Facilitating Opportunities for Professional Learning in Teacher Work Groups

• In Event: Roundtable Session 116
  In Roundtable Session: Leadership and Learning Roundtable

Abstract

Research has identified effective facilitation of teacher community as an important means for cultivating teacher learning (e.g., Borko, 2004). This analysis investigates the facilitation of one secondary mathematics teacher workgroup, whose practice was improving. Analysis of interlocutors’ changes in participation status revealed three phases in the facilitation of teachers’ opportunities to learn. In the first phase, teachers participated by describing classroom events. In the second phase, teachers and the facilitator negotiated the meaning of those events in light of reified ideas from professional development. In the third phase, the group specified localized versions of the reifications that were negotiated during phase two. This analysis is valuable because it begins to build a model of effective facilitation of teachers’ collaborative discussions.

Author

• Britnie Delinger Kane, Vanderbilt University