Teachers making sense of a mathematical professional development experience

The purpose of this study was to understand how teachers make sense of their professional development experience for their own learning, their students learning, and their teaching. Three teachers were observed and interviewed during a professional development course where the goal of the course was for the teachers to develop their mathematical content knowledge. The mathematics instruction of the course was similar to how these teachers are expected to teach in their classrooms with a course emphasis on using technology to explore mathematics. The participants experiences were broken into their making sense of the mathematics, technology, and problem solving, and their making sense was observed as assimilation (content was not problematic) or perturbation (content was problematic) and how they dealt with each. Each of the participants experiences is presented as case studies followed by a cross-case analysis.