TEACHERS INTERPRETATIONS OF CGI AFTER 4 YEARS - MEANINGS AND PRACTICES

Twenty primary teachers were interviewed who, three or four years earl ier, had participated in in-service workshops on Cognitively Guided In struction (CGI). Three patterns of CGI use seemed related to the meani ngs teachers constructed for CGI itself. Teachers who reported develop ing their use of CGI until it formed the mainstay of their mathematics teaching saw CGI conceptually. They also reported learning mainly thr ough their interactions with students and other teachers and developin g beliefs about the conceptual nature of mathematics, the constructivi st nature of learning, and the students' central role in that learning . Teachers who reported never having used CGI more than supplementally saw CGI as a group of procedures and espoused more traditional belief s in these areas. Teachers who reported using CGI more at first, but l ess currently, showed a marked incongruity between their espoused beli efs and reported practices. The authors ask whether additional researc her support, collegial interaction, or perhaps prescriptiveness in the intervention might have helped teachers in this third group enact the ir conceptually based beliefs.