Promoting Teacher Learning: Implications for Designing Professional Development Programs

초록

To offer insights in organizing professional development programs to promote teachers' substantial ongoing learning, this paper provides an overview of situative perspectives in terms of cognition as situated, cognition as social, and cognition as distributed. Then, it describes research findings on how mathematics teachers can enhance their knowledge and thus improve their instructional practices through participation in a professional development program that mainly provides opportunities to learn and analyze students' mathematical thinking and to perform mathematical tasks through which they interpret the understanding of students' mathematical thinking. Further, it shows that a knowledge of students' mathematical thinking is a powerful tool for teacher learning. In addition, it suggests that teacher-researcher and teacher-teacher collaborative activities influence considerably teachers' understanding and practice as such collaborations help teachers understand new ideas of teaching and develop innovative instructional practices.

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