Formative Reformulations in Interventions on School Development: A Longitudinal Case Study of a Project on Student Note-Writing

This article analyses microprocesses within an intervention project at a Danish upper secondary school, which aims to develop teachers’ understanding of student notes and subsequently their way of dealing with them in their teaching practice. Focus is on how teachers formulate and reformulate the project ideas. These formulations and reformulations are assumed to be caused by the teachers’ experience of contradictions between new ideas and established practices, attempts to make sense of the new ideas, resistance, misunderstandings etc. By using ethnographic methods teacher reflections, understandings and development of aims and means are studied. By applying activity theory as an analytical framework, reformulations or formative reformulations are interpreted as the dynamic and creative force in the project. They function as drivers of change and what he calls expansive learning and concept formation.