Professional Development Facilitators' Orienting Discourses as Supports for Teachers' Literacy Learning and Application

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Professional Development for New Futures

Abstract

Despite growing awareness that professional development (PD) facilitators and teachers navigate and contribute to a contingent relational system, researchers are just beginning to understand facilitators’ shaping influence on teachers’ literacy instruction. Through the microanalysis of ethnographically obtained teacher-facilitator interactional data, this paper describes the telling case (Mitchell, 1984) of Robin, an urban public high school teacher, to illuminate how facilitators’ orienting discourses (Rex, 2002) influence teachers’ efforts to apply their PD learning in their disciplinary classroom contexts and within the systems of power that mediate their instructional decision making. This analysis suggests the merits of further studying and supporting facilitators’ learning about how their orienting discourses can positively influence teachers’ PD involvement and instructional change.

Author

• Danielle Lillge, Missouri State University