Facilitation strategies responding to emotional displays in PD discourse: navigating relational and learning goals

Learning and relational goals are inherently intertwined in collaborative teacher learning. However, they present tensions that facilitators of professional development (PD) groups need to navigate. Scholars increasingly advocate for problem-based, collaborative teacher learning and highlight the central role that emotions play in teacher learning. However, scarce research has examined how facilitators manage emotion display in PD settings, navigating between relational and learning goals. This ethnographic study explores how facilitators respond to teachers' emotional displays and how their responses serve either or both relational and learning goals. We analyzed a case study of a video-recorded problem-based PD program for elementary and middle school science teachers. We used linguistic ethnographic microanalysis to identify seven facilitation strategies and mapped them onto two continuums: (1) recognizing the emotion (relational goal) and (2) exploring the emotion (learning goal). We present rich illustrations for each strategy and argue that it is possible, and in many cases desirable, to navigate the tension between relational and learning goals by integrating the recognition and exploration of emotions. We furthermore suggest that consistently avoiding or preventing the discussion of teacher emotions may constitute emotional rules that exclude emotions from pedagogical discourse and, hence, miss out on a significant dimension of learning to teach.