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Conducting Design Experiments to Support Teachers' Learning: A Reﬂection

From the Field
Article in Journal of the Learning Sciences · April 2009

DOI: 10.1080/10508400902797933
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Conducting Design Experiments to Support Teachers' Learning: A

Reflection From the Field
Paul Cobba; Qing Zhaoa; Chrystal Deanb
a
Department of Teaching and Learning, Vanderbilt University, b Department of Curriculum and
Instruction, Appalachian State University,
To cite this Article Cobb, Paul , Zhao, Qing and Dean, Chrystal(2009) 'Conducting Design Experiments to Support
Teachers' Learning: A Reflection From the Field', Journal of the Learning Sciences, 18: 2, 165 — 199
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THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 18: 165–199, 2009
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DOI: 10.1080/10508400902797933
Conducting Design Experiments

to Support Teachers’ Learning:
A Reflection From the Field
Downloaded By: [VUL Vanderbilt University] At: 15:28 28 September 2010
Paul Cobb and Qing Zhao

Department of Teaching and Learning
Vanderbilt University
Chrystal Dean
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
Appalachian State University
This article focuses on 3 conceptual challenges that we sought to address while con-
ducting a design experiment in which we supported the learning of a group of middle
school mathematics teachers. These challenges involved (a) situating teachers’ activ-
ity in the institutional setting of the schools and district in which they worked, (b) de-
veloping an interpretive framework that enabled us to document the collective learn-
ing of teacher groups, and (c) reconceptualizing the relations between teachers’
activity in professional development sessions and in their classrooms. For each chal-
lenge, we describe both the initial approach that we developed while preparing for
the experiment and the modifications that we found it necessary to make once the ex-
periment was in progress. Our goal in sharing these reflections from the field is to
contribute to the task of extending the design experiment methodology to investigate
the learning of groups of practicing teachers rather than groups of students.
The design research methodology has become increasingly prominent in the learn-
ing sciences and in several related fields of educational research in recent years.
Most design research studies focus on students’ mathematical learning either as
they interact one on one with a researcher (e.g., Cobb & Steffe, 1983; Steffe &
Thompson, 2000) or as they participate in classroom communal processes (e.g.,
Confrey & Smith, 1995; Lehrer & Schauble, 2004; Stephan, Bowers, & Cobb,
Correspondence should be addressed to Paul Cobb, Vanderbilt University, Teaching and Learning,
GPC Box 330, Nashville, TN 37203. E-mail: paul.cobb@vanderbilt.edu
166 COBB, ZHAO, AND DEAN
2003). In comparison, design experiments conducted to support and investigate the

learning of practicing teachers are far less common. Our purpose in this article is to
report on three conceptual challenges that needed to be addressed when we at-
tempted to “engineer” the learning of a group of middle school mathematics teach-
ers who taught in five schools in an urban district. Viable solutions to these three
challenges contribute to the task of extending the design experiment methodology
to investigate teachers’ rather than students’ learning.
The first challenge that we found critical to address concerned the need to situ-
ate the activity of the teachers with whom we collaborated within the institutional
setting of the schools and the district in which they worked. This conceptual issue
rarely arises when conducting a classroom design experiment with students be-
cause the research team typically insulates experimental classrooms from many of
the school and district institutional constraints while negotiating entrée to the site.
In contrast, it is rarely, if ever, possible to renegotiate with administrators the insti-
tutional settings in which the collaborating teachers work when developing sites
for what Simon (2000) termed a teacher development experiment.
The institutional setting encompasses district and school policies for instruction
in particular subject matter areas and includes both the adoption of curriculum ma-
terials and guidelines for the use of those materials (e.g., pacing guides that specify
a timeline for completing instructional units; Ferrini-Mundy & Floden, 2007;
Remillard, 2005; Stein & Kim, 2006). The institutional setting also includes the
people to whom teachers are accountable and what they are held accountable for
(e.g., expectations for the structure of lessons and the nature of students’ engage-
ment; Cobb & McClain, 2006; Elmore, 2004). In addition, the institutional setting
includes social supports that give teachers access to new tools and forms of knowl-
edge (e.g., opportunities to participate in formal professional development activi-
ties and in informal professional networks, assistance from a school-based mathe-
matics coach or a principal who is an effective instructional leader; Bryk &
Schneider, 2002; Coburn, 2001; Cohen & Hill, 2000; Horn, 2005; Nelson & Sassi,
2005). The findings of a substantial and growing number of studies in educational
policy and leadership document that teachers’ instructional practices are not
merely influenced by but are partially constituted by the materials and resources
that the teachers use in their classroom practice, the institutional constraints that
they attempt to satisfy, and the formal and informal sources of assistance on which
they draw (e.g., Cobb, McClain, Lamberg, & Dean, 2003; Coburn, 2005; Spillane,
2005a; Stein & Spillane, 2005). The findings of these studies oriented us to take
account of the institutional setting in which the collaborating teachers worked
when we formulated conjectures about their learning and when we developed ex-
planations of their activity in professional development sessions and in their class-
rooms.
The second conceptual challenge concerned the need for an interpretive frame-
work that would enable us to document the collective learning of the teacher group
DESIGN EXPERIMENTS TO SUPPORT TEACHERS’ LEARNING 167
as well as the individual learning of the participating teachers. In recent years, the
historically dominant cognitive paradigm in research on teaching has been chal-
lenged by an alternative orientation that draws on situated theories of activity (cf.
Borko, 2004). This newer situated paradigm is exemplified by analyses that have
situated teachers’ learning within the activities of professional teaching communi-
ties (e.g., Achinstein, 2002; Franke & Kazemi, 2001b; Grossman, Wineburg, &
Woolworth, 2001; Kazemi & Franke, 2004; Little, 2002; Nickerson & Moriarty,
2005; Stein & Brown, 1997; Warren & Rosebery, 1995; Westheimer, 1998). This
shift in focus from the cognitions of solo practitioners to teachers’ activity as they
participate in and contribute to the development of professional teaching commu-
nities was precipitated in part by ongoing reform efforts in a number of subject

matter areas, including mathematics.
The forms of research-based instructional practices advocated in current reform
documents emphasize using cognitively challenging tasks, maintaining the level
of challenge as tasks are enacted in the classroom (Stein & Lane, 1996; Stein,
Smith, Henningsen, & Silver, 2000), and ensuring that students have opportunities
to communicate their mathematical thinking in classroom discussions (Cobb,
Boufi, McClain, & Whitenack, 1997; Hiebert et al., 1997; Lampert, 2001). These
forms of instructional practice are complex, demanding, uncertain, and not reduc-
ible to predictable routines (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Clark, 1988; Lampert, 2001;
McClain, 2002; Schifter, 1995; Smith, 1996). The findings of a number of investi-
gations indicate that teachers’ participation in professional teaching communities
and, more generally, strong professional networks can be important social re-
sources as teachers attempt to develop demanding instructional practices of this
type (Franke & Kazemi, 2001b; Gamoran, Secada, & Marrett, 2000; Kazemi &
Franke, 2004; Little, 2002; Stein, Silver, & Smith, 1998). Consequently, one of our
initial goals as we worked with the middle school teachers was to support the emer-
gence of a professional teaching community characterized by a shared agenda for
classroom instruction. It was in this context that the need for an interpretive frame-
work that would enable us to document the collective learning of the teacher group
came to the fore. A corresponding issue arises when conducting classroom design
experiments with students, that of accounting for the collective learning of the
classroom community (Cobb & Yackel, 1996). However, in the case of teacher de-
velopment experiments, an adequate interpretive framework should encompass
collective pedagogical learning as well as collective learning in particular content
domains.
The third conceptual challenge that arose while we were collaborating with the
group of mathematics teachers centered on the relations between their activity in
the professional development sessions and in their classrooms. In a classroom de-
sign experiment, the research team typically focuses on supporting students’ learn-
ing within a single social setting, the classroom. To be sure, a classroom design ex-
periment might aim to support students’ eventual participation in practices beyond
the classroom, and it might draw on the out-of-school practices in which students
participate as initial instructional resources (e.g., Bouillion & Gomez, 2001; Civil,
2007; Gutstein, 2007). However, even when this is the case, the purposes for docu-
menting students’ activity in out-of-school settings are typically limited to inform-
ing the instructional starting points and to guiding the delineation of instructional
goals that give the design experiment a sense of directionality. As a consequence,
the issue of accounting for the co-development of activity across different settings
rarely arises when researchers conduct design experiments with students. In con-
trast, the intent of a teacher development experiment is to engage teachers in activi-
ties in one setting (professional development sessions) with the explicit goal of
supporting their reorganization of their activity in another setting (the classroom).

