Teacher learning within communities of practice: Using students' mathematical thinking to guide teacher inquiry

Teacher learning in mathematics is more than a matter of expanding knowledge and developing new pedagogical practices. It is also an enterprise that consists of crafting and re-crafting an identity of what it means to teach and to learn mathematics. This dissertation advances our understanding of teacher learning as participation in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The study reports the results of a professional development project whose goal was to help teachers develop their understandings of students' mathematical thinking through their professional inquiry inside and outside of the classroom. Teachers at one school met in monthly workgroups throughout the year. Prior to each workgroup, they posed a similar problem to their students. The workgroup discussions centered on the student work those problems generated. Teachers' workgroups and classrooms served as local and interacting communities of practice. The study coordinates qualitative analyses of communal and individual trajectories of learning.; The analyses first document interrelated shifts in workgroup participation. The initial activity of the workgroups involved conversations that detailed students' mathematical strategies. The focus on student thinking allowed teachers to develop a framework for interpreting student thinking, which included principled ideas about place value understanding and mathematical sophistication. The workgroups also served as communities where teachers shared and examined their classroom practices. As the year progressed, they began to puzzle over their roles in the classrooms, not only in eliciting student thinking, but in extending and building students' mathematical understandings.; Second, the analyses unveil the diversity in individual participation across the workgroup and classroom communities. Three forms of participation were identified: disassociated, peripheral, and generative. Shifts in participation are documented and explained. Moving towards generative participation involved shaping an identity of teaching as an intellectual activity centered around eliciting, interpreting, and making use of student thinking. Implications for the study of teacher learning, professional development, and school change are discussed.