Leveraging Expertise: An Investigation of Teacher Leaders' Agency as They Facilitate Collaborative Professional Learning

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Leading Our Own Learning: Teacher Leaders and Communities of Practice

Abstract

This study compares the cases of two teacher leaders (TLs) facilitating lesson study to address the persistent challenge of how to meaningfully engage teachers in collaborative learning about instructional improvement (Horn et al., 2017). Teacher-leader facilitators may help overcome this challenge by applying their expertise to guide teachers to make sense of reforms. However, precisely how TLs leverage their expertise to support peers’ learning is not fully understood. To contribute to this need, we investigate TLs’ agency to understand how TLs’ localized knowledge shapes their capacity to support opportunities to learn (OTLs) as they facilitate lesson study. We find that TLs’ distinct meanings of learning form different sources of expertise for each TL, leading to different OTLs in their groups.

Authors

• Cassie Howard, University of Central Florida

• Motoko Akiba, Florida State University