Instrumental orchestration: theory and practice

Abstract

The paper concerns the way teachers use technological tools in their mathematics lessons. The aim is to investigate the explanatory power of the theory of instrumental orchestration through its confrontation with a teaching episode. An instrumental orchestration is defined through a didactical configuration, an exploitation mode and a didactical performance. This model is applied to a teaching episode on the concept of function, using an applet embedded in an electronic learning environment. The results suggest that the instrumental orchestration model is fruitful for analysing teacher behaviour, particularly in combination with additional theoretical perspectives.