Disturbing Practice: Facilitating Teacher Change Within Professional Learning Communities

Alan Ovens and Aspasia Dania

Research points to the significant role of community facilitators in shaping the learning environment of teacher’s Professional Development (PD). Successful facilitation has been described as a process that engages teachers actively in connecting to new professional networks, engaging with new ideas, challenging assumptions and beliefs, and being supported to enact new practices and pedagogies.
The aim of this study is to examine the idea of teacher facilitation as a process that enables and provokes change, not in a linear progressive manner, but through productive forces that make creative involutions possible. Based on new materialist approaches, we decided to problematize the representation of the facilitator as a coherent and stable role and instead explore the conditions that make experiences of facilitation possible. By building on our professional dialogue as teacher educators we explored ‘What facilitation means?’ and ‘Why facilitation may be important for teachers’ professional development?’. The engagement with these questions forced us to be responsive to the conditions that take place during facilitation and explore the not-yet-said, seen or actualized, in relation to the creation of new forms of thinking.
Through the process of our dialogue, we found that we cannot be sure about those conditions of facilitation that produce instances of teacher learning within communities, or what we can conceive as teacher change as an outcome of teacher facilitation. Therefore, we suggest elaborating further on dialogues that transgress dominant beliefs and open to new forms of discourse about what can be manifested as (effective) facilitation within teacher communities.