Restructuring mathematics teaching | learning: Co-teaching as a designed approach to teachers' collaborative inquiry

This study explores how participation in collaborative inquiry opens space for an expanded set of understandings and practices for mathematics teaching | learning. It examines the affordances of collaborative inquiry to promote, or constrain, teacher learning in the context of teachers’ day to day work. Sociocultural perspectives underpin the study whereby professional learning is presumed to be situated in the social and cultural contexts of teachers’ work. A survey of the literature supports the assumption that persistent underachievement in mathematics for some groups of learners requires shifts in what teachers know and can do and reveals the importance of collaboration and inquiry for teacher learning. The study involved a participatory, design-based approach underpinned by an authentic and appreciative inquiry stance. Design-based research was chosen for its proximity to practice and its focus on connections between the enactment of learning designs and outcomes of interest. The research was iterative and cyclical whereby the researcher worked with a group of four teachers in one New Zealand primary school to design, implement and refine an approach to teachers’ collaborative inquiry. A range of data were gathered during a 6-month collaboration, including from teacher interviews, classroom observations and three-weekly group meetings. The analysis took a pragmatic and multi-theoretical approach to examine what it meant to design and enact teachers’ collaborative inquiry. Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) was employed to capture the complexity of the teachers’ collaborative inquiry activity and to analyse and interpret the contradictions that arose. A key finding was that a co-teaching inquiry approach fostered conditions that afforded teachers’ expanded access to and depth of engagement with new, and often dissonant, practice ideas. Through co-teaching, mathematics teaching | learning was restructured within three interconnected fields of practice: th