Designs for supporting teachers’ learning necessarily involve suppositions and as-
sumptions about the relations between teachers’ activity in these two settings. In
the course of our collaboration with the mathematics teachers, we had to examine
and revise our initial assumptions about these relations in order to develop a viable
design for supporting their learning. As a consequence of this experience, we con-
tend that it is important for researchers conducting teacher development experi-
ments to be explicit about and to scrutinize how they conceptualize the relations
between teachers’ activities in different settings.
In the remainder of this article, we first give an overview of the approach to de-
sign research that we refined while conducting a series of classroom design experi-
ments and then extended while conducting a 5-year teacher development experi-
ment. Against this background, we then describe how we sought to address each
of the three conceptual challenges while preparing for and conducting the teacher
development experiment.
BACKGROUND TO THE TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

EXPERIMENT
The teacher development experiment lasted 5 years and aimed to support a

group of middle school mathematics teachers in improving their classroom
practices for teaching statistical data analysis. The group initially comprised
nine teachers who worked in five different schools in the same urban district
that served serve a 60% minority student population and was located in a state
with a high-stakes accountability testing program. The membership of the
group was stable for the first 2 years but changed during the last 3 years as
teachers moved into administrative positions or left the district and new teach-
ers were inducted into the group. The size of the group therefore fluctuated; at
its largest, the group comprised 14 teachers. Three teachers were members
throughout the 5 years of the experiment.
During the first year of the experiment, we conducted three 1-day work sessions
with the teachers during the school year. In the remaining 4 years, we conducted
six 1-day work sessions each school year. In addition, we conducted a 3-day work
session with the teachers each summer. Although we observed and videotaped the
teachers’ instructional practices at least twice each year, we did not work with them
directly in their classrooms.1
An analysis conducted by Visnovska (2009) revealed that the practices of the
group were reestablished during the initial professional development sessions that
were conducted after new teachers joined the group.2 This was the case even for
the most significant change of membership, which occurred at the beginning of the
third year of the collaboration when three teachers left the group and six newcom-
ers joined the six old-timers. Visnovska’s findings indicated that it is reasonable to
frame the changes in group membership in terms of induction of new members
into a single teacher group that evolved across the 5 years of the collaboration,
rather than in terms of the emergence of a new group each time the membership
changed.
Our overall goal for the experiment was that teaching would become a collabo-
rative, knowledge-generating activity in which the teachers would come to place
students’ reasoning at the center of their instructional decision making (cf. Franke,
Carpenter, Levi, & Fennema, 2001). More concretely, we attempted to support the
teachers’ development of forms of instructional practice in which they would
adapt, test, and revise instructional materials and approaches that had proven effec-
tive elsewhere to the contingencies of their specific classroom settings by focusing
on their students’ interpretations and solutions. Our collaboration with the teachers
centered on statistical data analysis and built on two prior classroom design experi-
ments in which we had investigated middle school students’ development of in-
creasingly sophisticated forms of statistical reasoning (cf. Cobb, 1999; Cobb,
McClain, & Gravemeijer, 2003).
For the purpose of this article, we define design research as a family of method-
ological approaches in which instructional design and research are interdependent.
On the one hand, the design of learning environments serves as the context for re-
search; on the other hand, ongoing and retrospective analyses are conducted in or-
der to inform the improvement of the design (Edelson, 2002; Gravemeijer, 1994b;
Schoenfeld, 2006). Consistent with the basic tenets of design research, one of the
1This was a conscious design decision and reflected the overall goal of the project, which was to in-
vestigate how the travel of an innovation to a new site might be supported when the contact time is lim-
ited to that typically available for district professional development providers.
2In addition to looking for discontinuities in group practices, Visnovska also examined the fre-
quency of newcomers’ and old-timers’ contributions to group activities and conducted detailed analyses
of cases in which the newcomers’ ways of reasoning about mathematical and pedagogical situations
differed from those that were normative among the old-timers.
primary goals when we prepared for the teacher development experiment was to
formulate testable conjectures about both (a) an envisioned learning trajectory for
a group of teachers and (b) the specific means that might be used to support and or-
ganize that learning (cf. Gravemeijer, 1994a; Simon, 1995). The conjectures that
we formulated at the outset have been reported elsewhere (Cobb & McClain,
2001). For our current purposes, it suffices to note that one of our primary conjec-
tures was that the instructional sequences for statistics developed during the prior
classroom experiments could serve as an important means of supporting the teach-
ers’ learning (cf. Ball & Cohen, 1996). These instructional sequences are justified
in terms of analyses that document both the emergence of increasingly sophisti-
cated patterns of statistical reasoning and the specific means of supporting their
emergence3 (Cobb, 1999; Cobb, McClain, & Gravemeijer, 2003). We conjectured
that if we could support the teachers’ reconstruction of the rationale for the instruc-
tional sequence, they would be able to adapt, test, and modify the instructional se-
quence in their classrooms to support their students’ statistical learning.
As is the case in all design experiments, our primary research objective when
working with the teachers was to improve the design for supporting learning that
we had formulated at the outset. To this end, our overriding objective while collab-
orating with the teachers was to test and revise our conjectures about both the tra-
jectory of the teacher learning and the specific means of supporting and organizing
that learning. This process of testing and revising conjectures involved successive
cycles of design and analysis in which we conducted a series of debriefing meet-
ings after each work session (cf. A. L. Brown, 1992; Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc,
2004; Confrey & Lachance, 2000). In the debriefing meetings, we first clarified
our rationale for the activities in which we engaged the teachers and located these
design conjectures for the teachers’ learning within an envisioned trajectory for the
remainder of the experiment.4 Against this background, we then analyzed the work
session, in the process testing and revising our design conjectures for the session.
The resulting revised conjectures then oriented the planning of activities for the
next work session. In preparing for the subsequent session, we also attempted to
capitalize on the questions and issues that the teachers had raised during the prior
session.
The data generated in the course of the experiment to document the teachers’
learning included video recordings of all of the work sessions that we conducted
with the teachers and copies of all artifacts produced during these sessions. In addi-
3Follow-up trials with the instructional sequences with middle school students, high school stu-
dents, and elementary and secondary school teachers in which one of the research team served as the
teacher indicated that these successive normative forms of reasoning are relatively stable.
4For ease of explication, we speak of a single conjectured learning trajectory. However, in actuality,
the trajectory evolved in the course of the experiment as we tested and revised conjectures (cf. Simon,
1995).
tion, we collected modified teaching sets (Simon & Tzur, 1999) at least twice each
year to document the teachers’ instructional practices. Each teaching set involved
observing and video recording one or more lessons and then conducting an au-
dio-recorded interview in which questions about aspects of the teacher’s instruc-
tional practices were grounded in specific activities and events that had occurred
during the observed lesson(s). In conducting the interviews, we sought to under-
stand several aspects of each teacher’s instructional practice. These included the
teacher’s view of the most important ideas or skills addressed in the lesson, the ex-
tent to which the teacher took account of students’ reasoning when planning for in-
struction, the teacher’s use and adaptation of curriculum materials and other in-
structional resources, the aspects of students’ mathematical activity that were

visible to the teacher during the lesson, and the extent to which the teacher adjusted
instruction based on these aspects of students’ mathematical activity.
We documented the institutional settings in which the teachers worked early in
the first year of our collaboration with them by using a snowballing methodology
(Cobb, McClain, Lamberg, et al., 2003; Spillane, 2000; Talbert & McLaughlin,
1999). The first step in this process involved conducting audio-recorded interviews
with the teachers to document the institutional settings of their work as they per-
ceived and understood them. The issues addressed in these interviews included the
teachers’ understanding of the district’s policies for mathematics instruction, the
people to whom they were accountable and what they were held accountable for,
the professional development activities in which they participated, their informal
professional networks, and the official sources of assistance on which they drew.
The next step in the snowballing process involved conducting audio-recorded in-
terviews with the formal and informal leaders identified in teacher interviews
about their agendas for mathematics learning and teaching, and the means by
which they attempted to achieve their agendas. We then continued this snowballing
process by interviewing additional people identified in the second-round inter-
views as influencing how mathematics was taught in the district. The instructional
leaders interviewed included the principals of the schools in which the participat-
ing teachers worked, the district mathematics coordinator, two middle school dis-
trict mathematics specialists, and the Associate Superintendent for Curriculum
and Instruction.
One of our primary goals in conducting retrospective analyses of these data is to
document the actual learning trajectory of the teacher group over a 5-year period
and, on this basis, to propose a revised conjectured learning trajectory for a teacher
group that is situated in the institutional setting of the school and district. These
analyses delineate the process of the group’s collective learning, the means by
which it was supported, and the institutional setting in which it was situated (Dean,
2005; Visnovska, Zhao, & Gresalfi, 2007). The revised conjectured learning tra-
jectory that we developed on the basis of this analysis specifies how we would pro-
ceed if we were to conduct a follow-up teacher development experiment with an-
other group of middle school mathematics teachers (Cobb, Zhao, Gresalfi, &
Visnovska, 2007). The revised trajectory therefore encapsulates what we learned
in the course of the teacher development experiment and indicates how it might be
possible to accomplish in 3 years what took 5 years in the teacher development ex-
periment.
In our view, it is critical to situate the revised trajectory in the institutional set-
ting in which we worked so that it can be useful in informing other researchers and
teacher educators as they attempt to support the learning of groups of mathematics
teachers in other schools and districts. More specifically, we anticipate that this ap-
proach will enable other researchers and teacher educators to adapt the revised tra-
jectory to the contingencies of the institutional settings in which they and the col-
laborating teachers are working in a conjecture-driven manner. Furthermore, in
modifying the trajectory to take account of the contingencies of their local settings,
they would contribute to the development of a domain-specific theory of teacher
professional development that has the following characteristics:
• It specifies a range of possible learning trajectories for a group of teachers,

