Processes of decision-making by mathematics PD facilitators: the role of resources, orientations, goals, and identities

Facilitators of professional development (PD) for mathematics teachers currently gain increasing attention, as their practices are crucial for the success of spreading mathematics educational ideas and innovations into schools and strengthening the professional expertise of teachers. So far, mainly two components of facilitation have been empirically researched: facilitators’ knowledge resources and facilitation moves. In this paper, we propose to develop a more comprehensive conceptual framework in order to explain facilitators’ practices and underlying decisions. For this purpose, we lift Schoenfeld’s ROG framework for teachers' decision-making (comprising resources, orientations, and goals) to the facilitator level, and add identity as a fourth component to obtain what we call the ROGI framework. We draw on data collected simultaneously in two PD projects for mathematics teachers in Germany and in Israel. Through three cases of facilitation, we illustrate how the adapted ROGI framework helps to understand processes of decision-making made by facilitators during mathematics professional development sessions.