(Funded by an internal grant from the Weizmann Institute of Science and by the Ministry of Education).
TRAIL is a R&D project based on an original theoretical-organizational framework, which is designed for supporting, enhancing and scaling-up partnerships between education researchers and teachers, for the benefit of both. TRAIL is designed so to encourage teachers and researchers to cross the boundaries between teaching, research, design, and implementaton.
In TRAIL:
- Mathematics teachers collaborate with academic researchers in forming a TRAIL community with a joint learning agenda.
- Both teachers and researchers have agency over the articulation of goals or hypotheses situated in mathematics education, the formulation of research questions, the design of research tools, and the analysis the shared data corpus.
- The research goals and questions in the TRAIL communities deal with issues that have the potential to resonate with dilemmas and challenges that mathematics teachers encounter in their daily work at the level of a class, a small group or an individual student.
- TRAIL research-practice partnerships must have “clear utility” for practitioners that can be convincingly communicated without heavily relying on the scientific literature in which the research is situated. In a similar vein, a TRAIL partnership must have “clear utility” for researchers, that is, have the potential to yield insights of importance to the education research community at large.
Related papers
Koichu, B., & Pinto, A. (2018). Developing education research competencies in mathematics teachers through TRAIL: Teacher-Research Alliance for Investigating Learning. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology. DOI: 10.1007/s42330-018-0006-3.
Koichu, B., & Pinto A. (in press). Implementation through participation: Theoretical considerations and an illustrative case. In Proceedings of 11th Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education.
Pinto A., & Koichu B. (accepted pending minor revisions) Implementation of mathematics education research as crossing the boundary between disciplined inquiry and teacher inquiry. ZDM Mathematics Education.