Toward professional development for teachers grounded in a theory of decision making

There is now robust evidence that teachers' and others' in-the-moment decision making can be modeled and explained as a function of the following: their knowledge and other intellectual, social, and material resources; their goals; and their orientations (their beliefs, values, and preferences). The role of beliefs as they affect teachers' behavior can thus be described at a level of mechanism-but of necessity in interaction with resources and goals. This paper outlines and exemplifies how resources, goals, and orientations shape teachers' behavior. It indicates how they are interconnected, and why their evolution is necessarily slow. It then suggests how these understandings can be used as a foundation for mathematics teachers' professional development, and describes how they are being used to shape a course of participatory professional development for middle school mathematics teachers.