Facilitators of collaborative professional development (PD) develop their practice through evidence-informed reflection on sessions, yet they lack systematic ways to gather participant perspectives to guide their reflection and goal-setting. This qualitative study examines how facilitators across three mathematics-focused PD sites in the U.S. analyzed evidence from a participant-facing survey which surfaces conditions of the PD learning environment linked to teachers’ learning opportunities – a practical measure that provides systematic, timely formative data to support ongoing improvement. Participants included preservice and in-service teachers, coaches, and teacher leaders (n = 16); facilitators included university-, organization-, and district-based leaders (n = 7). Data sources included facilitator debriefs and interviews. Using constant comparative analysis, we found that facilitators drew on participant perceptions to validate impressions, refine goals, generate change ideas, and monitor ongoing decisions. Findings underscore the value of participant-centered formative assessments that make the PD learning environment visible for facilitators' reflection and goal-setting.

Educational leaders and researchers have stressed the value of centering communities in research. Yet, substantive research collaborations have remained the exception rather than the rule. Critical, organizational, and learning theories suggest the need to modify research systems, organizations, and infrastructure for the broad adoption of collaborative paradigms. We present a framework for normalizing collaborative research in the field of education: a desire for research impact animates these changes and will require actions that support egalitarian funding, power-leveling design, deliberate learning opportunities, expansive communication, and justice-aligned incentives. We build on the work of the Collaborative Education Research Collective to explore our framework through a sample of eight researchers’ vignettes describing their collaborative learning experiences. We find that authors center their narratives on individually compelling experiences with research impact, design, and learning opportunities. However, less emphasized action areas of our framework—funding, communication, and incentives—highlight the importance of expanding from individual to organizational change. Our findings and illustrative examples serve as a charge to proactively advance the role of research in creating more liberated educational futures.

We examined how highly rated novice teacher leaders facilitated video-based discussions in Problem-Solving Cycle workshops and found similarities and differences in their ways of contributing to discussions, fostering high conceptual depth. Some leaders consistently encouraged teachers’ participation and solicited ideas through questioning, whereas others contributed more of their own analyses. A discussion trajectory emerged, linking conceptual depth to the cognitive complexity of teacher leaders’ facilitation moves. We offer professional development recommendations based on these findings, emphasizing diverse strategies for enhancing video-based discussions in the Problem-Solving Cycle.

In this issue presented by the group leaders Ronnie Karsenty, Bettina Rösken-Winter, Stefan Zehetmeier, Birte Pöhler-Friedrich, Hilda Borko and Alf Coles

This chapter concerns research–practice partnerships as an approach to support longer and more significant uptake of instructional changes targeted in professional development for teachers. It starts off by outlining recent research that summarizes state-of-the-art on research–practice partnerships, before it goes on to outline the authors' approach to research–practice partnerships in their own project, "A Research-Practice Partnership to Develop Math Professional Development Leaders and Build District Capacity". The chapter explains two interconnected models used in that project that support the use of video: one for teacher learning and another for leadership development. The authors share how a thoughtful design of research–practice partnerships can contribute to build the capacity within the district to sustain the video-based professional learning models over time. They also discuss the benefits of a research–practice partnership from both a district perspective and a research perspective, before outlining some of the challenges encountered along the way in their project. The chapter concludes by discussing how working in partnership enhanced the role of video in their project.

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.

Teacher research tends to focus on either teacher cognition or actions, or both. However, an understanding of cognition or behaviour that does not take multiple goals into account is incomplete. We integrate insights from self-regulation research in a goal system model and a methodology for eliciting teachers' goal systems representations (GSRs). GSRs are personal constructs that show how people connect hierarchies of goals to actions in pursuit of tasks. The insight that multiple goals mediate the influence of cognition and context also has consequences for developing support for teacher learning. To illustrate the use of GSRs, we use the case of a biology student teacher who taught practicals in a cookbook manner and was supported to redesign her cookbook practical into a more open scientific inquiry practical. The case illustrates how GSRs can be used to understand a teacher's practice and to develop support that bridges for the teacher the gap between current and target practices. Such support shows the teacher how they can adapt their practice to make it more in line with the target practice, and how this contributes to attaining their goals better. Additionally, we describe practical variants of the bridging approach for groups of (student) teachers.

Professional learning can support teachers in developing their understanding of how to position students as agentic and authoritative – a rarity in most classrooms. We analyzed teachers’ discourse during professional development focused on agency and authority in middle school mathematics classrooms. We found that teachers frequently engaged with ideas related to student agency and authority. Though less common, episodes in which teachers constructed new ideas and critiqued existing ones indicate that using activity prompts, practicing responsive facilitation, normalizing critical stances, and positioning frameworks as tentative are important for supporting deeper engagement with ideas related to student agency and authority.

