Background
Teacher learning from professional development (PD) remains undertheorized. Most PD studies focus on its content or structure to gauge learning, leaving substantive gaps in our understanding of teacher learning processes and the role of contexts. Therefore, we investigate teachers’ learning as they take practices from PD and adapt them to their own settings.
Methods
Using ethnographic methods and taking a situative perspective, we offer an in-depth comparative case study of two teachers’ PD learning over time and across contexts.
Findings
We find that teachers’ learning was shaped in the process of recontextualizing practices from PD into their classrooms through agentic synthesis of these practices with contextual particulars: namely, salient problems of practice, learning in other contexts, idealized teacher identities, contextually situated goals, challenges of implementation, and other related affordances and constraints. Through this synthesis, they developed what we call personally meaningful practices, which may or may not reflect the intent of the original PD practice.
Contribution
Our work contributes to theory of how teachers’ learning occurs by illuminating agentic synthesis as a core process resulting from teachers recontextualizing practices from PD. Our findings underscore the roles of teachers’ agency, reasoning, and contexts in learning.
Marshall, S. A., & Horn, I. S. (2025). Teachers as agentic synthesizers: Recontextualizing personally meaningful practices from professional development. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2025.2468230