Abstract:

Teacher collaboration is key for the improvement of teaching practices and for the promotion of teachers' professional learning. In this regard, there is a growing interest in current research to understand and characterize the forms of interaction and communication among teachers that promote greater opportunities for them to learn during their regular school-based team meetings. In this context, it has been recognized that teams’ coordinators, acting as facilitators, can play a fundamental role in generating such learning opportunities. Drawing from a sociocultural perspective, the present study aims to explore and identify facilitation actions by those who coordinate these meetings that can contribute to create teachers’ learning opportunities during school-based team meetings.

To this end, a single-case study has been conducted focusing on the analysis of the pedagogical meetings of a teacher team from a primary school which develops innovative teaching practices for inclusion. The explicit purpose of these team meetings is for teachers to support each other in the design and planning of their daily teaching practices, with a special emphasis on supporting beginning teachers and teachers that have less experience in the innovative teaching practices developed in the school. The analyzed teacher team consisted of four teachers who taught 11-12-year-old students and two coordinators that played the role of facilitators (teachers from the same school who are considered “experts” in the type of innovative teaching practices that characterized the school). Nine meetings were observed over a period of four months, with approximately two sessions per month, each lasting 70 minutes on average. In addition to the audiovisual recording, narrative records of the sessions were made, and the materials used in the meetings was collected. The collected data were analyzed using the analysis of joint activity technique, which was employed to identify the patterns of joint action among the team members along the meetings.

The results of the study revealed two main types of actions carried out by coordinators/facilitators that could contribute to creating learning opportunities for all teachers in the meetings analyzed: i) facilitation actions aimed at developing conceptual reflection on the pedagogical meaning of current practices, and ii) facilitation actions aimed at evaluating and improving the planning of future immediate practices based on collective conceptual reflection. These results contribute to our understanding of how facilitators can promote and support the emergence of teachers’ learning opportunities during regular school-based team meetings.

Our results are of particular interest in the context of professional development and teacher training, as well as in terms of supporting processes for improving and transforming educational practices.

Keywords:

Facilitation, teacher collaboration, teacher learning, teachers’ learning opportunities, team meetings.