If students are to pursue the mathematical strategies they devise, teachers must be able to notice these strategies in-the-moment, attending to what a student did and interpreting what they understand. Otherwise, teachers might urge students to pursue a different approach. Novice teachers may find it particularly challenging to notice strategies in-the-moment as they have had few opportunities to develop the knowledge of children's thinking believed necessary to do so. We conducted video stimulated-recalls with four novice teachers, in which teachers shared what they had noticed during moments from a previous lesson. In recalling these moments, teachers often attended to specific details in students' strategies and made precise claims about students' understandings. This noticing was supported by contextual knowledge teachers had about their students and prior lessons. We propose that teacher educators prepare teachers to notice strategies by preparing them to develop contextual knowledge in addition to knowledge of children's thinking..

A common approach to scaling up a professional development program is for the researchers who designed the program to prepare teacher leaders to facilitate it at their schools. When researchers eventually leave, however, teacher leaders may receive less support. To ensure that teacher leaders continue receiving support, researchers can prepare district mathematics specialists to assume responsibility for preparing the teacher leaders. Little is known, however, about district mathematics specialists' role in sustaining, and potentially adapting, professional development programs. We examined district mathematics specialists' facilitation of an adaptive teacher leadership preparation program. Program sessions were originally facilitated by researchers then by the specialists. We analyzed the adaptations specialists made to the sessions over four years and the rationales underlying these adaptations. Specialists maintained the program's overall structure, continuing to model the facilitation of core program activities that teacher leaders would then facilitate in their site-based professional development workshops. However, they modified the thematic focus of these activities to address district goals, interests, and priorities. Adaptations were informed by specialists' intimate knowledge of what was occurring in district schools. This approach maintained activities supportive of teacher learning, but also demonstrated that the specialists took increasing ownership over the program by adapting it.

Using evidence of student thinking and performance is crucial to enacting ambitious science teaching because intimate, formative data can be responsive to student ideas about science. However, narratives and policies about assessment and data use do not always position teachers to draw on the breadth and variety of evidence from the classroom to make instructional decisions that foster sensemaking. Thus, understanding whether, when, and how teachers view and use assessment and other forms of student data is critical to understanding classroom interactions and learning. This study explores teachers' baseline assessment conceptions and practices as well as their changes with relation to assessment and data use across a year-long intervention using a portfolio of classroom assessment artifacts. Middle school science teachers participated in professional development in which they reflected on assessment artifacts in light of nine dimensions of effective science assessment and data-use practice. Drawing on interviews, as well as baseline and outcome portfolios from the classroom, we noticed that initial conceptions of practice focused on the variety and frequency of assessment. Nine months later, participants' practice showed growth in several dimensions, but differentially among teachers based on their baseline proficiency. Teachers were more likely to show growth in dimensions related to feedback and data use if they had initially showed proficiency in articulating clear learning goals and had previously aligned their assessments to the stated goals. These findings suggest a possible developmental trajectory for improving teachers' assessment and data use practice.

This paper describes a partnership between a university and an urban school district, formed with a goal of preparing mathematics teacher leaders to conduct professional development (PD) at their schools. The university and district partners worked together to achieve the district's mission of providing every student with high-quality instruction and equitable learning opportunities in mathematics by building the district's capacity to conduct school-based PD for mathematics teachers. Given the power of school-based subject-specific PD for improving instructional quality, we worked with Teacher Leaders from participating schools to prepare and support them to lead PD workshops at their schools. In this paper, we examine how Teacher Leaders learn and adapt key elements of a PD model over three school years through the lenses of Prediger et al.'s Three-Tetrahedron-Model (2019) and the university's Learning to Lead model. Over 3 years, we see that Teacher Leaders use the key structures of the PD model; make adaptations in response to school goals, interests, and priorities; and gain confidence in their work with colleagues. By viewing the adaptations through the lens of pedagogies of practice as well as the relationships illustrated by the 3-T model, this work offers insights into the complexities of teacher leadership development.

This article reports on changes in science discourse practices of four teachers who participated in an extended professional development (PD) program. Teachers were selected for their different patterns of improvement in the quality of their classroom discourse during their participation in the program. Analyses of their practices to support student discourse focused on “talk structures” and “teacher talk moves,” identified through fine-grained coding of these lesson features in classroom videos. All teachers increased their use of interactive talk structures and the cognitive demand of the talk moves they used while facilitating discussion. At the same time, there was considerable diversity in their improvements. Analyses of interviews and surveys indicate that they adopted pedagogical tools introduced in the PD program. We discuss the relationship between changes in their practice and features of the PD and suggest implications for PD and research.

Classroom assessment and the use of student performance data to inform instructional decisions have significant potential to help students meet the learning goals of science education. Research has shown that process-oriented assessment practices are challenging and sometimes ignored aspects of teaching, partly because teachers' conceptions of assessment practice do not reflect a cycle of assessment that continually informs instruction. This study explores middle school science teachers' conceptions of assessment practice based on drawn conceptual models and interviews that were gathered as part of a year-long professional development intervention. Results indicate that participants initially conceived of assessment practice in terms of tangible elements. Changes were seen, however, across the PD as several teachers developed conceptions that were more iterative, in which frequent assessment was used to inform future instruction. These findings raise important questions for how PD can most effectively support teachers' adoption of research-based conceptions of quality science assessment practices.