University of Helsinki, Finland
Thesis: Researching teacher guidance in flipped learning mathematics classrooms: A sociocultural investigation
Research supervisor: Prof. Kristiina Kumpulainen & Antti Rajala, PhD

This article is important for me not only as part of me PhD study but also for myprofessional development as a FL mathematics teacher.One of the most important reason for me to flip is to support students’ self-regulation and meta-level learning. I am worried about how loosely scaffolding is connected to any kind of support in students’ ZPD. Too often it sounds that mathematics teaching becomes easy if teachers just let students study at their own ZPD.With this study, I want to illustrate the complexity of teacher guidance in FL.

I direct the attention to teachers’ narration about the responsible participation in students’ learning by focusing on how they illustrate the role of guiding in students development. Teachers’ reported acts of guidance are divided into two categories: act of teaching and act of scaffolding. In this part of analyze I asked again and again, where is the line between learning and development. Quite few of them finally meet the criteria of scaffolding.

I have strong feeling about the need to create an additional zone to Valsiner’s reconceptualization of ZPD, named the zone of unprompted actions (ZUA). However, I do not know how ZUA should be added to ZPD/ZFM/ZPA complex. I have done an assumption to not contain ZUA within teacher ZFM which emphasizes teacher’s long term aim to become insignificant for student learning. One teacher informant’s quotation, “I don’t have myself significant information. Instead, the information is there to use and to observe.It is not a bad thing that the students are taught to read the textbook by themselves and to understand what they have read. Instead of waiting for there to always be someone else to tell them how to think mathematically before they can do something, the students are encouraged to trust their own ability to learn.”, crystallize the nature of teacher role in students’ ZUA. This view challenges van de Pol et al.’s (2010) conceptual model of scaffolding, where all three characteristics -contingency, fading, and transfer of responsibility- are seen mandatory.

I have not found appropriate reading that would help me finished my view about these zones. I have also problems in visualizing scaffolding in these zones. I would like to find a way to attachacts of scaffolding to ZPD/ZFM/ZPA/ZUA complex not based on what they are but rather how they are shaped and for that reason represent. My interest is in who is in charge of the actions (teacher responsibility, joint responsibility, or student responsibility) and what is developmental function of that action.