Inquiry activities are not for everyone: teachers’ beliefs and professional development

This study investigates teachers’ beliefs about the inquiry-based learning approach in mathematics. In particular, as first research problem, it addresses teachers’ beliefs about the appropriateness of inquiry activities for all the student, after three years of attendance of a professional development program, focused on inquiry. As second research problem, it studies the evolution of teachers’ beliefs and practices, during their fourth year of attendance of the program. The results show that, at the beginning of the fourth year, the teachers, despite thinking that inquiry activities in mathematics have several valuable aspects, held the belief that they are not appropriate for all the students, but only for the high-achieving ones. The two case studies, analyzed to address the second problem, refer to two teachers with different outcomes of their developmental paths. During the fourth year, in which the teachers have been invited to experiment with inquiry activities in their whole classes, one of them accepted the challenge and, as a consequence, had the opportunity to change both her practices and her beliefs. The second teacher, instead, continued to propose inquiry activities only to her high-achieving students and, consequently, showed no signs of change, neither in her practices, nor in her beliefs.