Mathematics programmes in basic education are currently undergoing reform in Portugal. This papersets out to see how teachers are putting the new guidelines for the teaching of mathematics intopractice, with particular emphasis on maths communication in the classroom. To achieve this, anexperiment in teaching the topic 'Sequences and Regularities' with open-ended tasks, using aqualitative and interpretative approach, is reported. Data were collected during two classobservations, from two interviews and by analysing the activities of the students. An exploratory taskwas chosen in the first lesson and a investigative one in the second. One month separated the twolessons, and during this time the teacher read and discussed texts on mathematics communication.Observation of the first lesson showed that the communication in the classroom was mostly focusedon the teacher, which provided little student-student and student-class interaction. In the secondobserved lesson, the teacher changed the attention she paid to what each student said and did,encouraging the students to ask each other and encouraged student-class and the student-studentcommunication.
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