with each trajectory consisting of successive developments both within the
group and in the instructional practices of the participating teachers.
• For each possible trajectory, it specifies the means of supporting and organiz-
ing these successive developments.
• It specifies the contingencies of the various trajectories by locating them in
contrasting institutional settings.
A theory of this type offers the prospect that teacher professional development
might become a design science in which the development of both theoretical in-
sights and designs for supporting teachers’ learning is cumulative. The develop-
ment of such a theory constitutes the long-term goal of a collaborative research
program. As an initial step, we first need to address the three conceptual challenges
that we encountered in the course of the teacher development experiment.
Our entree into the district to conduct the design experiment was facilitated by
the district’s mathematics coordinator, who invited us to provide teacher profes-
sional development in statistical data analysis. Prior to our collaboration with the
teachers the district had adopted at the middle school level a mathematics curricu-
lum funded by the National Science Foundation and had received external funding
to support the implementation of this curriculum. The mathematics coordinator re-
ported that the district’s instructional improvement efforts were nonetheless prob-
lematic in the middle grades, in part because a significant proportion of teachers
continued to use a traditional textbook series as the primary basis for mathematics
instruction. The teachers that the mathematics coordinator selected to work with us
at the beginning of the experiment were judged to need additional professional de-
velopment.
It became apparent early in the collaboration that the teachers’ classroom in-
structional practices were highly privatized. This appears to have been a conse-
quence of school and district leaders’ efforts to monitor and regulate teachers’ in-
structional practices in response to state accountability pressures. Our initial
classroom observations indicated that there were identifiable regularities in the
teachers’ classroom practices even though they worked in almost complete isola-
tion. The organization of activities typically involved a warm-up task; a review of
homework problems that had been assigned during the previous class session; a
demonstration of the method for solving specific types of tasks that were assigned
as homework in the current session; and individual work, during which the stu-
dents began working on homework tasks.

One of our initial challenges when we began working with the teachers was to
negotiate a genuinely collaborative relationship that was oriented by a shared vi-
sion of high-quality mathematics instruction. Our intent was that we and the teach-
ers would work together on issues central to classroom practice during profes-
sional development sessions. However, a relationship of this type clashed with the
teachers’ prior professional development experiences. As Spillane (2005b) ob-
served, knowledge and ideas in mathematics professional development typically
come from formally designated session leaders who do most of the talking. The
teachers’ primary obligation in such sessions is usually to listen, and “when they
do talk they ask clarifying questions or acknowledge that they agree or under-
stand” (p. 394). Against this background, we were eventually able to negotiate a
productive relationship with the teachers in which authority became increasingly
distributed. However, this was a protracted process. The progress of the teacher
group over the experiment was nonetheless substantial. During the last 18 months
of the collaboration, the mathematics coordinator designated it a mathematics
leadership community charged with developing instructional materials and assess-
ment activities for statistics that built on current research and supporting the imple-
mentation of these materials in the district.
LOCATING TEACHERS’ LEARNING IN THE

INSTITUTIONAL SETTING OF THE SCHOOL
AND DISTRICT
We anticipated that it would be critical to document the institutional settings in

which the collaborating teachers worked, based both on our prior experiences of
working in schools and on the educational leadership and policy literature. In par-
ticular, we realized that it would be important to take account of the demands of
state high-stakes assessments, the mathematics curriculum prescribed by the dis-
trict, ongoing district initiatives, and the district and school instructional priorities.
In addition to these readily apparent aspects of the institutional setting of teaching,
we also expected that our collaboration with the teachers would be impacted by
less visible aspects. As an illustration, the policy and leadership literature indicates
that collaboration between teachers and collegiality between teachers and formal
instructional leaders are not usually effective in supporting instructional improve-
ment unless they are connected to a shared vision of high-quality instruction that
gives them meaning and purpose (Elmore, Peterson, & McCarthey, 1996; New-
man & Associates, 1996; Rosenholtz, 1985, 1989; Rowan, 1990). This finding ori-
ented us to view the extent to which a common agenda for mathematics instruction
has been established as a key aspect of the institutional setting of teaching.
This and other findings indicate the importance of attending to what transpires
outside the teachers’ classrooms as well as what occurs within them by document-
ing what we came to call the institutional setting of teaching (Cobb & McClain,
2001). We expected that the resulting analyses of the institutional settings in which
the collaborating teachers worked would inform the adjustment of our design for
supporting the teachers’ learning. In addition, we expected that these analyses
would contribute to our understanding of the teachers’ activity in both professional
development sessions and their classrooms, thus enabling us to be more effective
in supporting their learning.
Researchers who collaborate with teachers to support their learning routinely
take account of the institutional setting in which the teachers work. However, they
typically do so pragmatically and treat it as ancillary to the major research focus on
teachers’ learning. Our agenda in developing the interpretive scheme reported here
is to support the framing of students’ identification with mathematical activity as
an explicit focus of investigation in design research. The work of Fishman and his
colleagues constitutes a rare exception because they have made the upscaling and
sustainability of curricular innovation a central focus of their research program
(Blumenfeld, Fishman, Krajcik, Marx, & Soloway, 2000; Fishman & Krajcik,
2003; Fishman, Marx, Besta, & Tal, 2003; Fishman, Marx, Blumenfeld, & Kraj-
cik, 2004). Fishman and colleagues have developed a framework for assessing the
feasibility of implementing curricular innovation successfully in a particular dis-
trict. In using this framework, they assess the gaps between the capacity required to
use the innovation successfully and the current capacity of the district along the
three dimensions of school culture, capability, and policy and management. The
approach that we developed for documenting the institutional setting of mathe-
matics teaching provides a means of assessing the current capacity of a school or
district at a level of detail sufficient to inform not only the implementation of cur-
ricular innovations but also the formulation of designs for supporting teachers’
learning that are tailored to the local school and district setting. In this regard, we
regard our work and that of Fishman and colleagues as complementary.
We developed an initial analytic approach while preparing for the experiment
conducted with the middle school teachers, and we tested and revised the ap-
proach as we worked with them to support their learning. We have described the
resulting analytic approach in some detail elsewhere (Cobb & McClain, 2006;
Cobb, McClain, Lamberg, et al., 2003). In this article, we restrict ourselves to
outlining its primary features while focusing on its development in the context of
our collaboration with the middle school teachers. As a first step, we should ac-
knowledge the profound influence of Wenger’s (1998) book Communities of
Practice, which we read as we prepared for the teacher development experiment.
This book has been criticized for being unnecessarily abstract (E. Wenger, per-
sonal communication, January 23, 2001). However, we found it to be extremely
concrete as we looked at the schools in which the teachers worked through the
text. One distinction that proved to be critical was viewing organizations (such as
schools and districts) as designed organizations and as lived organizations.5

Wenger clarified that a school viewed as a designed organization comprises a
configuration of interrelated elements that were designed to carry out specific
tasks or to perform particular functions. This is the view of the school that is in-
scribed in official organizational charts, policy statements, and manuals. It in-
cludes formally designated roles and divisions of labor together with official pol-
icies, procedures, management systems, organizational units, and the like. We
were aware that this perspective is taken for granted in much of the educational
policy and leadership literature. An important limitation of this viewpoint for our
purposes was that it privileges the perspectives of school and district leaders in
official positions of authority over those of teachers.6 In contrast, a school
viewed as a lived organization consists of the configuration of communities of
practice within which various tasks and functions are actually organized and ac-
complished. The value that we saw in analyzing schools as lived rather than de-
signed organizations was that the former approach would involve documenting
social structures that were within the scope of the collaborating teachers’ every-
day professional activities (Wenger, 1998). Our goal in focusing on schools as
lived organizations would be to understand what Engestrom (1998) termed “rela-
tively inconspicuous, recurrent, and taken-for-granted aspects of school life”
(p. 76). In doing so, we would act in accord with Blumer’s (1969) adage that peo-
ple respond to objects that are real within the worlds of their experience rather
than to objects that researchers project into their worlds.
Wenger’s (1998) discussion of organizations as lived oriented us to identify the
groups within the district that were pursuing agendas for how mathematics should
be taught and learned. The groups we identified when we analyzed the interviews
conducted with teachers and school and district leaders were the district mathe-
matics leadership group, the leadership group in each of the schools in which the
5It was only later that we learned that this distinction has a long and venerable history in sociology
(cf. Feldman & Pentland, 2003).

