5. Such discussions assist in the development of corporate meaning within the group and a sense of professional knowledge against which emergent ideas can be internally judged prior to articulation (cf: Von Glasersfeld, 1991).
6. Tutors need to organise and negotiate the progress of such professional discussions, feeding in appropriate stimuli and resources, driving the debate forwards to cover a planned curriculum. The tutor should not be a neutral chair between a varied range of largely inexperienced opinions, but the key player in an interactive teaching and learning process (cf: Jones & Tanner, 2000b).
7. In order to ensure that metacognitive professional knowledge is available for use and application in classroom problem solving contexts, opportunities for reflection should be available. Collective reflection in plenaries in which students are formally required to summarise key issues and ideas assist students to reify or formalise knowledge through reflected abstraction. Several studies have shown the benefit of such activities for the development of metacognition in mathematics (eg: Cobb et al, 1992; Tanner & Jones, 1994; 1995b; 2000b).
Analysis of our existing teaching and learning strategies