Roles, Identities and Interactions of Various Participants in Mathematics Teacher Collaboration

Mathematics teacher collaboration often involves additional participants and stakeholders besides the collaborating teachers themselves. These may include facilitators, mathematicians, researchers, administrators, policy makers or other professionals, who assume a variety of roles in regards to the endeavored collaboration. Such actors may have a significant impact on the collaboration’s productiveness, either from within the collaboration, for example when diverse perspectives are shared amongst group members with different expertise, or from the outside, for example when external actors encourage (or hinder) the creation of suitable environments for collaboration. The nature of roles taken up by participants in teacher collaboration can vary in different countries and contexts. Moreover, within teacher collaborative groups, the roles of participants may shift over time. In this chapter, we aim to explore the roles and identities of various actors involved in mathematics teacher collaboration, as well as the nature of interactions between them. We center in particular on the role of facilitators of teacher collaborations. The chapter relates to the following four foci: (1) existing theoretical framings and methodologies for researching the roles of different participants in teacher collaboration; (2) the role of facilitators in promoting mathematics teacher collaboration; (3) the professional trajectory of facilitators; and (4) the role of the environment in which the teacher collaboration is situated. We drew upon previous reviews and studies, as well as on the 16 papers presented in the Theme C sessions at the ICMI Study 25 conference.