Table 6 The eight meeting segment categories and their definitions. The ordering in the table reflects the priorities of the NextGenPET research team; categories are ordered from least (top row) to most (bottom row) valued

Social Chit-Chat

People talk about their family, themselves, life outside of work; this can include talk about work in the broad scope (e.g., sharing where they are employed) as long as the talk is not tied to FOLC activities or teaching work in detail

Meta

Discussing the operation of the FOLC (e.g., How to use the Slack Workspace; What the agenda of the meeting is)

Logistics

Discussing “how to do something” in one’s teaching work, but the issue is not pedagogically motivated (e.g., how to upload homework to a learning management system; equipment issues)

Status Update

Updating people on how one’s class is going (e.g., where you are in the curriculum, what units you plan to cover, how many students are in the class, how a lesson went); a report on your teaching “condition” with no underlying reason for it presented; can also entail report of one’s experience with a teaching strategy/an update on something you tried in the past

Generating detailed descriptions and explanations for pedagogical problem

When people are reporting in depth on a clearly articulated pedagogical issue, i.e., there is a description of what has happened and some statement or conjecture about why it is happening or why they care about the “what”

Generating solutions to a problem without a why

Describing in detail what one did in class to address a particular pedagogical issue. The issue itself may be implicit. These are conversations where people are reporting how they run some activity or deal with some issue in the classroom, “how to’s” that are pedagogically motivated (e.g., how they use student assistants; how they use a particular teaching strategy; how they run an activity). No explanation is proposed for the problem or solution. The “problem” can be the underlying pedagogical problem that drove the need for the solution, or it can refer to problems or rationale associated with implementing the solution.

Generating solutions to a problem with a why

Same as above, except an explanation is proposed for the problem or solution. A “why” is provided; either: “Why this is a problem/ why we care about it” or a conjecture as to “why this problem is occurring” or “Why I use the solution I do”

Developing a Pedagogical Concept

The group collectively addresses a pedagogical issue by making links between lived and formal concepts, developing a more general pedagogical concept that applies to the situation at hand and a number of other future teaching situations. (The developed concept, while often previously known to individual member(s) of the group and the broader education community, is new to the group’s collective knowledge.)