Impact of learning-centered facilitation on teachers professional development during a LS

Abstract

In this case study, six teachers ‘lesson-studied’ in a middle school in Western Switzerland. For the first time, they had a facilitator in their midst who used learning-centered questions to help teachers think, rather than a more guiding type of facilitation. Most teachers had a very teacher-centered view of teaching at the beginning of the process. Our claim was that a learning-centered facilitation would help the teachers notice the pupils, observe them and direct the teachers’ thoughts and teaching towards the pupils. The cycle lasted five months, in which the teachers met nine times to prepare the lesson. The meetings, research lesson and debriefings were recorded, transcribed and coded. A questionnaire was also administrated to the teachers at the beginning and the end of the process. Answers were coded in order to cross-check the data collected from recordings. The analysis frame was based on Miles et al. (2014).

The results show that the facilitator’s questions had a positive effect on the teachers’ reflective thinking, and that it was more and more directed towards the pupils’ learning, observation of learning, and assessment of and for learning. The discourse was more learning- and pupil-centered than the research lesson, a gap that is only too usual to witness.

Literature on facilitation is scarce, but the researchers built their learning-centered facilitation on theoretical framework set by Cady et al, (2008), Alston et al. (2011), Lewis (2011) Cajkler, & Wood, (2016), Lewis, (2016), Morago & Grigioni-Baur (2017), Amador et al. (2018), Khokhotva (2018) and Mynott, (2018).