Teachers' professional learning is a complex process that requires active participation and a willingness to transform teaching practices. In dialogic teaching, as in other teaching approaches, successful professional development programs are characterized by being well organized and structured in close collaboration with teachers. However, knowledge about the role of the facilitators who lead and implement these activities remains scarce. This single-case study investigates how a novice facilitator without dialogic teaching experience reconstructed her own experience and learning after conducting three versions of a teacher development program with Chilean primary school teachers to become a skilled dialogic facilitator. The study findings reveal the sources of knowledge and experience that this novice facilitator used to cope with her role, some of which were consistent with dialogic pedagogy, such as a genuine interest in promoting thoughtful development through the exchange of ideas, and an emphasis on creating trusting environments in which ideas can be freely shared and explored. These results show how a combination of disciplinary knowledge and socio-affective dimensions in learning and teaching were used to build a kind of new identity: "dialogic teaching facilitator." The importance of these characteristics for a facilitator is discussed, as is the contribution of narrative techniques to deepen the knowledge of dialogic teaching from the facilitator's perspective.
Mathematics teachers develop in tandem via the professional competence known as noticing. In this study, "noticing" is defined as mathematics teachers' identification and interpretation of communicative orchestration. Researchers have not yet fully investigated how the actions performed by a facilitator can influence noticing of communicative orchestration; therefore, the objective of this study is to characterize the facilitation strategies used by the facilitator during a professional development program (PDP) designed to support mathematics teachers' noticing of communicative orchestration. Building on a prior study that indicated that teacher noticing of communicative orchestration improves when discussing it within a group, we analyzed the facilitation strategies of a group discussion facilitator to determine how these actors could help five teachers to improve their noticing competence. We selected and adapted facilitation strategies (van Es, 2009) through actions that we analyzed in sessions in which a facilitator guided whole group discussions. Our results revealed the predominance of the "prompter" facilitation strategy, related to the identification of communicative orchestration, and the "proposer" facilitation strategy, related to its interpretation. The "builder" and "critic" facilitation strategies, which involve using evidence and challenging participant interpretative positions about communicative orchestration, were less frequent. These results are examined considering the levels of identification and interpretation attained by the teachers. Finally, the limitations of the study are described.