6J. S. Brown and Duguid (1991) anticipated Wenger’s observation, noting that the designed organi-
zation reflects the dominant assumptions of what they referred to as the organizational core.
teachers worked, and the teacher group.7 The district mathematics leadership
group comprised the district mathematics coordinator and three secondary mathe-
matics specialists who were based in the district’s central office. In addition to the
semistructured interviews, the data that we generated to document the activities of
this group included follow-up interviews, observations of professional develop-
ment sessions conducted by the district mathematics leaders, and an ongoing
e-mail exchange. As we have reported elsewhere (Cobb, McClain, Lamberg, et al.,
2003), these data consistently indicated that the joint enterprise of this group was
to improve mathematics performance of all students (but particularly minority stu-
dents) by supporting teachers’ use of a recently adopted reform curriculum funded
by the National Science Foundation.

The leadership groups in each of the schools in which the collaborating teachers
worked consisted of the principal and two or more assistant principals. We relied
on the interviews conducted with leaders in each school to document the activities
of these groups, and we triangulated our analysis of these interviews with the col-
laborating teachers’ descriptions of the settings of their work. These data docu-
mented that the primary agenda of each of the school leadership groups was to
raise students’ scores on the state-mandated achievement test. To this end, mem-
bers of these groups conducted frequent drop-in classroom visits during which
they focused on classroom management and on the match between the lesson ob-
jectives that teachers were required to write on their whiteboards and the objectives
assessed by the state-mandated test of student mathematics achievement.
The image that emerged as we analyzed the interviews was that of the members
of the district mathematics leadership group and the school leadership groups
“reaching into” classrooms in an attempt to achieve their partially conflicting
agendas for mathematics instruction. The two groups’ pursuit of their contrasting
instructional visions constituted the immediate institutional setting within which
teachers developed and refined their instructional practices. The teachers, for their
part, spoke spontaneously in the interviews and in professional development ses-
sions about the tensions that were endemic to their work. It is in this sense that an
analysis of schools as lived organizations documents social structures that were
within the scope of the collaborating teachers’ everyday professional activities.
Although Wenger’s (1998) discussion of communities of practice provided an
overall orientation, it underspecified how the practices of particular groups and
communities might be analyzed. In addressing this issue, we drew on Spillane and
7Here and elsewhere in this article, we speak of a group of teachers rather than a professional teach-
ing community because supporting the emergence of a community in the true sense of the term is one of
the goals of the experiment and can be a non-trivial accomplishment in our experience. We discuss the
criteria that we use for determining whether a group of teachers constitutes a professional teaching
community when we discuss the challenge of developing an interpretive framework for documenting
teachers’ collective learning.
colleagues’ (Spillane, 2005a; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 1999, 2001) dis-
tributed theory of school leadership. Spillane and colleagues argued that analyses
of leadership should focus on how various leadership functions are actually ac-
complished. As they have illustrated, the resulting analyses reveal that leadership
is not a property or attribute of individual leaders but is instead distributed across
several people. Analogously, our goal when documenting the practices of the
groups that we had identified was to understand how the functions of mathematics
teaching were accomplished in the collaborating teachers’ schools. Ueno’s (2000)
exemplary analysis of the use of inscriptions in a work setting was an important
source of guidance and led us to realize that the functions of teaching are not re-
stricted to interacting directly with students in the classroom. We delineated the

following additional functions by drawing direct analogies with Ueno’s work
while analyzing the interviews:
• Organizing for mathematics teaching and learning by, for example, delineat-
ing instructional goals and by selecting and adapting instructional activities
and other resources.
• Making mathematics learning and teaching visible by, for example, inter-
preting test scores or posing tasks designed to generate a record of students’
mathematical reasoning.
It was apparent from the mathematics leader and school leader interviews that they,
as well as the teachers, engaged in these functions of teaching. For example, the
mathematics leaders organized for mathematics teaching and learning by produc-
ing a pacing guide that the teachers used to coordinate the reform curriculum with
state standards and objectives (Cobb, McClain, Lamberg, et al., 2003). For their
part, the school leaders made mathematics learning and teaching visible when they
conducted regular drop-in classroom observations. The teachers experienced math-
ematics teaching as a site of struggle because the ways in which members of the
different groups contributed to the functions of teaching were misaligned.
The task of documenting the practices of the different groups by clarifying how
they contributed to the functions of teaching led us to focus explicitly on the inter-
connections between the three groups. Three types of interconnections discussed
by Wenger (1998) came to life as we listened to the interviews conducted with
members of the various groups. The first type of interconnection, boundary en-
counters, arise when members of different groups engage in activities together as a
routine part of their respective practices. For example, boundary encounters in the
district in which we worked included the professional development activities that
members of the district’s mathematics leadership community conducted to support
teachers’ use of the curriculum funded by the National Science Foundation as well
as the regular classroom visits that they and school leaders made to observe the
teachers’ instructional practices (Cobb, McClain, Lamberg, et al., 2003).
The second type of interconnection that proved important to document con-

cerned the activities of brokers who are at least peripheral members of two or more
groups. Brokers can bridge between the activities of different groups by facilitat-
ing the translation, coordination, and alignment of perspectives and meanings
(Wenger, 1998). They can therefore play an important role in aligning the enter-
prises of different groups. It is significant that we were unable at the outset to iden-
tify any brokers in the district in which we worked (Cobb, McClain, Lamberg,
et al., 2003). This goes some way toward explaining why the practices of the dis-
trict mathematics leadership group and the school leadership groups were mis-
aligned. As part of our effort to support the teachers’ learning, we therefore at-
tempted both to act as brokers between the various groups ourselves and to support
the emergence of brokers. As Lamberg (2005) documented, two members of the
mathematics leadership group, a mathematics specialist and the district mathe-
matics coordinator, subsequently became relatively substantial members of the
teacher group. As a consequence of their brokering activities, the enterprises of the
mathematics leadership group and the teacher group became closely aligned, and
the teacher group was eventually given leadership responsibilities that involved
both developing instructional materials and assessment activities for statistics and
supporting the implementation of these materials in the district.
The first two types of interconnections between groups are based on participa-
tion, whereas the third type of interconnection, boundary objects, involves what
Wenger (1998) termed reification. Wenger defined reification as “the process of
giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience
into ‘thingness’” (p. 58). As Wenger noted, reifying objects are relatively trans-
parent carriers of meaning for members of the group or community in which they
were created. In contrast, there is the very real possibility that they will be used
differently and come to have different meanings if they are incorporated into the
practices of other groups or communities. Even in such situations, reifying ob-
jects can play a significant role in enabling the members of different groups and
communities to coordinate their activities. As Star and Griesemer (1989) demon-
strated, common boundary objects can constitute focal points around which in-
terconnections between groups and communities emerge in the absence of
shared meaning. In this respect, boundary objects can serve as tools for commu-
nication even though they do not provide ready-made bridges between the per-
spectives and meanings of different groups. In the district in which we worked,
boundary objects between all three groups included state mathematics standards
and student test scores (Cobb, McClain, Lamberg, et al., 2003). They were im-
portant aspects of what might be termed the material infrastructure of the district
as lived even though they were used in significantly different ways by the school
leaders and by the teachers and mathematics leaders. McDermott’s (1976) and
Ueno’s (2000) observation that members of different groups look at one another
through the tools they use became very real to us as we identified boundary ob-
jects and documented the ways in which they were used in different groups. For
example, it became apparent that members of the school leadership groups
looked at teachers through the state standards and test scores and made judg-
ments about individual teachers’ competence as they did so.
As we have clarified, we tested and revised the analytic approach that we have
outlined for documenting the institutional setting of teaching as we attempted to
support the middle school teachers’ learning. This involved learning on our part,
the most significant aspect of which was the realization that we had initially under-
estimated the critical role of brokers. It was only as we analyzed the developments
that occurred once the two mathematics leaders began to participate in the activi-
ties of the professional teaching community that we began to appreciate more fully
the important contributions that brokers can make in bridging between perspec-
tives. In addition to revising the analytic approach by giving more emphasis to the
role of brokers, we elaborated our understanding of the ways in which document-
ing the institutional setting of teaching could enable us to be more effective in sup-
porting teachers’ learning. At the outset, we anticipated that analyses of the institu-
tional setting would both inform our plans for supporting the teachers’ learning
and contribute to our accounts of the teachers’ activity in both professional devel-
opment sessions and their classrooms. This indeed proved to be the case, but two
additional reasons for documenting the institutional setting of teaching became ap-
parent once we began working with the teachers.
First, we came to realize that individual interviews and group conversations
that focused on the school and district settings in which the teachers worked con-
stituted excellent contexts in which to begin developing collaborative relation-
ships with them. Although our immediate purpose in these interviews and con-
versations was to generate data, we necessarily attempted to understand some of
the deep-rooted problems with which the teachers had to cope on a daily basis.
This appeared to be a relatively novel experience for the teachers and seemed to
indicate to them that we took their perspective seriously. Furthermore, as we
came to understand their concerns, we were better able to explicitly negotiate a
joint agenda with them that reflected their priorities and interests. Based on this
experience and on similar experiences with teachers in other districts, we now
routinely initiate conversations of this type when we first begin working with a
group of teachers.
The second additional reason for analyzing the institutional setting of teaching
is that such analyses can themselves become tools for supporting the learning of a
teacher group. In the case at hand, the interviews that we conducted with the teach-
ers and district mathematics leaders revealed that they viewed the school leaders
solely as managerial or administrative leaders who gave instructional issues a low
priority (Cobb, McClain, Lamberg, et al., 2003). However, the interviews con-
ducted with school leaders indicated that they considered instructional leadership
in mathematics to be an important part of their work. The reasons for this discrep-
ancy in perspectives are beyond the scope of this article. We conjectured that it
would be critical for the teachers and the mathematics leaders to appreciate that the
school leaders’ ineffectiveness as instructional leaders was primarily a matter of
competence rather than will, and that the school leaders had not received any sup-
port in developing effective leadership practices. Only then would the teachers and
mathematics leaders be able to communicate effectively with the school leaders
about issues of mathematics teaching and learning. We therefore shared our analy-
ses of the school leaders’ practices with the teachers, foregrounding the school
leaders’ understanding of the challenges of teaching mathematics effectively, and
their concomitant approach to instructional leadership. As Dean (2005) docu-
mented, these analyses constituted a primary point of reference in the subsequent

