New and innovative approaches to teaching in elementary schools are often advocated by university teacher education programs but fail to reach the actual classroom. This phenomenon was explored by interviewing graduates from the University of Utah elementary education program. These teachers were required to take two courses designed to prepare them to teach mathematics in elementary school. The first was designed to assist future teachers in gaining proficiency in the processes of mathematics as learners. The second helps them to learn how to teach mathematics to children. In these courses the approach has a process rather than a content orientation that asks the learner to engage in the activities of thinking, experimentation, problem solving, and verification with concrete models instead of mere memorization. The research into implementation of this teaching method had three aims: determine to what extent the graduates were using this approach in their classrooms; investigate the reasons why those who were only using the approach partially were not incorporating it in their teaching to a greater extent; and determine whether any differences existed in the responses made by teachers who had been teaching for different lengths of time. It was discovered that beginning teachers were inclined to use the teaching methods commonly in use in their schools rather than to innovate, but that teachers with more experience increasingly used the innovative approach they had learned at the university. The teachers revealed that while they understood, accepted, and valued the approach, and knew how to teach it to small groups of children, they were not taught how to organize and manage their classrooms so they could utilize it in their math programs. (JD)