Facilitation Literacy: Circulating Power in Professional Learning Conversations With Teacher Colleagues

Abstract

The author describes how and why a team of literacy leaders fruitfully studied their own efforts to address the challenges they faced in supporting teacher colleagues’ learning and teaching. Actively resisting facilitation models that privilege facilitators’ power to fix colleagues’ dilemmas and consistent with their belief that professional learning is socially constructed, the facilitators adopted a view of power as a resource that, when circulated, offers people opportunities to be who they wish, and be seen as knowledgeable without challenge. To explore ways of circulating power, the facilitators studied transcripts of their interactions with colleagues. Through co‐analysis of their transcripts, the team identified five discursive strategies supporting circulation of power: identifying sticking points, listening, posing clarifying questions, reframing the challenge, and soliciting feedback. The facilitators’ efforts to circulate power cultivated generative social and discursive spaces, which afforded their colleagues opportunities to negotiate self‐identified dilemmas to advocate for themselves and their students’ literacy learning.