series of activities, in the course of which we negotiated a common agenda with the
members of the teacher group. This use of the analyses as a tool for supporting the
learning of the teacher group ran counter to our expectations. At the outset, we had
anticipated that our analyses of the school and district institutional setting would
serve solely as a resource for us as we adjusted our plans and accounted for the
teachers’ activity. The realization that analyses of this type could also be a useful
resource for a teacher group and could support its development therefore consti-
tuted significant learning on our part.
In summary, the analytic approach we have described constitutes a general
way of documenting and analyzing the institutional settings in which specific
groups of teachers work. The account we have given of our learning illustrates
several characteristics of the approach that contribute to its usefulness. First, be-
cause the resulting analyses account for the interpretations that teachers and oth-
ers make and the understandings that they develop, these analyses are likely to
have face validity to members of different communities in that they acknowledge
and account for the frustrations and antagonisms that these members experience.
Second, because analyses of this type situate people’s actions within school and
district as lived organizations, they constitute resources that might enable mem-
bers of particular communities to move beyond viewing members of other com-
munities merely as impediments to their agendas. As members of one commu-
nity look at others through an analysis, they might instead begin to appreciate
that their actions are rational (or at least understandable) given the constraints
and affordances of their institutional niches within the school and district as
lived. Third, analyses of this type support the formulation of strategies for insti-
tutional change that involve the creation of new tools as prospective boundary
objects as well as the orchestration of boundary encounters and the development
of brokers. This relatively broad orientation to the process of renegotiating the
institutional settings in which teachers work is significant given Wenger’s (1998)
observation that mutual engagement and reification offer two complementary
ways of attempting to shape the future and that one is rarely effective without the
other.
ACCOUNTING FOR THE COLLECTIVE LEARNING

OF A TEACHER GROUP
The second conceptual challenge we encountered when conducting the teacher de-
velopment experiment with the middle school teachers was that of developing a
framework for analyzing the collective learning of the teachers as they participated
in work sessions. Pragmatically, the need for an interpretive framework of this type
derives from the increasing attention that researchers on teaching are giving to
teachers’ participation in pedagogical communities. Theoretically, an interpretive
framework of this type documents the evolution of communal norms that consti-
tute the immediate social setting of the participating teachers’ learning. As a conse-
quence, analyses produced by using such a framework would situate teachers’
learning with respect to their participation in collective practices that both enable
and constrain their activity.
The need for a framework of this type also stemmed from the specific approach
that we take to design research. In this approach, one of our primary goals when
preparing for an experiment is to formulate a conjectured learning trajectory com-
prising testable conjectures about both (a) an envisioned process of learning and
(b) the specific means that might be used to support and organize that learning
(Gravemeijer, 1994a; Simon, 1995). We have clarified elsewhere that in the case of
a classroom experiment, these conjectures cannot be about the prospective mathe-
matical learning of each and every student in a class, given that there will be signif-
icant qualitative differences in how students participate in classroom activities and
thus in their mathematical reasoning at any point in time. Instead, the conjectures
are about the collective mathematical development of the classroom community
(Cobb, Stephan, McClain, & Gravemeijer, 2001). The same line of reasoning
holds for a teacher development experiment and implies that the conjectures for-
mulated when preparing for an experiment of this type are about the collective
learning of a group of teachers rather than the individual learning of each member
of the group. We therefore required a framework that would enable us to document
the evolution of the communal norms and practices that constitute the collective
learning of a teacher group.
In our view, the members of a teacher group jointly constitute the communal
norms that enable and constrain their individual learning. To be useful, it is there-
fore important that the framework attend to the different ways in which individual
teachers participate in and contribute to the development of collective practices. In
the hands of a skilled professional development facilitator, this diversity is a pri-
mary resource that can be used to support the emergence of substantive mathemati-
cal and pedagogical issues as an explicit focus of group activity. The type of frame-
work that we sought to develop would therefore focus on both the evolution of
communal norms and practices and on the diverse ways in which individual teach-
ers participate in those practices.
As a first step in developing a viable framework, we differentiated between a

group of teachers who meet to work on issues of mutual interest and a professional
teaching community. Researchers who have collaborated with practicing teachers
to support their learning make clear that a group of teachers who collaborate with
one another in some way does not necessarily constitute a community (Franke,
Kazemi, Shih, Biagetti, & Battey, 2005; Krainer, 2003; Nickerson & Moriarty,
2005; Secada & Adajian, 1997; Stein et al., 1998). In this regard, Grossman et al.
(2001) reported that
as community starts to form, individuals have a natural tendency to play commu-

nity—to act as if they are already a community that shares values and common be-
liefs. Playing community, or pseudocommunity, draws on cultural notions of inter-
action often found in middle-class, typically White, settings. The imperative of
pseudocommunity is to “behave as if we all agree.” An interactional congeniality is
maintained by a surface friendliness, hypervigilant never to intrude on issues of
personal space. The maintenance of a pseudocommunity pivots on suppression of
conflict. Groups regulate face-to-face interactions with the tacit understanding that
it is “against the rules” to challenge others or press too hard for clarification.
(p. 955)
Based on a synthesis of the literature on communities of practice, professional

communities, and professional teaching communities, we developed the following
criteria for differentiating between a teacher group and a professional teaching
community:
• A shared purpose or enterprise (e.g., ensuring that students come to under-

