Exploring the growth of facilitators’ noticing during professional development

Abstract Teacher professional development (PD) plays a critical role in advancing mathematics education. In a cascade model that aims to scale up PD for teachers, facilitators provide teacher PD after being qualified as facilitators. The effectiveness of these teacher PD courses depends on the expertise of facilitators, including their noticing skills (i.e., their knowledge-based perception, interpretation, and decision-making skills in PD contexts). This study examines how the noticing skills of 114 facilitators changed during their participation in a year-long PD course that prepared them to conduct PD for primary mathematics teachers. Facilitators’ written answers were collected as indicators of their noticing skills using a scenario-based instrument. Before and after the PD course, facilitators’ answers often focused on isolated aspects of the observed scenarios and rarely employed content-specific arguments. However, comparing their answers before and after the course revealed shifts in the facilitators’ skills: In particular, after the PD, facilitators showed a stronger focus on the important role of students’ conceptual understanding, corresponding to the course’s goals. The study provides new insights into facilitators’ noticing skills and has implications for the design of facilitator PD programs.