This study examines how middle leaders - teachers who support their colleagues' learning while maintaining instructional responsibilities - facilitate professional learning (PL). Through a qualitative study of two middle leaders facilitating classroom-embedded PL, we investigate how their facilitation practice supports teacher learning within and across PL sessions and what guided their practice. Analysis from two PL cycles revealed that middle leaders' relational facilitation practices supported their relations with teachers and PL content, and teachers' relations to the PL content. Our analysis showed that these practices were guided by three principles: (1) using instances of shared representation of instruction may generate robust teacher conversations, (2) specifying mathematics, classroom teaching, and student learning leads to generative dialogue, and (3) probing differentially on teachers' contributions in light of their expertise supports teachers' learning trajectories. We found that the facilitation practices, principles, and the PL structure reinforced one another, fostering teachers' pedagogical reasoning about content, student reasoning, and teaching, as well as generative instructional dialogue about their future teaching. This study confirms existing research findings and contributes to the knowledge base of middle leaders, focusing on the facilitation practices of two middle leaders who learned on the job, rather than through formal facilitation training.

Despite the complexity of facilitating professional development (PD) and growing attention to supporting facilitators, few tools exist for facilitators to engage in ongoing inquiry into their practice. In this article, we offer a practical measure, the Collaborative Professional Development Survey (CPDS), designed to provide facilitators with information about teachers’ perceptions of aspects of the PD learning environment that research indicates matter for teachers’ opportunities to learn. We illustrate how facilitators used the CPDS to support their collective inquiry into facilitation. We also illustrate the social processes that appeared to enable facilitators’ productive use of the CPDS, including a routine to analyze the resulting data, and the orientations that underpinned their analysis. We discuss implications for facilitators’ use of the CPDS.

Increasingly, teachers are asked to make their practice public for collective inquiry. In “practice-embedded” professional learning experiences, educators work alongside colleagues to enact instruction in front of each other with students present. How teacher educators facilitate these professional learning settings is critical to successfully supporting teachers’ learning. This study identified facilitation practices and described the functions they fulfill toward fostering productive practice-embedded environments, including promoting collaborative learning, supporting teachers’ experimentation with and analysis of instructional practice, and shaping the emotional space. The practices identified can support the work of facilitators in creating practice-embedded experiences for pre-service and in-service teachers.

This paper addresses the role school leaders and professional learning facilitators play in establishing communities of mathematics teachers characterized by authentic, collective inquiry into instructional practice and oriented toward ambitious and equitable learning aims for students. We report on an ongoing qualitative analysis instructional leaders’ work designing and facilitating a professional learning system to develop an inquiry-oriented teacher community. We highlight the commitments and principles that guided the leaders’ decisions and the challenges that arose.

Two cases show the value of reflecting on data about students’ perspectives on their experiences of classroom conversations in professional learning settings.

Introduction This White Paper is intended to serve as a resource for educational researchers and practitioners interested in using practical measures and routines to support improvement efforts in schools. In particular, it describes two practical measures aimed at supporting efforts to improve the quality of small-group and whole-class discussions in middle-grades mathematics. The measures were developed in collaboration with partners in Jefferson County Public Schools (Louisville, KY) and San Francisco Unified School District (San Francisco, CA), and a team of researchers.1 The White Paper is meant to accompany the measures we have developed. One of our primary goals is to develop tools and routines that can inform improvement efforts in mathematics instruction. Therefore, we have made our initial measures publicly available at www.education.uw.edu/pmr. Our hope is that users will try out and adapt the measures to fit with their specific improvement initiatives. In exchange for using the measures, we ask that all users share with us adaptations, rationales for making adaptations, and information on the results of the adaptations. We intend to then make this information publicly available on the website. The paper is organized as follows. First, we describe what we mean by the term practical measure. Second, we describe the process by which we developed the measures. Finally, we put forth our perspective regarding how the measures might be used (and not used).