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We examined teachers’ development of adaptive expertise of mathematics language routines (MLRs) as they engaged in Studio Day professional learning focused on the MLR Compare and Connect. We collected video data from pre- and post-Studio Day meetings, as well as debriefs and their lesson enactments. We analyzed the data using three dimensions of adaptive expertise: flexibility, deeper level of understanding, and deliberate practice. We share a case study of a teacher exhibiting dimensions of adaptive expertise during the Studio Day Cycle through the use of a gallery walk. The teacher’s enactment of the MLR Compare and Connect provides an image of a teacher’s adaptive expertise of this MLR and helps us understand these MLRs and how teachers use and make sense of them in their instruction. 

Our work uses Studio Day Cycles (Von Esch & Kavanagh, 2018) focused on the integration and development of mathematics language routines (MLRs; Zweirs et al., 2017). Our conceptual framework draws on two key ideas: communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and teacher communities (CoP; Grossman et al., 2001). We discuss each and how they interact with each other. Therefore, our research question was: How, if at all, did a Studio Day Cycle establish a teacher learning community to support teachers to engage in reflection around use of the MLRs? 

Engaging teachers in reflective practices is recognized as a crucial component of their adaptive expertise development. Drawing on this perspective of adaptive expertise development, we qualitatively examined how the design and structure of a Studio Day professional learning cycle afforded opportunities for reflective practice for secondary in-service mathematics teachers. We found that small group reflections, immediate reflections-on-action, and the use of videos afforded notable instances of reflective practices throughout the Studio Day Cycle that supported teachers’ development of adaptive expertise of equity-based, language-responsive teaching. We suggest that Studio Day Cycles are one avenue to better support in-service teachers’ development of adaptive expertise of mathematics language routines and multilingual learner core practices. 

This article explores how the practice-focused Studio professional learning (PL) model can provide incremental and ambitious teacher learning opportunities. We argue that when the model’s structures and practices are grounded in ambitious and equitable teaching, they catalyze incremental teacher learning. Studio, like lesson study, supports teachers in considering the entailments of lessons, focusing on the live shared enactment to strengthen teaching and learning through collaborative analysis and reflection. To build our argument, we drew from two Studio projects that had shared structures of cycles of learning and routines, as well as shared practices of using rich representations and collective interpretations of teaching. While both projects’ structures and practices take up ambitious and equitable teaching, they use different routines and attend to different features of equitable teaching. Building on a history of PL models, such as lesson study, which use similar structures and practices as powerful catalysts of teacher learning, we argue that Studio’s structures and practices can catalyze teachers’ incremental learning of ambitious and equitable teaching. We discuss the implications for future research based on this argument and for those leading PL.