Bringing facilitation into view

There is much to be learned from these articles about facilitation in video-based contexts. To start, the articles highlight the complexity of expanding professional development beyond the designers and the challenges involved for both designers and facilitators in this process. Across the articles, we identified three key components of facilitation in which challenges arose.

Third, the articles highlight that orchestrating discussions requires a range of knowledge, tools, and practices to ensure that video is used productively. In the first paper in this special issue, Tekkumru-Kisa and Stein (2017) adapted the Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions framework (Smith & Stein, 2011) to describe practices for leading video-based professional development. The adapted framework identifies the preparatory work required for facilitating video-based professional development, including setting goals and selecting tasks, anticipating teacher responses to videos, and strategically sequencing video clips for analysis, as well as in-the-moment practices for enacting productive discussions with video—carefully monitoring teachers’ ideas, and selecting and connecting their ideas to achieve the learning goals. In particular, the authors acknowledge that during video-based discussions “facilitators are faced with a wide variety of teacher responses to the video and must carefully listen to, interpret, and gently shape those responses toward a productive end” (p. 3). Similarly, facilitators need to press teachers’ thinking in order to cultivate critical conversations and move away from surface-level judgments that limit teachers’ opportunities to learn. This is consistent with other research that recognizes that sustaining high-quality video-based conversations requires facilitators’ keen attention to the ideas that unfold, how video is being used as a source of evidence for claims about instructional practice, and how participants work together to advance their own and each other’s learning (van Es et al., 2014). An important feature then, of the adapted five practices framework, is the dual focus on anticipating teachers’ ideas and close attention to those ideas in-the-moment of discussion. After carefully considering how teacher will respond to the selected video clips, facilitators are likely better equipped to attend to the ideas that emerge and to make choices about how to organize those ideas in the discussion in order to achieve the intended learning goals.

These concerns are no different when projects move from one site to multiple sites with many facilitators. In the case of STeLLA, Roth et al. (2017) explain that the designers developed a framework to support teachers’ discussions when they analyzed video: make claims supported with evidence from the clips, reason about those clips, and consider alternative interpretations about student thinking, learning, and instructional interactions. To ensure that teachers’ discussions follow this approach, however, requires facilitators to make many in-the-moment decisions. As Roth et al. (2017) describe, this includes decisions about what kinds of questions to ask to elicit, probe, and challenge teachers to deepen their understanding; when and how to model practices of analyzing teaching; how to make visible their own uses of STeLLA strategies in the professional development meetings—all while attending to whom is participating and how teachers are working together, ensuring that all participants have a voice, and monitoring teachers’ developing content and pedagogical understanding as revealed in the discussions of video. Thus, part of the preparation of facilitators includes preparing them for the in-the-moment decision-making to lead productive discussions with video so that the affordances of video are leveraged to advance teacher learning.

Taken together, these papers further elaborate the range of knowledge, skills, and practices that comprise the work of facilitation with video. At the same time, they also reveal that as programs move from the initial stage to being used more widely, the needs of facilitators change. We now turn to discuss this issue in terms of adapting materials for facilitation.

An important issue that emerged in our reading of the articles concerns adapting materials for use in professional development. It is to be expected that facilitators will adapt materials based on the goals, contexts, and participants. Of interest to us, however, was that the types of adaptations seem to vary depending on a program’s position in Borko’s (2004) phases of program development and implementation. In the introduction to the special issue, Tekkumru-Kisa and Stein refer to these phases to distinguish among the different professional development programs explored in this issue. For example, in phase 1 of Borko’s model, the goal is to demonstrate that a program can promote teacher learning and to begin to document how the program design achieves that aim. At this stage then, adaptations involve researchers as designers attending carefully to particular design decisions in order to investigate the ways in which various aspects of the program foster particular learning goals. Take, for example, Tekkumru-Kisa and Stein's (2017) work with TSCD-PD, which illustrates activities taking place in phase 1. This initial work by the researchers demonstrated for them the importance of having the instructional factors associated with maintaining cognitive demand surface from the PD activities themselves instead of describing these ideas for participants.

In contrast, projects at phase 2 move from a single site to multiple sites and require a different set of considerations. In this phase, designers and facilitators work together to make sense of the design of the program and also explore how facilitators come to understand and use different features of the professional development program. For instance, Jacobs et al. (2017) collaborated with the facilitator in the preparation and enactment of the Learning to Teach Geometry materials, and in doing so were able to identify the kinds of adaptations that facilitators make and why they make them. The main consideration at phase 2 is about how to support new facilitators enacting the professional development with teachers. We also saw that when the programs moved to new contexts, the designers needed to attend to the broader organizational structure in which their programs were situated. For Borko et al. (2017), adaptations concerned generating tools and resources that sustained the design principles of the Problem Solving Cycle while responding to local needs. For example, to address the district’s focus on supporting English Learners, the designers created a protocol to direct teachers’ attention to issues of agency, authority, and identity when watching videos. Likewise, to address the limited experiences of the teacher leaders, they developed protocols to help leaders analyze the work of leading professional development in action.

