In the Pursuit of Relevance – Mathematicians Designing Tasks for Elementary School Teachers

In this paper we investigate task design in an unusual professional development course for elementary school teachers, conceived and taught by research mathematicians. Prior analysis singled out relevance for teaching as a critical design issue for engaging teachers in effective learning. The aim of the current research is to uncover how relevance for teaching was achieved without compromising mathematical rigor and depth. Findings are based on an analysis of three representative cases of task designing in which the authors where involved – one as instructor and task designer, the other as participant observer. Our analysis reveals a designing model that first addresses purely mathematical concerns and then refines tasks, taking into consideration a series of constraints imposed by the requirement of relevance for teaching. Using Schoenfeld’s Resources-Orientations-Goals framework for decision-making, we show how the mathematicians drew on their special knowledge of mathematical content to achieve such relevance in ingenious ways. We find that tasks were best aligned with Knowles’s principles of Adult Learning in cases where the designers appropriated the teachers’ point of view, no longer seeing the need for relevance as a constraining imposition, but rather as an opportunity to combine and merge knowledge specific for teaching and purely mathematical knowledge.