Problem Solving As A Teacher Professional Development Strategy: Tensions Affecting Teachers

Teacher professional development programs aim to generate changes in teachers, in their knowledge, beliefs or practices. For these changes to occur, the professional development experience should cause the teacher to question aspects related to his/her profession. In this article, we present a problem-solvingbased professional development strategy for mathematics teachers and we offer an analysis of the tensions which emerged. To do this, we carried out a case study based on a workshop called RPAula that took place in Chile with elementary teachers. The results show that participation in this workshop causes tensions related to teachers' expectations about their students, their beliefs about teaching and learning, and their models of mathematics teaching.