Design of a topic-centered research-based teacher guide as support for teachers’ planning and teaching, and professional learning
Marcus Gustafsson har i sin avhandling bland annat undersökt hur lärarhandledningar kan utformas för att stödja matematiklärare i deras planering och undervisning, samt deras professionella lärande.
Marcus Gustfsson
Jorryt van Bommel, Karlstads universitet Yvonne Liljekvist, Karlstads universitet
Professor Anderas Ryve Lund, Mälardalens universitet
Karlstads universitet
2026-05-08
Institutionen för matematik och datavetenskap
Abstract in English
This thesis presents a design research project, comprising five papers on the design and implementation of a topic-centered research-based teacher guide for quadratic equations in Swedish upper-secondary school. The thesis aims to explore if and how such teacher guides can be designed to support mathematics teachers in their planning and teaching, and their professional learning. Further, it examines how teachers and their contexts affect conditions for such support.
The papers investigate teachers’ existing resource use when planning, previous research on quadratic equations, the design of the teacher guide, and the support found through teachers’ interactions with the teacher guide in two cycles of implementation.
The practice of planning and teaching is examined through teachers’ interactions with resources, perceiving and mobilizing them in designing instruction. Professional learning is operationalized as developing Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching and is further discussed through the lens of the Documentational Approach to Didactics. A theoretical contribution of the thesis is that the notion of what is educative differs across lenses for professional learning. Previous ideas on educative features in curriculum materials are extended by highlighting how these are interrelated and context-dependent in relation to the support they provide. Such support is found to function differently across stages of planning and teaching.
The findings provide empirical insights into teachers’ use of teacher guides, and further suggest that teacher support will be most effective when designed features meet the needs of teachers within their context. For Swedish upper-secondary teachers, this was found to include providing suggestions for lesson activities with rationale, grounded in implications emerging from issues found in research, rather than providing student tasks alone. The designed teacher guide constitutes a practical contribution for teaching quadratic equations.