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The ARPA Experience in Chile: Problem Solving for Teachers’ Professional Development

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Mathematical Problem Solving

Part of the book series: ICME-13 Monographs ((ICME13Mo))

Abstract

In this chapter, we present the ARPA Initiative, a research and development program having as a main goal the introduction of problem solving into regular teachers’ practice as a way of enriching mathematics classrooms, moving the attention from teacher to students and opening the route for developing abilities intertwined with content rather than content alone. Starting with the educational context in Chile, we describe the origin of the ARPA Initiative and then its professional development program with its different workshops: PSAction, (We use PS in front of our workshops’ names for emphasizing the role of Problem Solving in them.) PSContent, PSMonitor and, with special emphasis, PSClassroom, the core of the initiative. The experiences and research taking part along three years are then described, to conclude with learnings from practice and the main challenges for the future.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    PISA test defines six level of achievement for students, being level 1 the lowest and level 6 the highest.

  2. 2.

    In Chile, there are many private foundations administering a group of schools.

  3. 3.

    School year in Chile runs from the beginning of March until the middle of December.

  4. 4.

    In Spanish, we use ARPA for these activities as the acronym of Problem Solving Activity in Classroom (Actividad de Resolución de Problemas en el Aula), which coincide with the initiative name.

  5. 5.

    Conicyt is the national agency for funding of research and development in all disciplines.

  6. 6.

    Chile is administratively divided in 15 regions. VI Region is located to the South of Santiago.

  7. 7.

    All names of teachers are pseudonym.

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Acknowledgements

Funding from Fondef ID14I10338, PIA-CONICYT Basal Funds for Centers of Excellence Project FB0003, Basal CMM Projects, University of O’Higgins and Project EDU2015-65270-R are gratefully acknowledged. The authors are thankful to Lisa Darragh for useful comments on the chapter content and form and to Peter Liljedahl for many inspiring conversations, in particular the one in which we visualized the changes proposed in Sect. 14.7.

The authors want to thank the editors for granting us the opportunity of publishing this chapter, the referees for various interesting suggestions and for pointing out some English improvements.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Santiago, Chile

    Patricio Felmer, Josefa Perdomo-Díaz & Cristián Reyes

Authors
  1. Patricio Felmer
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  2. Josefa Perdomo-Díaz
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  3. Cristián Reyes
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Correspondence to Patricio Felmer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Peter Liljedahl

  2. Department of Mathematics Education, Cinvestav-Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico

    Manuel Santos-Trigo

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Felmer, P., Perdomo-Díaz, J., Reyes, C. (2019). The ARPA Experience in Chile: Problem Solving for Teachers’ Professional Development. In: Liljedahl, P., Santos-Trigo, M. (eds) Mathematical Problem Solving. ICME-13 Monographs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10472-6_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10472-6_14

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