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This study investigates how two middle school teachers of mathematics reflected on and planned for the use of a digital collaborative platform embedded with a problem-based curriculum. As digital resources can help teachers enact mathematics problems that are responsive to the needs of their students, more empirical work is needed to understand and inform relevant teaching practices that leverage evidence of student thinking (Pepin et al., 2017). Drawing on a documentational approach to didactics (Gueudet & Trouche, 2009), we examine the influences of collaborative reflections on teachers’ decisions about the use of digital resources. Our preliminary findings show that based on their reflective conversation, teachers considered the affordances and constraints of both digital and non-digital resources in their planning. Our findings suggest collaborative reflections help teachers critically examine digital resources. 

In this chapter I report on a design research project of a digital collaborative platform for an embedded problem-based mathematics curriculum—the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP). The goal of the project is to enhance the teaching and teaming of mathematics that occurs in paper-and-pencil classrooms by leveraging the affordances of digital technologies in a digital classroom environment. In this chapter I share lessons learned for developing the digital collaborative platform for students and teachers, focusing on how the project team: (1) reimagined mathematics problems delivered in a digital collaborative platform, (2) supported a model of collaboration in the digital platform, and (3) provided students with just-in-time supports in the digital collaborative platform. To illustrate the lessons learned, I report on the iterative changes made to features of the digital collaborative platform based on analysis of project data and feedback from teachers and students. 

Learning mathematics in a student-centered, problem-based classroom requires students to develop mathematical understanding and reasoning collaboratively with others. Despite its critical role in students’ collaborative learning in groups and classrooms, evidence of student thinking has rarely been perceived and utilized as a resource for planning and teaching. This is in part because teachers have limited access to student work in paper-and-pencil classrooms. As an alternative approach to making student thinking visible and accessible, a digital collaborative platform embedded with a problem-based middle school mathematics curriculum is developed through an ongoing design-based research project (Edson & Phillips, 2021). Drawing from a subset of data collected for the larger research project, we investigated how students generated mathematical inscriptions during small group work, and how teachers used evidence of students’ solution strategies inscribed on student digital workspaces. Findings show that digital flexibility and mobility allowed students to easily explore different strategies and focus on developing mathematical big ideas, and teachers to foreground student thinking when facilitating whole-class discussions and planning for the next lesson. This study provides insights into understanding mathematics teachers’ interactions with digital curriculum resources in the pursuit of students’ meaningful engagement in making sense of mathematical ideas.