Against the background of the uncertainty and simultaneity of multiple challenges confronting the school system, such as the shortage of teachers, issues of educational inequality, and the dynamics of technological developments with constantly growing impulses for education and learning, the need for comprehensive, high-quality and thus effective further teacher training as well as support opportunities for all those involved in school development, increases. Especially regarding digitalisation, professional development plays an important role – in Germany and many other European countries as well (Butler et al., 2018; Engec et al., 2021; Fraillon et al., 2019).

In the context of digitalisation and for the quality of further teacher training and support services, professional development facilitators are considered to be highly relevant (Gräsel et al., 2020). Despite this assumption, research so far offers little knowledge about in-service trainers (Karsenty et al., 2021; Perry & Booth, 2024), although they necessarily influence the learning of teachers and thus occupy a central position in the professionalisation and support of schools (Lipowsky, 2019; Timperley et al., 2007). This may be due to the fact that defining the term ‘teacher professional development facilitators’ is rather complicated: Focusing the German context, different types of teacher professional development opportunities exist and are offered and deployed by various actors and institutions. These use different terms and understandings when describing teacher professional development facilitators; a standardised definition is non-existent. There also is the umbrella term ‘multipliers’ to describe people disseminating information and knowledge between institutions and levels of the education system, which is used in a wide variation of contexts and understandings, e.g. pupils using peer approaches, student teachers, teachers who pass on learning content from further training courses at their schools; further qualified teachers who train and advise other schools and teachers within the framework of state structures, or managers who are responsible for the conception of training and counselling.

In the paper at hand, we understand teacher professional development facilitators as persons who work within the structures of the German federal states and who educate practicing teachers as trainers and counsellors (Endberg & Engec, 2023). This definition comes close to the one issued by Perry and Booth (2024, S. 145): “Our focus is those practitioners who design, lead and deliver formal professional development activities for teachers, including workshops, courses, programmes and similar activities, whether online, face-to-face or blended”. 

Considering the lack of standardized terminology, the federal and multi-level education structure in Germany, and the under-researched role of teacher professional development facilitators, our aim is to generate descriptive knowledge about the recruitment, qualification, and deployment of professional development facilitators in Germany. Moreover, we use a co-constructive approach by networking representatives of the state institutes/quality institutions of the federal states with responsibility for teacher professional development facilitators within a working group “Multipliers”, which has been initialized within the context of our ongoing research project (part of the joint project “Kompetenzverbund lernen:digital” funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and by the European Union-NextGenerationEU). Here they contribute their expertise on how concepts for the selection, qualification, and deployment of teacher professional development facilitators are implemented in their state. Discussions concerning similarities and differences between the federal states, open questions and existing challenges are encouraged in order to generate a survey to gather the necessary descriptive knowledge about the group of facilitators as “multipliers” in permanently changing circumstances in schools, school systems, countries and the whole world. 

The guiding research interest therefore revolves around the question: 

To what extent are there cross-national approaches, strategies and quality criteria for recruitment, qualification, and deployment of teacher professional development facilitators in the context of digitalisation?

To answer this question, we draw on existing expert knowledge from the education system and systematise findings from established structures and processes. To this end, a semi-structured survey with leading questions will be conducted in state institutes/quality institutions, which will be answered by responsible persons with relevant expertise in the institutions mentioned. The methodological approach can be considered as an expert (group) interview in written form. One main advantage of expert interviews lies within their power to “add to experimental findings about micro processes and how decisions were made in practice” (von Soest, 2023, S. 277). Regarding the lack of research knowledge, while assuming a great variety in terminology, implementation standards, and qualifying programs for teacher professional development within the federal states, this approach allows for a look ‘behind the scenes’ and into the practices of the state institutes/quality institutions whose role and importance is only slowly gaining attention from the perspective of educational research. The list of open questions will be discussed and modified in the "Multipliers" working group on the basis of preliminary scientific work so that both the existing research desideratum is addressed, and the needs of educational practice are taken into account. The approach and methodology of data collection are deliberately designed to be open: there are no prescribed answers; instead, the expertise should be noted down in the experts’ own words. The interviewees decide whether they answer in writing or provide audio files. The data will be analysed qualitatively by the research team using content analysis (Mayring, 2015) applying a category system following a deductive-inductive approach. Exemplary, the following superordinate categories have been identified by applying the deductive approach: • Group of people (qualifications/professional background, employment/institutional connection, number/quotas of multipliers in the federal states); • Deployment (deployment strategies and areas of application, subject reference/school reference, job description); • Recruitment (strategy/concept, process, criteria); • Qualification (determined goal/s, structured qualification programs/modules, content/skills, needs, reference to competency models/quality criteria e.g. standards or quality frameworks); • Intended and perceived effects for school development, school effectiveness, i.e. student learning (effect logic/chain, ways of evaluating effects/effectiveness); • Possible conditions for success (specific objectives, emphasis and reported challenges of the federal states). The survey is expected to take place in March 2024, so that initial insights into the data and first results can be provided during the conference.

“[C]hallenges of school development, like integrating ICT, can best be tackled when working collaboratively” (Gageik et al., 2022, p.18). This does not only hold true for individual schools collaborating within a school network but is also highly relevant considering the multi-level school system in Germany with different levels of authority and responsibility. In this context, facilitators of professional development are seen as a central group of actors whose actions and impact on school development have not yet been sufficiently recognised. As the role of facilitators of professional development in the implementation of innovations in the school system will become more important in the future since schools are key actors in realising the SDG4 (‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’, (UNESCO, 2016) then more research is needed on the multipliers themselves, their qualifications, their application scenarios and strategies and, associated with this, their selection, support and underlying impact assumptions as well as impact measurements. In this paper we aim to contribute to this rarely researched topic. We present preliminary findings from the nation-wide systematic inquiry of practices of recruitment, qualification, and deployment of facilitators of professional development in the German federal states. That offers also new perspectives on this crucial role of facilitators of professional development for spreading innovations into schools and into school systems in Germany and provides a foundation for an international comparison of structures and practices in teacher professional development. This paper also presents the co-constructive, cross-state concept of the working group, which brings together representatives from academia and practice. Initial experiences of the discursive and solution-orientated approach are reported in addition to the jointly modified survey and its preliminary findings.

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