We’re used to talking about learning goals for students. Every lesson plan has one. But what about the adults in the room? When a coach sits down to plan a professional learning session, are they working from an equally clear goal for teacher learning? Melinda Knapp joins Lynsey to explore this question.
In a recent study, we examined facilitators’ goals in the context a job-embedded professional learning structure used with elementary teachers over two years. Melinda and Lynsey analyzed five cycles of facilitator planning guides to understand what learning goals the facilitator had identified and was working toward with teachers. They presented this research at the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) and the paper reporting these findings is currently under review.
What a Math Lab Looks Like
Before getting into the goals themselves, it helps to know the structure. We’ve explored math labs in our post What is the Right Professional Learning Tool: Start with the Problem You’re Trying to Solve. A Math Learning Lab typically runs in four phases: teachers examine ideas about teaching particular content and research on student thinking, co-plan a lesson together, enact that lesson in a real classroom (often with many teachers involved in the instructional decision-making), and then debrief what they noticed about students’ thinking. The whole cycle is built around teachers learning in and from practice together.
It is also worth noting that the Lab structure makes certain goals learnable. Because a Math Lab plans, enacts with students in the room, and debriefs together, a goal about noticing students’ thinking in the moment can actually be pursued—in a way it can’t be in a one-off workshop.
What we found, when we dug into five different Math Lab cycles, was that the facilitator was working from four distinct, recurring learning goals for the teachers, goals that shaped which readings she chose, which questions she asked, and which moments she leaned into during the debrief discussions.
Four Goals, Four Very Different Kinds of Growth
1. Seeing students as sensemakers. The first goal was helping teachers genuinely believe that all children can make sense of challenging problems in their own ways. To make this thinking visible, the facilitator chose instructional activities—like “notice and wonder” or numberless word problems—that made space for students’ own ideas to emerge before anyone showed them how to solve the problem. The facilitator reinforced this goal through debrief questions such as: “How were students positioned as mathematicians? What mathematical ideas were they making sense of? Which ideas weren’t yet clear to them?” These questions deliberately trained teachers to focus their attention on students’ emerging and unfinished thinking. This goal aligns with our vision described in Our North Star: The Classroom Experiences We Want for Every Child—that students’ thinking, ideas, and sensemaking should be at the center of the classroom experience we are working toward. Here, that same vision becomes a teacher learning goal: What do teachers need to learn to consistently see and respond to students as sensemakers?
2. Developing rich discourse communities. A second goal targeted how teachers facilitate talk: helping students explain their thinking, build on each other’s ideas, and engage in real mathematical conversation rather than just reporting answers to the teacher. This goal showed up in readings about classroom talk, in planning prompts like “What questions could we ask to press student thinking?”, and in reflection questions after each lesson like “What talk moves did we use?” and “What norms need to be set to make talk moves more effective?”
3. Deepening mathematical knowledge for teaching. A third goal focused on the math itself: helping teachers understand the content at their grade level deeply enough to anticipate the many ways students might approach a problem. One striking example came before working with students on the concept of equality. First, teachers read research on the developmental trajectories students typically move through, then they used a True/False Equations activity to see how those benchmarks show up in real student reasoning. The goal in this facilitation decision was building teachers’ capacity to recognize where any given student sits on a known developmental trajectory.
4. Engaging in collective inquiry. The fourth goal was about how teachers work together to improve their practice. The facilitator wanted to support teachers to take risks, make their teaching public, and treat teaching as something to be studied collectively rather than judged individually. This goal lived in the norms teachers set together at the start. For example, one norm the facilitator discussed with the teachers was “cultivate a safe environment so we can learn from one another.” Another way this goal showed up was that at the end of every lab the facilitator asked teachers to set one personal goal and one collective goal to carry into their own classrooms before the next cycle. They were expected to then come back to the Math Lab space and report back on how their inquiry into practice unfolded. In this way, the Math Lab provided a structure for making practice public, studying teaching together, and building collective capacity—key ideas we explored in Coaching for Individuals or Systems: How You Set It Up Matters.
Why This Matters Beyond Math Labs
A few things stand out about how these goals functioned that apply well beyond this particular structure.
