LEARNING FROM A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DESIGN EXPERIMENT: INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT OF TEACHING

In this paper we report our learning as researchers from a five-year professional development design experiment. At its completion, we identified five strands of support as being essential to mathematics teachers’ learning. However, when planning the design experiment based on prior research, we only explicitly considered two of these strands: Building Mathematical Competence and Focus on Student Reasoning. The significance of three more strands of support became evident during the course of the experiment. We document the emergence of one of these strands, Understanding the Institutional Context of Teaching, by focusing on pivotal episodes from the experiment.

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