Finally, in phase 3 of Borko’s (2004) scale-up model, projects move to multiple sites with different facilitators, which raise a host of additional issues and concerns. In the case of STeLLA, the use of the program across multiple schools and districts highlighted for designers that articulating principles and theories of learning was critical though not sufficient for facilitators to effectively use the materials. Attention to the readiness of the system in which the program would be implemented was also necessary. This work involved developing skills and supports for identifying key stakeholders in the district and establishing ongoing partnerships.

The articles in this special issue offer particularly rich analyses that reveal the complexity of facilitation. At the same time, they raise questions for us about how to move forward with research on facilitation and how to best support future facilitators in leading professional development. Of particular interest to us is the idea of developing tools to support the work of facilitation. We think of such tools as resources that provide structure to facilitators’ planning and to their work with participants. Across the articles are important examples of protocols and frameworks that the designers developed to scaffold the observation and analysis of teaching via video. Yet, in unpacking the detailed work of facilitation, we suspect that additional tools will be needed to support facilitators, particularly in the case of facilitators new to this work. What might these tools be and what aspects of facilitation might they support? For example, we discussed the wide range of skills facilitators need to select clips and the range of considerations needed to identify a segment that will advance the specified goals. We envision that tools and frameworks that specify these considerations will be useful in coaching facilitators to select clips that feature students and teachers interacting with worthwhile content. Such a tool might identify places in a lesson where the kinds of events and interactions that lead to productive discussions take place (e.g., small group work or whole class discussions) or what should be the objects of focus in the videos for discussions to achieve different learning aims (i.e., a focus on student thinking versus a focus on participation, agency, and access).

Tools will also be needed to help leaders orchestrate discussions with video. For example, adapting the Five Practice for Orchestrating Mathematics Productive Discussions to facilitation implies that leaders will need tools and resources to lead discussions with video. A central tool in the original framework is a chart for monitoring student contributions (see Smith and Stein, 2011). We envision that a monitoring tool would be equally useful for facilitators leading video-based professional development. Such a tool would help them track teachers’ observations and interpretations of the videos to guide their decisions about what ideas to take up and how to work with those ideas to advance teacher learning. Alternatively, some of the tools that were developed as part of these research projects might also be useful to guide facilitators. For example, the frameworks that Jacobs et al. (2017) used to assess facilitation could be repurposed and used by a facilitator for self-reflection.

A second issue concerns facilitation of highly specified video-based programs in contrast to facilitation of more emergent and adaptive forms of video-based professional development (van Es et al., 2014). The professional development programs discussed in this special issue represent different degrees to which the program goals and resources have been defined by the designers versus in the local context (Borko et al., 2011). For example, LTG-PD studied by Jacobs et al. (2017) is highly specified, with both videos and facilitation materials determined by the designers and provided to facilitators. In contrast, STeLLA combines elements of a highly specified program with detailed information for facilitators concerning the program goals and structure, with elements of a more adaptive model in which facilitators use video from participating teachers’ own classrooms midway through the program.

While video serves as the anchor for teacher learning across these contexts, we conjecture that the facilitation demands vary. In particular, we suspect that the facilitation challenges discussed above may need to be adjusted for highly adaptive settings. For instance, in a less structured environment such as TeachingChannel or video clubs, it may be the case that designers and facilitators collaborate from the start to define the goals for using video and to design tasks that will leverage the affordances of video to achieve these goals. Additionally, when videos come from participants’ classrooms, we suspect that facilitation of conversations is different than when the videos come from others’ classrooms and that facilitators have to attend to aspects of facilitation that are relevant because the video is from the participants in the group and necessitates setting particular norms that may be different from viewing others’ videos (see van Es et al., 2014; Coles, 2012; Zhang et al., 2011). Because of the array of video-based environments available—with some more specified than others—we see analysis of facilitation in these different settings as a fruitful line of inquiry. Such research can lead to the identification of knowledge and practices for using video in the range of contexts, while also elucidating unique considerations for the different settings.

A final concern for future inquiry relates to the trajectory of learning for facilitators. These manuscripts reveal the work entailed in planning for and leading video-based discussions. We believe it would also be valuable to investigate the process by which facilitators come to learn to engage in these practices and how they develop knowledge for leading professional development. The question for us is, thus, not only what do facilitators need to know, but how does this learning proceed and how does the design and enactment of these programs foster this learning. Borko et al. (2017) illustrated that the researchers needed to adapt their leadership preparation program to focus on what it means to lead professional development. It was not sufficient to prepare facilitators to lead the Problem Solving Cycle; they also needed to develop dispositions and practices specific to being leaders. In the STeLLA project, the Lesson Analysis Protocol that frames video analysis removes the inclination to evaluate teaching to do careful observation and analysis to inform teaching decisions. Prior research suggests that this approach to analysis is not natural for teachers, suggesting that it is likely not natural for teacher leaders to work with artifacts in this way (van Es & Sherin, 2008; Lessieg et al., 2016). Thus, we see an important line of research that involves asking questions about what it looks like for facilitators to begin to learn to lead and how they come to shift their identities to become teacher leaders and take up practices in ways that promote teacher learning (see for example, Elliott et al., 2009). Similar to research that documents trajectories of teacher learning (see for example, van Es, 2011), findings from this work could lead to the generation of materials and resources that can be used to scaffold learning to facilitate while also lead to the development of a curriculum for facilitator learning.