Facilitating Change: A Study of Supporting Teacher Learning

Abstract

This article examines efforts to implement the Scratch Educator Meetup model in order to accommodate the growing number of teachers involved in supporting computing education. Scratch Educator Meetups are focused on supporting teacher co-construction and participatory learning using a professional learning community approach. Previous literature on teacher professional development suggests that professional learning communities play a key role in promoting instructional improvement, and that facilitators are central to this process. Following this theoretical orientation, we share an ethnographic case study that details the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities that can arise when a professional development facilitator eschews familiar models of supporting teacher learning in favor of a novel approach. We argue that implementing instructional improvement initiatives demands careful attention to the qualitative dimensions of change, change that occurs as facilitators learn to think and act in new ways.