Abstract
Studies of facilitators of professional development (PD) for mathematics teachers have been increasing in order to improve their preparation for conducting PD. However, specifications of what facilitators should learn often lack a conceptualization that captures facilitators’ expertise for different PD content. In this article, we provide a framework for facilitator expertise that is in line with current conceptualizations but makes explicit the content-related aspects of such expertise. The framework for content-related facilitator expertise combines cognitive and situated perspectives and allows unpacking different components at the PD level and the classroom level. Using two illustrative cases of different PD content (probability education in primary school and language-responsive mathematics teaching in secondary school), we exemplify how the framework can help to analyze facilitators’ practices in content-related ways in a descriptive mode. This analysis reveals valuable insights that support designers of facilitator preparation programs to specify what facilitators should learn in a prescriptive mode. We particularly emphasize the importance of working on content-related aspects, unpacking the PD content goals into the content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge elements on the classroom level and developing facilitators’ pedagogical content knowledge on the PD level (PCK-PD), which includes curricular knowledge, as well as knowledge about teachers’ typical thinking about a specific PD content. Situated learning opportunities in facilitator preparation programs can support facilitators to activate these knowledge elements for managing typical situational demands in PD.
Highlights
Since the early work of Zaslavsky and Leikin (1999), the leaders of professional development programs (PD) for mathematics teachers have attracted increasing research attention: We call them PD facilitators
Some teachers rely on highly differentiated categories from their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK; e.g., allowing deep analysis of students’ conceptual knowledge) when evaluating the success of their teaching, whereas other teachers might only refer to surface categories from their pedagogical knowledge (PK; e.g., discipline or motivation)
With respect to teachers’ heterogeneous and low prior knowledge, Erin mainly pursued CK-C goals in the PD course. She always presented the CK-C learning goals linked to the respective PCK goals, meaning that she often used tasks from the classroom level and embedded them in more complex activities that fostered teachers CK-C and pedagogical content knowledge categories (PCK-C)
Summary
Since the early work of Zaslavsky and Leikin (1999), the leaders of professional development programs (PD) for mathematics teachers have attracted increasing research attention: We call them PD facilitators (other names for them are multipliers, teacher educators, teacher leaders, etc.). The aims of our article are, first, to introduce the framework and connect it to the existing literature and, second, to illustrate by two qualitative cases how the framework can be used to (a) analyze and explain facilitators’ practices with respect to content-related and generic aspects of the underlying expertise in descriptive modes and (b) conclude what facilitators should learn in a prescriptive mode that can inform the design of facilitator preparation programs by elaborating on content-related and generic learning goals. The last section exemplifies how to draw consequences in a prescriptive mode for specifying what facilitators should learn
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