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Abstract Although there has been increasing attention to the importance of teacher agency in professional development, there has been little attention to what it takes to facilitate collaborative work that both centers teachers’ assets and expertise and leads to productive learning. This paper presents a framework for focused and responsive facilitation of productive discourse around instructional practice in teacher learning communities. Drawing on a situative perspective, we trace the development of six novice teacher leaders as they were mentored to lead online collaborative lesson design groups focused on analyzing artifacts of K-8 mathematics instruction in a large urban district in the US. Our framework articulates how leaders facilitated the discussions in ways that both built on teacher knowledge, experiences, and contributions while also focusing on professional learning goals. Our analysis also shows how rich learning opportunities were co-constructed and sustained by the mentors, teacher leaders, and participants in each group over time. Through narrative descriptions of one group, we show how the teacher participants began to take on some of the facilitation practices themselves as they apprenticed into the practices of the community. This approach to professional learning positions teachers’ experience and knowledge as important assets while supporting them to try out and reflect on new classroom practices. 

This study explored how two professional development approaches to reforming math instruction with different mechanisms for fostering change might have valuable synergies when used in tandem to support take-up, i.e., teachers’ acceptance, adoption, and incorporation of ideas into practice. This investigation of Practice-Based Professional Development and Collaborative Lesson Design found that take-up was a recursive process that occurred across both PD types as teachers iteratively moved between building and deploying knowledge. Both overarching and practice-specific struggles occurred during enactment, triggering shifts back to knowledge building. Struggles associated with learning to facilitate productive struggle included making sense of student thinking, identifying and providing appropriate scaffolds without lowering the cognitive demand, and helping students move from intuitive to mathematical arguments.