stand central mathematical ideas while simultaneously performing more
than adequately on high-stakes assessments of mathematics achievement).
• A shared repertoire of ways of reasoning with tools and artifacts that is spe-
cific to the enterprise of the community (e.g., normative ways of reasoning
with instructional materials and other resources when planning for instruc-
tion or using tasks and other resources to make students’ mathematical rea-
soning visible).
• Norms of mutual engagement (e.g., general norms of participation and norms
that are specific to mathematics teaching such as the standards to which the
members of the community hold one another accountable when they justify
pedagogical decisions and judgments).8
8Wenger (1998) proposed an extensive list of characteristics of a community of practice, and Barab,
Schatz, and Scheckler (2004) proposed eight critical characteristics of online communities. Our goal in
differentiating between a teacher group and a professional teaching community was to identify the min-
imum number of characteristics sufficient to make the distinction.
One of our initial goals when we began working with the middle school teach-
ers was to support the evolution of the teacher group into a professional teaching
community. The criteria that we identified imply that the deprivatization of teach-
ers’ instructional practices is integral to this transition. This conjecture is compati-
ble with current research on teacher learning, which has made considerable prog-
ress in recent years in conceptualizing collegial relationships and in specifying the
attributes of professional communities (Achinstein, 2002; Grossman et al., 2001;
Gutiérrez, 1996; King & Newmann, 1999; Little, 1990, 1999, 2002; Louis &
Kruse, 1995; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001; Stokes, 2001; Talbert, 1995; West-
heimer, 1998; Witziers, Sleegers, & Imants, 1999). However, relatively few studies
have been conducted that have examined either the initial emergence of profes-
sional teaching communities (Gamoran et al., 2003; Grossman et al., 2001), or the
types of practices established by a professional teaching community and forms of
participation in them that support teachers’ learning (Wilson & Berne, 1999). We
sought to address these issues in the course of our collaboration with the middle
school teachers.
The second step in developing a framework for documenting the learning of a
teacher group and its evolution into a professional teaching community was to
identify qualitatively distinct types of norms that we anticipated would be relevant
based on a review of the literature on teacher change. The three types of norms that
we delineated while preparing for the experiment were (a) norms of general partic-
ipation, (b) norms of pedagogical reasoning, and (c) norms of mathematical rea-
soning. Our conjecture that norms of general participation would prove to be im-
portant was influenced by Grossman et al.’s (2001) claim that norms of interaction
necessarily change as a teacher group evolves from a pseudocommunity into a pro-
fessional teaching community. In addition, the third criterion that we identified for
differentiating between a teacher group and a professional teaching community,
mutual engagement, implicated norms of general participation.
Our focus on mutual engagement also constituted a rationale for documenting
norms of pedagogical reasoning because this criterion encompasses norms that are
specific to mathematics teaching, such as the standards to which the members of a
teacher group hold one another accountable when they justify pedagogical deci-
sions and judgments. In addition, the analysis of norms of pedagogical reasoning
was central to our overall goal of supporting the middle school teachers’ develop-
ment of instructional practices in which teaching became a generative, knowl-
edge-building activity that focused on supporting students’ development of signifi-
cant mathematical ideas. Our decision to analyze the evolution of norms of
mathematical reasoning was informed by prior investigations that have docu-
mented the importance of teachers developing a deep understanding of central dis-
ciplinary ideas if they are to achieve a substantial instructional agenda by building
on their students’ reasoning (Ball & Bass, 2000; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking,
2000; Hill, Rowan, & Ball, 2005; Ma, 1999; Shulman, 1986).
The final step in developing the framework was to test the adequacy of the three
types of norms in capturing the significant developments that occurred as we
worked with the middle school teachers to support their learning. As Dean’s
(2005) analysis of the collective learning of the teacher group during the first 2
years of this collaboration documented, all three types of norms proved to be rele-
vant in this regard. However, as Dean also documented, we found it necessary to
elaborate the framework by including a fourth type of norm. We have already
noted that we shared our analyses of the institutional setting of teaching with the
members of the teacher group and that these analyses served as a primary resource
as the teachers engaged in a subsequent series of activities. These activities were
conducted during the latter part of the second year of our collaboration with the
teachers and culminated in the formulation of a trajectory for supporting the devel-
opment of their school leaders’ understanding of the challenges involved in teach-
ing mathematics effectively. This series of activities was based on an explicit de-
sign conjecture about the importance of the teachers identifying aspects of the
institutional setting that they might be able to change and developing plans for at-
tempting to do so. Dean’s retrospective analysis documented the major develop-
ments in the evolution of what we subsequently referred to as norms of institu-
tional reasoning.
At the outset, it was normative for the teachers to speak about aspects of the in-
stitutional setting as objects of frustration that were beyond their control to change.
By the end of our first year of working with them, it had become normative for the
teachers to acknowledge the highly privatized nature of their instructional prac-
tices and to account for it terms of the influence of aspects of the institutional set-
ting on their teaching. By the end of the second year after they had engaged in the
series of activities mentioned in the previous paragraph, it had became normative
for the teachers to perceive aspects of the institutional setting as susceptible to their
influence. For example, the teachers’ goal in formulating a trajectory for school
leaders’ learning was to gain access to resources such as time for collaborative in-
structional planning that they considered essential as they attempted to develop in-
structional practices that focused on student reasoning. Dean’s (2005) analysis in-
dicated that these developments were critical to the deprivatization of the teachers’
instructional practices and the evolution of the teacher group into a professional
teaching community. As a consequence of this finding, we elaborated the interpre-
tive framework to include norms of institutional reasoning. As we have illustrated,
an analysis of norms of this type documents the normative ways in which a group
of teachers speak about the institutional setting and its influence on classroom their
instructional practices as well as the aspects of the setting that they believe they can
change.
Our analysis of the learning of the middle school teacher group revealed that the
four types of norms did not evolve independently (Dean, 2005). Instead, the evolu-
tion of norms of one type created conditions within the teacher group for the evolu-
tion of norms of another type. For example, shifts that occurred in norms of mathe-
matical reasoning appeared to make possible subsequent developments in general
norms of participation. In particular, the norm of challenging others’ thinking in
mathematics discussions did not emerge until it had become normative for the
teachers to develop more sophisticated arguments for justifying their mathematical
reasoning. As another example, the fact that the teachers would not allow us to
video-record their classroom instruction until we had worked with them for 18
months provides a strong indication of the highly privatized nature of their instruc-
tional practices. This privatization and the concomitant norms of institutional rea-
soning constrained the development of norms of general participation when teach-
ers discussed pedagogical issues during the first year of the experiment.
The framework we have outlined constitutes a general way of documenting the
actual learning trajectory of teacher groups at different grade levels and in dis-
tinctly diverse settings in some detail. As we have clarified, we identified three of
the four types of norms that compose the framework by reviewing the current
teacher education literature. Norms of institutional reasoning emerged as signifi-
cant while the experiment was in progress. It is reasonable to anticipate that it will
be important for other researchers to focus on norms of this type given that teach-
ing as collaborative knowledge generation clashes with the institutional con-
straints of most districts. This is particularly the case in the current era of
high-stakes accountability given that most districts do not have the capacity to re-
spond productively to accountability demands (Elmore, 2006). Although the
framework focuses on the learning of mathematics teacher groups, we anticipate
that it can be generalized to other disciplines in which teachers’ development of a
relatively deep understanding of central disciplinary ideas is important. In making
these claims about generalizability, we acknowledge the value of ongoing testing
and refinement of the types of norms that compose the framework.
It is reasonable to anticipate that the analyses produced by using the framework
have some generalizability and are not limited to a particular case of teacher learn-
ing. For example, the process by which the middle school group made the transi-
tion from a group to a full-fledged professional teaching community and the means
by which this transition was supported should be of interest to other teacher educa-
tion researchers. In contrast, the generalizability of other aspects of the specific
case we studied is clearly more circumscribed. The literature on educational re-
form and educational leadership emphasizes the importance of supporting school
and district leaders’ development of effective instructional leadership practices
(Glennan & Resnick, 2004; Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004).9
Many districts organize ongoing professional development for school and district
leaders. The district in which we worked recognized the value of leadership pro-
9The depth of discipline-specific knowledge that leaders need in particular content domains to be
effective is still a matter of debate (Cobb & Smith, 2008; Stein & Nelson, 2003).
fessional development but did not have the resources to launch such an initiative.
As a consequence, we made the design decision to involve the teachers in activities
in which they developed a trajectory for school leaders’ learning. The general-
izability of the resulting analysis is therefore limited to cases in which a district ei-
ther does not recognize the need for leadership professional development or does
not have the capacity to support such an initiative. As this case illustrates, the ana-
lytic approach allows us to specify the conditions of generalizability.
RELATING TEACHERS’ ACTIVITY IN PROFESSIONAL

DEVELOPMENT SESSIONS AND IN THE CLASSROOM
The final challenge we addressed in the course of the teacher development experi-
ment was that of developing a viable conceptualization of the relations between the
teachers’ activity in the professional development sessions and in their classrooms.
This challenge is endemic to teacher development experiments that aim to engage
teachers in activities in professional development sessions with the goal of sup-
porting their reorganization of their activity in another setting, the classroom. The
manner in which a research team conceptualizes the relations between teachers’
activity in the two settings impacts all three phases of an experiment. For example,
the design conjectures formulated while one is preparing for an experiment neces-
sarily involve assumptions about the specific ways in which teachers’ learning in
professional development sessions might influence their classroom practices and
vice versa. In addition, these assumptions necessarily frame analyses of the partic-
ipating teachers’ learning and are thereby implicated in the resulting teacher devel-
opment theory.
Designs for supporting teachers’ learning have traditionally focused on equip-
ping teachers with forms of expertise that are conjectured to underpin effective in-
structional practices. These designs are premised on the assumption that teachers
will develop insights as they engage in professional development activities, and
then apply these insights in their classrooms. In such cases, the design conjectures
focus primarily on what might be accomplished in the professional development
sessions, and the teachers’ classrooms are treated as settings in which the outcomes
of their learning in the professional sessions can be applied and assessed. The un-
derlying relation between the professional development sessions and the teachers’
classrooms is therefore primarily unidirectional in nature (Borko, 2004; Clarke &
Hollingsworth, 2002).
The design conjectures that we developed while preparing for the design exper-
iment with the middle school teachers were consistent with the work of a number
of researchers who have challenged this unidirectional conceptualization. These
researchers’ central claim is that professional development activities should be
grounded in classroom instructional practice (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Franke, Car-
penter, Fennema, Ansell, & Behrend, 1998; Nelson, 1997; Putnam & Borko, 2000;
Schifter, 1998). For example, Ball and Cohen (1999) called for teacher develop-
ment activities to be centered on the use of artifacts that are directly relevant to
teachers’ classroom practices. This proposal is based on the rationale that teachers’
classroom practices constitute a valuable resource on which researchers can draw
as they formulate designs for supporting teachers’ learning. In this conceptualiza-
tion, a key criterion for assessing the quality of designs is how closely the designs
are tied to the reality of the classroom.
The initial design conjectures that we developed when preparing for the teacher
development experiment went beyond the unidirectional conceptualization and re-
flected the assumption that we could situate professional development activities in

