Coaching Between Experts: The Process and Its Outcomes

• In Event: 70.065 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 70.065-12 - Division I Roundtable D. Mentoring of Experts by Experts: Dyadic Workplace Learning in Education and Other Professions

Abstract

Teaching is something that generally happens behind closed doors, away from the attentions of peers or researchers. To overcome this “pedagogical solitude,” Shulman (2004a; 2004b) calls for the transformation of teaching into community property by making it visible and valuable by peer review. Coaching between experts may be one way to overcome the pedagogical solitude that Shulman describes -- a way of studying teaching that might serve to transform knowledge about teaching into community property.
Gawande (2011) discusses examples of coaching from a variety of professions (including sports, music and medicine), the aim of which is to improve the performance of experienced professionals. According to Gawande, experts can improve their performance by inviting another expert to provide feedback after viewing their work.
Inspired by Gawande's idea, the present paper's second author (hereafter, the mentee) invited the first author (hereafter, the mentor) to observe a course, "Identity and Education," that he taught in a professional development program for experienced educational leaders in Israel. Following each observed class, the mentee and mentor met to discuss the mentor’s observations. The mentee’s lessons were videotaped and the post-observation conversations between mentor and mentee were audiotaped and transcribed. These transcripts were analyzed according to Schwab's (1973) "commonplaces" of curriculum: subject matter, student, teacher, and milieu, as well as pedagogical aspects that arose in the coaching process.
In the “subject matter” category, mentor and mentee discussed the mentee's choices of texts and their interpretation; they reviewed segments within lessons that reflected uneasiness or awkwardness on the part of the students; and they considered the impact of students' ideological views, background and personal experiences on classroom discourse. Discussion of these topics helped the mentor and mentee to pinpoint students’ difficulties and to consider their connections to specific features of the classroom situation.
In the "pedagogical aspects" category, mentor and mentee discussed the sharing of lessons’ goals with students, the mentee’s use of movies and poems as triggers and exemplars, how the mentee coped with students’ misconceptions, and issues related to the allocation of time between different activities within the lesson.
These preliminary analyses indicate that the coaching between experts that took place in our study was practice and evidence-based, characterized by mutual, reciprocal learning and ongoing reflection on action.
In our paper we describe the coaching process, present examples of protocols and their analysis, and discuss the following questions: What have the participants in the coaching process learned from it? How can other educators benefit from learning about this case? And, in what ways does the study of coaching between experts in teaching contribute to the professional development of experts and to the scholarship of teaching?

Authors

• Miriam Ben-Peretz, University of Haifa

• Eli Gottlieb, Mandel Leadership Institute