This autobiographical essay depicts a process of development through which an elementary school teacher becomes both expert and professional. With an MA in Medieval History and no teacher education coursework, the writer adopts a personalistic, "unorthodox traditional" approach to instruction. Exposure to controversy among traditionalists and innovators and involvement in after-school discussions and weekly inservice workshops provides her with a first view of professionals at work on educational questions for which there are no simple and ready answers. Two years of subsequent participation in a Cambridge teachers' seminar, requiring microscopic classroom observation of children's encounters with materials and minute analysis of concrete instances of children's thinking, produces guidelines for managing classroom activity for cognitive outcomes. Then, first hand experience with a school system exclusively committed to behaviorist principles and direct instruction techniques provides clarifying contrast for the writer's emerging philosophical orientation. A need for conceptual integration and a rationale for classroom practice promotes an extensive reading of the Piagetian developmental literature from which she gains the ability to delineate differences between learning theory and developmental approaches to education. The essay continues with a description of the teacher's first cognitively oriented open classroom and a discussion of new questions emerging from her errors and her successes. (Author/RH)