LEARNING TO LEAD PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES IN MATHEMATICS

Professional learning communities are increasingly seen as a generative and sustainable method of in-service teacher development in mathematics. Professional

learning communities are situated in teachers’ instructional practices and support teachers in using their experience, evidence from their classrooms, their own and their colleagues’ insights, and knowledge from research, to decide what they need to learn and how they can learn it. Leadership of professional learning communities is central

to their success and facilitating mathematical conversations in communities is an important part of leading them. Learning to facilitate community conversations takes time and collaborative work among facilitators. In this paper we show how a professional learning community of mathematics facilitators worked together to develop facilitation skills. As part of the community of facilitators, we analysed episodes from teachers’ community conversations, focusing on the role of the facilitators. We show how our analyses supported the facilitators’ learning through a focus on mathematical inquiry, developing teachers’ mathematical knowledge and building community.