Compiling video cases to support PD facilitators in noticing productive teacher learning

BACKGROUND: Research studies on facilitating professional development describe the knowledge and skills facilitators need to effectively attend to teachers’ learning processes. In this context, some studies gave rise to the question how to design learning opportunities to prepare facilitators to support teachers’ learning during professional development. The approaches share putting mathematics specialized content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge on the professional development level and facilitation moves in the center. Research findings also highlight the role of video-based learning opportunities to qualify facilitators respectively. In particular, structured approaches that guide facilitators noticing toward advancing teacher learning have to be proven effective. Although research highlights using video-based material as a training tool for facilitators, what exactly the learning opportunities should consist of is up for discussion. In this article, we report on a validation study concerned with designing video cases, taken from a videotaped teacher professional development. We explored how eight experienced facilitators perceived the representativeness and the quality of the video cases for using them in facilitator professional development with respect to specialized content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge on the professional development level, and facilitation moves. Additionally, we investigated what facilitation moves are noticeable in the video cases, and what noticing prompts can enhance these learning opportunities. RESULTS: Our results indicate that all video cases present vital opportunities to discuss how to support teacher learning in terms of specialized content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge on the professional development level and facilitation moves. Our analyses provide insights into facilitators thinking processes, thus enriching their ratings by ideas and concerns considering the final implementation of the video cases in facilitator professional development. On the basis of our validation study, we were able to carefully check the learning opportunities that the chosen video cases can provide for facilitator professional development. CONCLUSIONS: This paper provides information on how to design video-based learning opportunities for facilitator professional development. Although our results are of course bound to the six video cases we selected, our approach can be transferred to other contexts. The procedure of compiling the video cases and validating them takes up the most prominent research findings on designing facilitator professional development and pays careful attention to experiences facilitators thinking. We exemplarily show how the empirical evidence can be used to prepare facilitator PD.