Documentation Work, Design Capacity, and Teachers’ Expertise in Designing Instruction

Teachers use resources in order to support their teaching, to support student learning, and to advance their own pedagogical and content knowledge. Using resources is intrinsically linked to particular knowledge and skills. These are conceptualized within different theoretical frames as competencies, aspects of design capacity, teacher expertise, professional knowledge, or utilization schemes within the instrumentation process. We discuss four different conceptualizations of teachers’ work with resources, problems they aim to address, and exemplars of empirical studies in which such conceptualizations are used. We then discuss the affordances, constraints, and blind spots of these frameworks and indicate how they overlap and complement each other.