Learning to leverage teachers’ ideas: Facilitators’ growth in moderation practices with simultaneously strong goal focus and participant focus

When novice facilitators start to lead teachers’ professional development (PD), they have been found to struggle to combine a strong participant focus (i.e., valuing and working with participating teachers’ needs and ideas) and goal focus (working toward the PD goals), whereas expert facilitators seem to be more able to integrate both focus. Empirical studies have identified these challenges across contexts and several situational demands, for example, when facilitators set goals, plan a PD activity, notice teachers’ ideas, and moderate video-based discussions. In this paper, we contribute to this line of research by investigating another situational demand in a longitudinal perspective: We studied how two novice facilitators moderated the discussion after the same PD activity several times. The qualitative comparative analysis of transcribed videos from PD sessions revealed that each facilitator used several practices with varying degrees of goal and participant focus. Over time, they learned to apply more practices that were, simultaneously, strongly goal and participant focused: By leveraging teachers’ ideas toward the PD content goals, they achieved integration of both focus, which have sometimes previously been experienced as conflicting. We discuss implications for facilitator preparation programs in terms of unpacking facilitation practices and explicitly working with the content elements for finer-grained goals.