the context of teaching by using artifacts that originated in the teachers’ class-
rooms. However, events that occurred during the third year of our collaboration
with the teachers led us to reconsider this initial assumption. As we have clarified,
the teachers had deprivatized their instructional practices and the teacher group
had evolved into a professional teaching community by this point in our collabora-
tion. Against this background, we engaged the teachers in activities in which they
used a common instructional task with their students and then analyzed the result-
ing student work in the subsequent professional development session. Our ratio-
nale for this design decision serves to illustrate our initial conceptualization of the
relation between the teachers’ activity in the two settings. First, we assumed that
students’ work is an integral aspect of teachers’ instructional practices and conjec-
tured that making it a focus of activity in professional development sessions would
enhance the pragmatic value of the sessions for the teachers. Second, we conjec-
tured that the teachers would openly critique and challenge on another’s interpreta-
tions of student work because teaching was now deprivatized. Finally, we conjec-
tured that open discussions of this type would give rise to opportunities for the
teachers to gain insight into the diversity of their students’ reasoning that would be
useful when they attempted to build on their students’ solutions while conducting
whole-class discussions.
This rationale reflected a conscious effort to draw on the teachers’ classroom
practices while planning for professional development sessions. However, as Zhao
and Cobb (2007) reported, our conjectures about the use of student work as a
means of supporting the learning of the teacher group proved to be unviable de-
spite detailed preparations. All of the teachers seemed to find the activity engaging
and discussed their interpretations of the student work openly. Furthermore, most
were able to discriminate between students’ solutions in terms of level of sophisti-
cation. However, it became apparent that none of the teachers viewed this activity
as relevant to their classroom instruction. Zhao and Cobb’s analysis indicated that
the teachers’ primary orientation to the student work was evaluative in that they
used it to assess whether the instructional activity had been successful. In other
words, there was substantial evidence that student work was, for the teachers, a
tool for retrospective assessment of prior instruction rather than a resource for the
prospective planning of future instruction.
This sequence of events led us to reexamine our assumptions about the relations
between teachers’ activity in the professional development sessions and in their
classrooms. In analyzing these events, we came to realize that the ways in which
we had assumed that student work would be used in the sessions did not fit with
how the teachers used student work in their classrooms. It was our hope that stu-
dent work would be, in Wenger’s (1998) terms, a reification of students’ current
mathematical reasoning that could inform instructional planning in the context of
our practices as researchers and teacher educators. In contrast, student work was a
reification of the outcome of instruction that was useful for assessment purposes in
the context of the teachers’ classroom practices.
This insight led us to question our assumption that teachers’ learning in profes-
sional development sessions and in their classrooms would necessarily be related
for the teachers if we organized professional development activities around arti-
facts that originated in their classrooms. We found Beach’s (1999) notion of conse-
quential transitions particularly useful as we attempted to rethink the relations be-
tween teachers’ activity in the two settings. In Beach’s terms, transitions between
settings occur when teachers shift from engaging in classroom teaching to partici-
pating in professional development activities, and vice versa. For Beach, these
transitions are consequential if and only if teachers’ participation in professional
development sessions is oriented toward reworking their classroom practices, and
if their classroom teaching constitutes the context in which they make sense of
their engagement in professional development activities. This perspective implies
that design conjectures should not merely focus on the movement of artifacts be-
tween the two settings, as was the case in our initial conceptualization. Instead, de-
sign conjectures should anticipate the ways in which teachers might use artifacts in
professional development sessions given how they use them in their classroom
practices. In other words, how an artifact is used in one setting needs to be concep-
tualized in relation to how it is used in the other setting.
The questions that need to be addressed when planning to use an artifact such as
student work to support teachers’ learning include the following: How do the par-
ticipating teachers typically use the artifact in their classroom practices? What
pedagogical value do the teachers attribute to the artifact in the context of those
practices? Are there significant differences between the teachers’ use of the artifact
in their classrooms and the ways in which the researchers envision it being used in
professional development sessions? Answers to these questions clarify whether
the planned use of an artifact such as student work constitutes a viable means of
supporting teachers’ learning across the settings of the professional development
session and the classroom.
In summary, when we began the teacher development experiment, we
assumed that the two-way movement of artifacts between the teachers’ class-
rooms and the professional development sessions would support teacher learn-
ing across the two settings. We assumed that designing the professional devel-
opment activities around the classroom artifacts would in itself constitute an
effective means of situating professional development activities in the context
of the teachers’ classroom practices. In attempting to understand why design
conjectures based on this assumption were unviable, we came to conceptualize
the relations between the teachers’ activity in the two settings not merely as a
two-way movement of physical artifacts but as a bidirectional interplay be-
tween teachers’ use of artifacts in professional development sessions and in the
classroom.
The bidirectional conceptualization is a general way of conceptualizing the re-

lations between teachers’ activity across the settings of professional development
sessions and their classrooms. It orients the interpretation of teachers’ activity
when one is conducting retrospective analyses by extending the unit of analysis to
include the practices that are constituted in both settings. In doing so, it emphasizes
the importance of examining how teachers use an artifact in their classrooms when
analyzing their use of that artifact in professional development sessions. In addi-
tion, the bidirectional conceptualization can guide the prospective design of pro-
fessional development by orienting researchers and teacher developers to antici-
pate the potential connections that might be established between professional
development activities and teachers’ classroom practices. We have illustrated the
usefulness of the bidirectional conceptualization by focusing on one particular ar-
tifact, student work, as a support for the teachers’ learning. This conceptualization
also proved useful when we analyzed the contribution of second artifact that we
used during the last 3 years of our collaboration with the teachers: video recordings
of the teachers’ classroom instruction. We anticipate that this conceptualization
will prove to be equally useful in analyses of the use of artifacts in other subject
matter domains, such as student essays in English classes or student products in art
classes.
Employment of the bidirectional conceptualization requires a relatively de-
tailed account of the collaborating teachers’ current instructional practices and, in
particular, of the ways in which they use key artifacts in their classrooms. In our
view, two aspects of teachers’ classroom practices are particularly worthy of docu-
mentation. The first concerns the extent to which student reasoning is made visible
in the teachers’ classroom practices. The second involves identifying issues that
are pragmatically relevant to the teachers in the context of their classroom prac-
tices and that can be leveraged to achieve the professional development agenda of
supporting their development of practices that place student reasoning at the center
of instructional decision making. The overall approach of attempting to under-
stand teachers’ current classroom practices and their experiences in professional
development sessions is consistent with the goal of attempting to achieve this
agenda by using teachers’ current practices as a resource.
CONCLUSIONS
One of the strengths of the design experiment methodology is that it embraces

the complexity of the settings in which learning occurs, be it the learning of stu-
dents or of teachers. In the case of classroom design experiments, considerable
effort has been expended to develop theoretical constructs that enable research-
ers to see regularity and order in the messiness and complexity of classroom ac-
tions and interactions (Cobb et al., 2001; Collins et al., 2004; Edelson, 2002;
Lehrer & Lesh, 2003; Schoenfeld, 2006). Analogous theoretical work is needed
if the methodology is to be a viable means of supporting and understanding the
learning of groups of practicing teachers. As we have noted, the extension of the

methodology to professional development settings poses additional theoretical
challenges both because it is typically impossible to renegotiate teachers’ institu-
tional obligations when preparing for an experiment and because teacher devel-
opment experiments necessarily seek to support and understand teachers’ learn-
ing across settings. This article is a report from the field on one attempt to engage
in this theoretical work.
The three conceptual challenges that we have discussed in this article each have
significant implications for all phases of a teacher development experiment. In the
initial phase of preparing for an experiment, the analytic approach that we de-
scribed when addressing the first challenge influences the formulation of a conjec-
tured learning trajectory by orienting us to situate the prospective learning of the
teacher group in the institutional setting of the participating teachers’ schools and
district. The first step of the approach involves (a) identifying the people and
groups within a school or district that are attempting to achieve an instructional
agenda and (b) documenting the nature of their agendas, the means by they attempt
to achieve them, and the means by which they gauge whether their efforts are ef-
fective. The second step involves documenting the interconnections between the
groups by delineating boundary encounters between members of different groups,
the various ways in which members of different groups use boundary objects, and
the extent to which there are brokers who are members of two or more groups and
who can thus bridge between the perspectives. As we have indicated, this analytic
approach reflects the view that teachers’ activity both in professional development
sessions and in their classrooms is partially constituted by the institutional setting
in which they work.
In addressing the second conceptual challenge, we outlined a framework for
documenting the collective learning of a teacher group. This framework comprises
four types of norms, namely norms of general participation, mathematical reason-
ing, pedagogical reasoning, and what we termed institutional reasoning. These
four different types of norms orient us to consider four interrelated aspects of a
teacher group’s prospective learning when designing professional development.
As we clarified, an analysis of the learning of a teacher group conducted using the
framework documents the evolving social situation that constitutes the immediate
setting of the participating teachers’ learning.
The bidirectional conceptualization that we proposed when addressing the third
conceptual challenge orients us to develop a relatively detailed account of the col-
laborating teachers’ instructional practices in order to situate the professional de-
velopment design in the context of teaching. This conceptualization brings the use
of records of classroom practice in professional development to the fore. Such re-
cords include student work, classroom tasks, and video-recorded episodes of class-
room instruction. The bidirectional perspective highlights the limitations of focus-
ing solely on the movement of artifacts between the classroom and professional
development sessions. It instead emphasizes the importance of taking account of

