"I Don't Understand the Purpose of This Experience”: Tensions in Collaborative, Process-oriented Professional Development for Mathematics Teachers
Keywords:
mathematics teacher education research, collaboration, facilitators, process-orientated professional development, responsivenessAbstract
Mathematics teachers' professional learning is moving away from prescriptive professional development (PD) toward collaborative, practice-based models—such as video-clubs and lesson co-design—which provide teachers with space and time to discuss problems of practice among peers. Some models, which we term "process-oriented", exclusively focus on fostering teachers’ professional discourse and reflection rather than pushing for the implementation of specific classroom practices. Although research has documented the affordances of process-oriented teacher learning, less is known about the complexities involved. This multi-perspective qualitative study describes tensions surfaced by teachers and a facilitator in an online lesson-design programme in the United States. We identify two core tensions: valuing collaboration and relating to the programme’s process-oriented aims, and we trace these tensions to participants’ prior PD and classroom experiences, showing how implicit expectations about PD processes and outcomes shape participants' engagement with innovative learning opportunities. These findings contribute to the field's understanding of collaborative and process-oriented teacher learning by highlighting the presence of a didactical contract within in-service teacher learning contexts, which resonates with the classroom didactical contract. We posit that recognising and addressing teachers' implicit expectations is essential for designing PD that is not only innovative in form but also responsive to practitioners.
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