Abstract
Our purpose in this chapter is to outline a general approach to collaborating with teachers in order to support the establishment of a professional teaching community. As will become apparent, our goal is to help teachers develop instructional practices in which they induct their students into the ways of reasoning of the discipline by building systematically on their current mathematical activity. We develop the rationale for the approach we propose by describing how our thinking about in-service teacher development has evolved over the last thirteen years or so. To this end, we first revisit work conducted in collaboration with Erna Yackel and Terry Wood between 1986 and 1992 in which we supported the development of American second- and third-grade teachers. In doing so, we tease out aspects of the approach we took that still appear viable and discuss two major lessons that we learned. In the next section of the chapter, we draw on a series of teaching experiments we have conducted over the past seven years in American elementary and middle-school classrooms both to critique our prior work and to develop three further aspects of the approach we propose. We conclude by highlighting broad features of the approach and by locating them in institutional context.
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Cobb, P., Mcclain, K. (2001). An Approach for Supporting Teachers’ Learning in Social Context. In: Lin, FL., Cooney, T.J. (eds) Making Sense of Mathematics Teacher Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0828-0_10
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