how teachers use artifacts in one setting when anticipating how they might use
those artifacts in another setting.
In the second phase of a teacher development experiment, experimenting to
support the collaborating teachers’ learning, the process of testing and revising
conjectures is necessarily informed by ongoing interpretations of teachers’ activity
in both professional development sessions and their classrooms. These ongoing in-
terpretations have immediate implications for the conduct of the experiment and
inform both the revision of conjectures and the design of activities for supporting
the collaborating teachers’ learning. The analytic approach that we developed
while addressing the first conceptual challenge enables us to situate the collaborat-
ing teachers’ activity in institutional setting, thereby influencing ongoing design
decisions. Similarly, the interpretive framework we developed while addressing
the second challenge enables us to situate teachers’ activity in professional devel-
opment sessions within the social context of the teacher group, thus informing the
testing and revision of conjectures. The bidirectional conceptualization developed
when addressing the third challenge indicates the importance of drawing on analy-
ses of the collaborating teachers’ classroom practices as well as ongoing analyses
of professional development sessions when testing and revising the design conjec-
tures.
As we have indicated, one of the primary goals during the third phase of the
teacher development experiment should, in our view, be to conduct retrospective
analyses that contribute to the development of domain-specific teacher develop-
ment theories. We have clarified that analyses of the institutional setting that en-
ables and constraints the collaborating teachers’ learning are central to the devel-
opment of theories of this type. The value of including such analyses is that they
make it possible for other researchers and teacher educators to adapt the docu-
mented learning trajectory to the contingencies of the schools and districts in
which their collaborating teachers work in a conjecture-driven manner.
The interpretive framework for documenting the learning of a teacher group in-
fluences retrospective analyses by orienting decisions about what was necessary
and what was contingent in supporting the learning of a group of teachers (cf.
Cobb & Gravemeijer, 2008; Kelly, 2004). We have described why we found it nec-
essary to elaborate our initial framework by attending to the evolution of norms of
institutional reasoning. We made this modification because there was increasing
evidence that the development of the normative ways of talking about the institu-
tional setting and its influence on classroom practices were integral to the evolu-
tion of the teacher group into a professional teaching community. Had we not made
this modification, the actual learning trajectory that we documented would, in all
probability, have been framed in terms of interrelated developments in the first
three types of norms.
In this final phase of conducting retrospective analyses, the bidirectional con-
ceptualization shapes the explanation of a teacher group’s learning and contributes

to the development of credible accounts for why particular design decisions did not
work as expected. For example, to account for why students’ work did not support
the learning of the teachers with whom we collaborated, we focused on the lack of
alignment between assumptions about how the teachers would use student work in
the professional development sessions and how it was constituted in teachers’
classroom practices. In this regard, the bidirectional conceptualization orients us to
consider teachers’ activity in their classrooms as well as in professional develop-
ment sessions when determining both the aspects of a professional development
design that are necessary rather than contingent, and the conditions under which
they are necessary.
We have argued that the constructs we discussed when addressing each of the
three challenges have relatively broad applicability. However, we should acknowl-
edge that their usefulness is limited to cases in which the goal is to support teachers’
development of relatively ambitious forms of instruction that are consistent with cur-
rent research on learning. Supporting the development of professional teaching com-
munities as social supports for the participating teachers’ learning becomes crucial
when pursuing a professional development agenda that focuses on complex and de-
manding forms of instruction. Furthermore, it is important to take account of the in-
stitutional setting in which the collaborating teachers work when pursuing such an
agenda because the professional development goals conflict with the current instruc-
tional priorities of most schools and districts. The teacher education literature indi-
cates the value of using artifacts that can serve as records of practice to support
teachers’ development of ambitious instructional practices (Borko, 2004).
Although the constructs we have discussed are broadly applicable, the gen-
eralizability of the resulting analyses is limited to a particular type of institutional
setting in which teachers have developed particular forms of instructional practice
in particular content domains. It was for this reason that we characterized a do-
main-specific theory of teacher professional development comprising a range of
possible learning trajectories for a teacher group, the contingencies of which are
specified by locating them in contrasting institutional settings. In the case of the
design experiment that we conducted with the middle school teachers, the gen-
eralizability of our analyses is limited to cases in which school leaders attempt to

monitor and regulate teachers’ classroom practices and in which teachers have de-
veloped highly privatized instructional practices in which students’ reasoning is
currently invisible.
This limitation acknowledged, we anticipate that analyses of this type can in-
form the work of researchers and teacher educators working in other settings pro-
vided that this is treated as a process of conjecture-driven adaptation rather than as
implementation or replication. In our view, the adaptation and testing of profes-
sional development designs that have proven effective in one type of setting to
other types of settings is an important step in the development of domain-specific
theories of teacher professional development. In the case of the middle school ex-
periment, our use of student work as a potential means of supporting the teachers’
learning drew heavily on the work of Franke, Kazemi, and colleagues (Franke &
Kazemi, 2001a; Kazemi & Franke, 2004). Our analysis of how student work was
initially constituted in the professional development sessions goes some way to-
ward clarifying the conditions under which activities organized around student
work can support teachers’ development of forms of classroom practices that fore-
ground student reasoning. The analyses therefore make a contribution to the devel-
opment of teacher professional development theory in mathematics.
One key feature of the design experiment methodology is that specific experi-
ments have frequently served as contexts for developing and refining theoretical
constructs that guide the generation, selection, and assessment of design alternatives
(diSessa & Cobb, 2004). The three conceptual challenges discussed in this article
emerged in the context of a teacher development experiment as we attempted to sup-
port and understand the learning of a group of teachers (cf. Franke & Kazemi,
2001b; Simon, 2000; Stein et al., 1998). A strength of the design research methodol-
ogy in the case of both classroom experiments and teacher development experiments
is that theoretical constructs are developed in the contexts in which they will be used.
As a consequence, the resulting constructs are likely to do useful work by contribut-
ing to the formulation, testing, and revision of design conjectures.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The analysis presented in this article was supported by National Science Foundation
Grants REC-0231037 and ESI-0554535. The opinions expressed in this article do
not necessarily reflect the position, policy, or endorsement of the Foundation.
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Conducting Design Experiments to Support Teachers' Learning: A Reﬂection

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Conducting Design Experiments

Paul Cobb and Qing Zhao

2003). In comparison, design experiments conducted to support and investigate the

nities was precipitated in part by ongoing reform efforts in a number of subject

supporting their reorganization of their activity in another setting (the classroom).

BACKGROUND TO THE TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

The teacher development experiment lasted 5 years and aimed to support a

structional resources, the aspects of students’ mathematical activity that were

• It specifies a range of possible learning trajectories for a group of teachers,

dents began working on homework tasks.

LOCATING TEACHERS’ LEARNING IN THE

We anticipated that it would be critical to document the institutional settings in

schools and districts) as designed organizations and as lived organizations.5

(cf. Feldman & Pentland, 2003).

by the National Science Foundation.

stricted to interacting directly with students in the classroom. We delineated the

The second type of interconnection that proved important to document con-

mented, these analyses constituted a primary point of reference in the subsequent

ACCOUNTING FOR THE COLLECTIVE LEARNING

As a first step in developing a viable framework, we differentiated between a

as community starts to form, individuals have a natural tendency to play commu-

Based on a synthesis of the literature on communities of practice, professional

• A shared purpose or enterprise (e.g., ensuring that students come to under-

RELATING TEACHERS’ ACTIVITY IN PROFESSIONAL

DEVELOPMENT SESSIONS AND IN THE CLASSROOM

flected the assumption that we could situate professional development activities in

The bidirectional conceptualization is a general way of conceptualizing the re-

One of the strengths of the design experiment methodology is that it embraces

learning of groups of practicing teachers. As we have noted, the extension of the

development sessions. It instead emphasizes the importance of taking account of

ceptualization shapes the explanation of a teacher group’s learning and contributes

eralizability of our analyses is limited to cases in which school leaders attempt to

Simon, M. A. (1995). Reconstructing mathematics pedagogy from a constructivist perspective. Journal

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