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Little is known about the integration of current neuroscience knowledge to classroom teaching, although many teachers rely on neuromyths to shape their pedagogies. Through a professional development approach, the learning study, we explored how teachers learned to apply neuroscience to teaching instruction. The teachers collaborated to design, enact and evaluate neuroscience-framed lessons as part of classroom research. Theories relating to neural plasticity, including the neural network hypothesis for memory and learning, hierarchical relational binding theory, and attention and awareness acted as the theoretical frame for the study. Borrowing phenomenographic methods, we drew on a variety of data sources to construct categories describing the teachers' engagement with neuroscience. Findings highlighted the pivotal role analogies played in the teachers' interpretation of neuroscience content and its application. Through the analogies of the 'rose', 'butcher on the bus', 'deepening the trenches', and 'walking the pathway', we illustrated how teacher learning manifested as the teachers' deepened understandings of knowledge construction, moving away from didactic forms of instruction and increasing the use of multiple modalities, and creating coherent student learning experiences. Findings suggest how neuroscience holds the potential to support teachers' development of theoretical coherence in their understandings of learning and pedagogy. Implications are discussed.

This study marries collaborative problem solving and learning study in understanding the onset of a cycle of teacher professional development process within school-based professional learning communities (PLCs). It aimed to explore how a PLC carried out collaborative problem finding-a key process involved in collaborative problem solving-that has received minimal attention in the extant literature. In line with this goal, we adopted the learning study approach, which highlights the application of a theory in research lessons. Multiple data sources were drawn upon to construct a narrative description of four consecutive meetings, detailing challenges and turning points that teachers experienced while engaged in collaborative problem finding, and how the process was facilitated by developing shared understandings of the complexity of possible curricular problems and establishing a common ground amongst teachers. Other modes of action and factors that can facilitate the process of collaborative problem finding are also presented.