Examining the development of teachers' skills to support productive struggle in the mathematics learning-teaching process

This study aimed to examine a middle school mathematics teacher's development of productive struggle-supporting skills. Within this scope, the skills that support productive struggle were identified as content processing, using communication to support reasoning, and establishing a classroom microculture, based on the literature review. Teacher skills, categorized under these three headings, were supported through teacher development activities. A teacher development experiment, a qualitative research method, was employed in the study. Critical issues were identified through continuous analysis based on findings from teacher lesson observations, and teacher development sessions were planned to address these critical issues. The planned activities were implemented with the teacher through online interviews. The teacher development process was implemented throughout this cycle over a 13-week period in the fall semester of the 2022-2023 academic year. Data were collected through lesson observations and interviews. Continuous and retrospective analysis was used in the analysis of the data. The findings revealed that teachers' productive struggle-supporting skills improved in all three areas, but this development was limited at some points. Pedagogical content knowledge, content knowledge, beliefs, and time constraints in the curriculum were identified as factors affecting the teacher development process. In the light of the results obtained from this research, which supports teacher development, suggestions for future research are presented.