Mathematics teacher education advanced methods: an example in dynamic geometry

We present a research work about an innovative national teacher training program in France: the Pairform@nce program, designed to sustain ICT integration. The Pairform@nce trainings are grounded in a principle of collective lesson design by teams of trainees; they associate face-to-face and distant training. We study here a training for secondary school teachers, whose objective is to foster the development of an inquiry-based approach in the teaching of mathematics, using investigative potentialities of dynamic geometry environments (DGE). We adopt the theoretical background of the documentational approach to didactics for studying how a training organizing the design of lessons by teachers teams can contribute to teacher professional development, directed in particular towards more inquiry in the classroom supported by DGE. This approach conceptualizes the interactions between teachers and resources as geneses: complex, long-term processes, associating evolutions and stability. In the frame of this approach, for studying these geneses, we develop a specific methodology: we organize a follow-up of teachers during several weeks; during this period, the teachers fill a logbook describing their activity; they answer to questionnaires and interviews; we also collect as completely as possible the material resources involved in their work. We followed in particular the work of a team of trainees; drawing on the data collected, we analyse their professional development, related with the training. We discuss on a more general level, the consequences of a training based on collective documentation work for the integration of technology by mathematics teachers.