To become an expert teacher, it is theorised that a practitioner will need to develop three distinct knowledge bases; content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge (Lachner et al., 2016). Expert teachers integrate these knowledges into curriculum scripts, and are able to use their professional vision to activate their knowledge in ways that reflect their context (Lachner et al., 2016). Access to quality professional learning is a key mechanism for ensuring teachers are able to continuously build their knowledge base. This is particularly important in the area of high ability, where training providers often neglect to equip pre-service teachers with the knowledge needed to work effectively with this cohort (Plunkett & Kronborg, 2021). This is despite the important relationship that exists between a teacher’s knowledge base and their capacity to meet the needs of their high-ability learners. For instance, the abilities of students will often mediate what a teacher needs to know about the subject they are teaching, with high-ability students requiring their teacher to provide them access to advanced content (Van Tassel-Baska, 2019).

There is, though, much debate in the international literature as to what constitutes an appropriate knowledge base for teachers working with high-ability students (Dai & Chen, 2013; 2014), and in these circumstances designing professional learning can be fraught. It involves sifting through a range of contested approaches in order to make content decisions related to definitions (See Smedsrud, 2020 for an explanation of the various definitions in the field); identification (See Almeida et al., 2016 for a discussion of some of the issues surrounding the identification of high ability); provisions (See Walsh et al., 2012 for a discussion on the difficulties in locating evidence based practices in the field of high ability); cultural understandings of high ability (See Thraves et al., 2021 for a discussion of cultural perspectives and high ability); equity issues (See Peters, 2022 for a discussion of equity issues in the field); and practices and processes for supporting the social-emotional needs of this unique cohort (See Rinn, 2021 for a discussion of the issues related to the social-emotional and psychosocial development of high-ability students).

This paper presents a case study which involved interested teachers from the study site, an Australian school (The College) working closely with researchers to co-design a professional learning program on the topic of high ability. Often, when programs are designed by researchers alone, little consideration is given the school’s specific context, and as a result practitioners must spend time determining which of the program’s elements need to be adapted, and which are more universal (Gomoll et al., 2022). When researchers co-design with teachers, contextual factors can be interwoven into the design process.

Given the complexity of the high-ability field’s underlying issues, the study utilised a facilitated dialogue to support decision making. Facilitated dialogues are structured sessions built on the premise of promoting consensus (LoBianco, 2016). The facilitated dialogue in this study allowed the school to develop policy positions for each of the high-ability field’s contested areas, which, in turn, guided content decisions for the professional learning, thus answering the research question: What do participants envision should constitute the knowledge base to underpin the co-designed high-ability professional learning at the study site?

To this end, the study was guided by a conceptual framework that emphasises the role knowledge plays in an expert teacher’s cognition (Lachner et al., 2016), as well as the importance of co-design for accounting for context when designing professional learning (Gomoll et al., 2022). The conceptual framework also acknowledges the contested nature of knowledge within the field of high ability (Dai & Chen 2013; 2014).

This case study consisted of a facilitated dialogue on the topic of high ability that was conducted between twelve (12) teachers from The College and two researchers. The participants, a purposive convenience sample of interested teachers at the school, exhibited varying degrees of experience in the field of high ability, though all agreed that meeting the needs of this cohort is an issue of equity and diversity. This meant that whilst all participants were intimately familiar with the school’s context, they all held varying views about what should be included in professional learning for staff. The facilitated dialogue, therefore, was guided by the following principles: • A focus on promoting “consensus and mutual understanding among stakeholders in relation to educational rights, equity and diversity for all children” (UNICEF, 2016. p. 32). • A belief that teachers should be positioned as the bridge between the researcher, schools, and the communities that they serve (LoBianco, 2016). A facilitated dialogue is a form of Participatory Action Research (PAR) which as a form of research is aimed at generating knowledge in a local context to solve localised problems or effect change in a particular setting (Johnson & Christensen, 2016). PAR deliberately blurs the line between participants and researchers, and upholds Rawls (1999) principles of deliberative democracy. The dialogue was conducted over one full working day and was held in a classroom at The College. The day was divided into three distinct sections. The first section involved the teacher participants presenting their current understandings of high ability to the whole group. The middle section involved a ‘researcher’s presentation’, which canvassed current issues in the field. The final section involved the participants and researchers working together to reach consensus in relation to the various issues raised in the session, and to make content decisions about what to exclude and include in the co-designed professional learning. At the close of the dialogue, participants had spent considerable time working through their varying perspectives to develop an artefact that contained policy positions, and initial content decisions on the following topics: • Definitions • Identification • Provision options to meet the learning needs of high-ability students • Supports to meet the social-emotional needs of high-ability students A qualitative documentary analysis (Bowen, 2009) was used to analyse these policy and content decisions, and to situate the work within the extant high-ability literature.

In the case study presented in this paper, a facilitated dialogue protocol was used to support participants to develop policy positions on a variety of issues in the field of high ability, and to make professional learning content decisions. Ultimately, an artefact was co-constructed, and when analysed using qualitative content analysis, it was revealed that participants were willing to adopt a broad approach to high ability, and that they were reticent to adhere to any of the specifics models that are presented in the research literature. Instead, the participants co-developed policy positions and made initial content decisions that drew from a variety of approaches (See for example Gagné, 2009; Subotnik et al., 2009; Borland, 2003), and they agreed to small adaptions for coherency and to account for their setting. This analysis also reveals the strength of the facilitated dialogue approach when navigating areas of contest, and the benefits of interweaving contextual factors into the co-design process (Gomoll et al., 2022) when designing professional learning in the field of high ability. Further research is needed to determine if the co-designed professional learning, once made available, is successful in building a coherent knowledge base for high ability among the broader staff, thus contributing to teacher expertise at The College. Whilst this research was conducted in Australia, it aims to contribute broadly to the international field of professional learning through co-design, and more immediately to the international field of high ability. The issues looked at in this research impact globally, and it is hoped that insights gained from this research will ultimately support context specific consensus building in relation to a knowledge base that will assist teachers and schools, including those across Europe where there is a long history of High-Ability Studies, to meet the needs of this unique cohort.

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