Teaching by Design: Understanding the intersection of teacher practice and the design of curricular innovations

This dissertation explores the ways that three urban middle school teachers use curriculum materials to enact a 10-week classroom science project. Unlike typical studies of implementation, this work devotes particular attention to the nature of the curriculum designs and the ways that teachers use these resources to design everyday instructional settings. I introduce a scale for characterizing teachers’ differing degrees of reliance on the materials, a framework for analyzing the factors that influence teacher-tool interactions, and a theoretical perspective that characterizes differences both in teachers’ individual capacities to use materials and in the overall systemic capacities of the teacher-tool partnerships.