Developing Teachers as Researchers: A Collaborative Approach 1

This paper describes how one graduate student in a master's degree program for mathematics teachers moved from a state of confusion and anxiety to confidence in herself as a teacher researcher via a three-way collaboration among the teacher, her university professor, and her school supervisor. The second semester of her year-long Research in Education course was spent researching, analyzing, and interpreting data for her research project. The success of her project and her transformation to a classroom researcher was due to several factors within this collaboration. First, in the beginning, she was the "middle person " trying alone to negotiate a deal enabling her to satisfy course requirements and fulfill her responsibility as a teacher. Things became easier when she, the professor, and the supervisor communicated directly to clarify what she needed to do and how she could work this into her real work day, thus connecting the academic to the practical in a concrete way. Second, through the collaboration, she gained enough confidence to examine her own teaching and make it the object of her investigation, rather tha