, can be implemented in the classroom. In a sample lesson, algebra students explore the nature of exponential and linear growth functions with eight situation based problems designed to allow students to think about a variety of configurations of growth and decay versus linear climb and fall. Situations include population growth, fan club membership, and investments. Students use spreadsheets and a computer graphing program to explore the situations numerically and graphically and to find the point of intersection for each problem's graph.
Students check a variety of points in their model and write a paragraph explaining their solution.
Finally, students create a sensible problem situation from the real world that compares two kinds of growth or decay, write the equations, find the solution, and draw a cartoon that represents the situation. An extensive bibliography is included. ENC does NOT distribute this resource.