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The servants of two discourses: how novice facilitators draw on their mathematics teaching experience

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Abstract

Professional development (PD) courses are the main context for mathematics teachers’ lifelong learning. Leaders with expertise are needed to facilitate these courses; thus, there is a growing interest in understanding the nature of this profession, its core practices, and the challenges it entails. This paper focuses on a specific group of facilitators: experienced mathematics teachers who have just begun facilitating PD courses in addition to their classroom teaching. To better understand these novice facilitators’ practices, a commognitive approach was implemented to examine how they draw on their mathematics teaching experience when leading PD courses. In commognitive terms, these practitioners draw on multiple professional discourses, but mostly on the discourses of teaching and facilitation. The analysis of the challenges and affordances associated with participating in these two professional discourses showed that novice facilitators bring into play their teaching practices in four distinct ways: enacting a familiar practice, negating a familiar practice, questioning the relevance of a familiar practice, and generating a new practice based on their teaching experience. We claim that novice facilitators’ well-established identity as teachers is both a challenge and an asset in grounding successful facilitation practices. Overall, facilitators modify their teaching experience through the adoption, adaptation, and retraction of their teaching practices. Implications for the preparation and support of facilitators, within processes of upscaling PD programs, are discussed.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Notes

  1. The term “Mathematics Teacher Educators” is used in the literature to describe both practitioners who educate pre-service teachers, and those who educate in-service teachers. Thus, this umbrella term is sometimes used as a synonym to the term facilitators.

  2. Note that these examples refer to teachers’ routines and meta-rules, and that students would probably use different routines and meta-rules when participating in the classroom mathematical discourse.

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Funding

The study was supported by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (Grant No. 1426), the DZLM (German Center for Mathematics Teacher Education) at the IPN Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, the Ariane de Rothschild scholarship, and the Weizmann Institute of Science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Science Teaching Department, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Herzl St. 234, 7610001, Rehovot, Israel

    Gil Schwarts, Avital Elbaum-Cohen, Abraham Arcavi & Ronnie Karsenty

  2. Institute of Mathematics and Mathematics Education, The University of Cologne, Classen-Kappelmann-Straße 24, 50931, Cologne, Germany

    Birte Pöhler

  3. Institute for Development and Research in Mathematics Education, TU Dortmund University, Vogelpothsweg 87, 44221, Dortmund, Germany

    Susanne Prediger

  4. IPN Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, Berlin, Germany

    Susanne Prediger

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  1. Gil Schwarts
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  2. Avital Elbaum-Cohen
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Correspondence to Gil Schwarts.

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Schwarts, G., Elbaum-Cohen, A., Pöhler, B. et al. The servants of two discourses: how novice facilitators draw on their mathematics teaching experience. Educ Stud Math 112, 247–266 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-022-10182-0

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