External reform initiatives and teachers' efforts to reconstruct their practice: The mediating role of teachers' zones of enactment

This paper considers the interplay of teachers' capacity and will to reconstruct their mathematics practice with teachers' incentives and opportunities to learn as these are mobilized by the school system and agencies beyond the formal system. Comparing those teachers in the study who had changed the core of their practice substantially with those teachers who had not, it is argued that teachers' zones of enactment play a crucial role in their implementation of instructional reform. The zones of enactment of those teachers who had changed the core of their practice are characterized and it is conjectured that the extent to which teachers revise their practice will depend on the characteristics of their zones of enactment.