UNDERSTANDING MATHEMATICS TEACHERS’ COLLABORATIVE SENSEMAKING IN THE CONTEXT OF TEACHERS’ LEARNING ECOLOGIES.

Over the last two decades, researchers have portrayed quality professional development for mathematics teachers as collaborative and situated in teachers’ instructional realities. However, empirical findings also point out various impediments to transforming teacher conversations into consequential learning. These findings illuminate the need to acknowledge additional resources that teachers bring to professional interactions and the need for ever more nuanced theories of teacher learning to inform teacher educators’ work. Inspired by ecological models of learning, in this conceptual paper I work towards understanding teachers’ collaborative sensemaking as part of broader teacher learning ecologies. I distinguish and name possible scopes and contexts for the study of teacher learning in conversations about instruction, and then identify directions for future research towards stronger connections between immediate and broader contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]