First, the goals weren’t a checklist marched through one at a time. We found that they were interwoven — a single activity, like the True/False Equations, was simultaneously building teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching, their discourse facilitation skills, and their orientation toward students as sensemakers, all at once. Naming the goals clearly didn’t mean treating them as separate; it meant the facilitator could see and pursue several threads at the same time. None of these goals was finished in a single lab either. All four reoccurred across all five cycles, which is what made them more like anchors than agenda items to check off.
Second, having clear goals changed the facilitator’s in-the-moment decision making, not just her advance planning. During one cycle, when teachers seemed reluctant to value partial or incomplete student explanations, the facilitator drew on her goal of “students as sensemakers” to decide, on the spot, to push the group toward honoring those partial justifications rather than categorizing these as incorrect ideas. Without a clear goal already in mind, that kind of responsive, purposeful redirection is much harder to pull off because you end up reacting to whatever comes up rather than steering toward something specific.
Third, and maybe most useful for anyone designing professional learning: we offer a planning tool built around six questions, starting with “who are these teachers, and what do they already believe and do?” and ending with “what will teachers do with this goal once the session ends?” See a helpful planning tool at the end of this post. It’s a structure that treats teacher learning goals the same way we’d want teachers to treat student learning goals: specific, intentional, and tied directly to evidence of whether the learning happened.
The Takeaway
If we expect teachers to plan lessons around well-defined learning goals for students, it’s worth holding professional learning to the same standard. Goals can guide a facilitator in selecting what to learning activities to design, what to ask teachers, or what to listen for in a collaborative debrief. The research on teacher learning goals suggests that the clearer and more deliberate we are about what we want teachers to learn — not just what activity we want them to do — the more coherent, responsive, and ultimately useful the learning experience becomes for everyone in the room.
| Planning Tool for Identifying Teacher Learning Goals | ||
| Connect to participants’ histories, experiences,and context | Who are the teachers I will be working with? What are their:current practices in alignment with ambitious teachingbeliefs about studentsbeliefs about teaching & learningbeliefs about mathematicsexperience working collaboratively | What are factors based on district and school context? What are their:current school/ district initiativescurricular materialsorganization of teaching blockleadership involvementaccountability structurespast professional learning experience |
| Identify and Unpack Learning Goal(s) | Based on what I have learned about the teachers and the context in which they work, what learning goals should become the focus of work with participating teachers? Define what the stated teacher learning goal(s) means. What does it look like? What does it sound like? | |
| Connecting Learning Goal(s) Over Time | What might these teachers already know related to the stated learning goal(s)? How does the learning goal connect to what I have done previously with this group of teachers? What strengths from the teachers might be leveraged? How will the learning goal continue to be deepened over time, in upcoming interactions with teachers? | |
| Learning Activities that Support Building Collective Knowledge | What learning activities or routines will teachers engage in to understand stated teacher learning goal(s)? Are there readings, videos, or other resources that I want to use to engage teachers with that will build their knowledge? Is there an existing tool or framework that I can use to help teachers understand the meaning of the learning goal(s) and what it looks like in practice? (e.g., Five Practices Framework; Stein et al., 2008). If not, what tools can be created to help teachers engage meaningfully with the learning goal(s)? How does the activity specifically address the learning goal(s)? Or what modifications can I make to the learning activity to support my desired goal(s)? How does the activity support reflective analysis of teaching? What are important questions that I can ask during the enactment to support teachers to deepen their understanding of or practice around the teacher learning goal? How will we focus on learning goals during enactment of professional learning? | |
| Reflect on Goal(s) | How does the set of goal(s) and learning activities connect to support teacher learning and student learning? How will you know if teachers learned what you wanted them to learn during the professional learning? What will serve as evidence of learning? What artifacts might you collect? Example artifacts:classroom-based observationsreflective discussionswritten reflectionsgoal setting routines | |
| Next Steps | How will teachers continue to work on the learning goal(s) beyond the professional learning experience, moving forward in their own classrooms, with their own students? What individual goals and collective goals could the teacher/group of teachers set because of engaging in this professional learning? | |
Leave a Reply