An Investigation of Teachers’ Shared Interpretations of Their Roles in Supporting and Enhancing Group Functioning

Abstract

This study investigates the work done by two teams of elementary teachers as they designed teacher level classroom tools to help them support and enhance their students working in groups solving model eliciting activities (Lesh et al., Handbook of research design in mathematics and science education, pp. 591–645, 2000). The goal of this study was to investigate two different teams of teachers’ shared interpretation of the teacher’s role in supporting and enhancing students’ functioning well in groups. These interpretations are described as they are expressed in the form of two tools designed for optimizing those roles, a group observation tool, and a teacher self-coaching tool. The results of the study include: (1) the tested and refined tools that the teams produced which expressed their ways of thinking, and (2) the shared interpretations of the teams and the researcher of the themes and trends of thinking across the development of those tools.KeywordsProfessional Development ProjectObservation ToolTeacher TeamMathematic Professional DevelopmentShared InterpretationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.