Teachers’ Selection of Resources in an Era of Plenty: An Interview Study with Secondary Mathematics Teachers in England

Abstract

The proliferation of instructional resources and the potential impact of teachers’ resource selection on students’ learning opportunities create a need for research on teachers’ selection of resources. We report results from an interview study with 36 secondary mathematics teachers in England, designed to find out (1) what instructional resources teachers choose for their everyday practice, thus beginning to document what we call a resource “pool of possibilities” to represent teachers’ resource options, and (2) the reasons for teachers’ choices, thus beginning to construct a taxonomy of what we call teachers’ “resource pre-disposition” to schematize teachers’ selection decisions. Our results show a large pool of possibilities and a complex taxonomy of teachers’ resource pre-disposition.