Implementation through participation: Theoretical considerations and an illustrative case

Overview & Synopsis

This paper explores a particular model of implementation of research: teacher adaption of research procedures and ideas in their classrooms as part of participation in community educational research. The TRAIL (Teacher-Researcher Alliance for Investigating Learning) project seeks to guide the design and conduct of co-learning partnerships between mathematics teachers and mathematics education researchers. In TRAIL, mathematics teachers actively participate in formulating research goals and designing research tools, and then collect data in their classrooms and analyze together the shared data corpus. In the first part of the paper, we present theoretical underpinnings of implementation through participation in TRAIL. In the second part, we examine implementation through participation in an illustrative case, in which a group of teachers designed and explored classroom situations aimed at promoting student questions in the classrooms.