Transforming practice: Using collective argumentation to bring about teacher change in a year 7 mathematics classroom

Providing assistance to teachers in the design of efficacious learning environments is an essential element in promoting teacher change in the teaching of mathematics. The process of teacher change, however, may be demonstrated in quite different ways by different teachers. This paper provides insights into the process of change as perceived by one teacher as she went about employing Collective Argumentation to reconstitute her pedagogy so as to better promote the learning of mathematics in her Year 7 classroom. The recent review of Mathematics teaching in Australia (DEST, 2003) emphasised the need for schools to design pedagogies that stimulate interest, curiosity, substantive understanding, and problem solving amongst students, and that provide teachers with the means to teach mathematics confidently and competently. Designing learning environments that support a teacher’s use of such pedagogies in the everyday classroom is a key challenge for the field of mathematics teaching and learning. Teacher use of productive pedagogical techniques requires that teachers learn as they teach (Sherin, 2002). That is, that teachers change the familiar routines that they have employed in the past to teach mathematics to better suit a focus on the multiple representations of conceptua